10 Best Practices to put your LinkedIn lead generation on autopilot
In today’s world, and perhaps more than ever with large swathes of the globe still ‘locked down’, massive business opportunity lies in social networking platforms like LinkedIn.
As the world’s premier B2B social selling platform, it’s here that you can virtually network, nurture relationships and source deals at a scale that suits your business. With the ability to be in contact with hundreds or even thousands of qualified prospects at the same time.
But, how do you generate a consistent flow of leads without taking time away from other essential business activities or just plain burning out?
Automating your LinkedIn outreach and lead gen
LinkedIn automation can give your business the ability to produce better lead gen results without having to invest time in traditional outreach and sales.
LinkedIn automation was designed to automate tedious ‘early-stage’ networking activities - like visiting profiles, sending out connection requests and messages - so that you could establish a meaningful relationship with qualified prospects more quickly and without taking up too much of your valuable time.
Using automation, you get more qualified leads and can focus your time on ‘later stage’ lead funnel activities that close the deal.
No wonder Dux-Soup, as the leading (70,000+ users) and most trusted LinkedIn automation tool, has long been a favourite of entrepreneurs, recruiters, digital agencies, sales and marketing professionals.
In this blog, we harness our extensive experience to cover the top 10 best practices that will put your LinkedIn lead generation on autopilot - saving you time, money and accelerating your lead generation!
Outline process
Selling on LinkedIn starts with attracting people with your connection message. Once you have a prospect’s attention, you then engage with them by sending a direct message. The concept is highlighted simply below.
In this blog, we provide best practices for every lead gen phase; Discover, Connect, Engage and Routing Leads to Sales - showing clearly how you can automate this process but also why!
Discover
There are more than 700 million members on LinkedIn today - forming the world’s largest professional network. That’s an amazing pool of potential leads - don’t let the volumes put you off!
As a best practice, remember that when you run a search on LinkedIn, the more 1st-degree connections you have, the bigger your 2nd and 3rd-degree network will be.
#1. Use LinkedIn Filters and Boolean Search
One of the most powerful things about the LinkedIn platform is its search capability which, when you’ve got the hang of it, can hugely enhance the effectiveness of your outreach and LinkedIn lead generation programs.
Turning your LinkedIn prospect list into a potential customer list is a definite start point when it comes to lead generation. LinkedIn “People” filters, Boolean expression and Dux-Soup’s Regex options can help you to create an accurate target list.
When on Sales Navigator, search for “Leads” and don’t forget to use the full potential of advanced search filters like company size, seniority level and years of experience.
Learn more about the Boolean expression and Regex by reading our masterclass blog here.
#2. Harness the power of “People” Lists
If your network is not big enough yet or you’re new on LinkedIn, you can join LinkedIn Groups and explore the Alumni that match your target audience. In addition, don’t forget to check the search alerts and those who viewed your profile!
People tend to accept your request to connect if they see you share a common connection with them. You can usually view the list of shared connections between you and a target 1st-degree connection. This is a great way to expand your network (for example, inside a client’s company), or maybe even reach out to the clients of your competitors!
Another list that is likely to bring you a higher acceptance rate is the “People who viewed your profile” that you can access here. This list provides you with profiles who have recently viewed your profile page - indicating that they already have some interest and will likely be warmer / more open to your outreach.
Get the most from different LinkedIn lists and take your lead generation to the next level with Dux-Soup. Find our more about different “people” lists on LinkedIn here.
Connect
Once you have “discovered” your target profile list, you can start to switch to autopilot mode. In this phase, this essentially means Dux-Soup sending automated, personalized connection requests for you so you can focus on other stuff, like closing deals.
This blog showcases an expert user interface. If you don’t find the options mentioned here, simply enable them in the User tab located within Dux-Soup Options.
#3. Personalize your connection messages
Personalized connection requests increase the acceptance rate and give you a better shot at landing a sale.
When you’re automating this process it’s important that your personalised message looks bespoke to give the impression that you have actually checked the person’s profile before asking to connect.
To help you achieve that, Dux-Soup allows you to include a variety of markers that can be used to personalise your message.
Learn more about how to write LinkedIn connection messages that get results here.
#4. Stick with the safety guidelines
LinkedIn has a very strict policy when it comes to connecting with people. And you want to ensure you don’t fall at the first hurdle!
At this connection stage, if a person keeps ignoring your request or (even worse) they keep ticking the option “I don’t know”, it may cause your LinkedIn account to get temporarily suspended.
There are no hard and fast rules set by LinkedIn for the number of connection requests you can send. But, as a best practice (and to keep within recommended LinkedIn guidelines) we advise sending connection requests to between no more than 3-5% of the number of all your connections.
However, we don’t recommend that you suddenly start to send 50 requests for 30 straight days in a row if you’ve never had this strategy before. This change in behaviour patterns will alert LinkedIn detection.
If you’ve just started lead generation campaigns, we recommend sending as little as 10-25 requests per day and gradually increase this number as your acceptance rate increases.
Read our most recent blog that gives an extremely comprehensive overview and walks you through the complexity of LinkedIn’s restrictions and how to avoid them.
#5. Use the Revisit Data Tool for further engagement
As we have mentioned, LinkedIn provides a variety of filtering options you can use to build up your target audience. However, you might want to manually choose people you wish to connect with.
While the Dux-Soup “Visit Profiles” option is the main function of the bot (as all automated actions are executed during automated profile visits on LinkedIn), the “Scan Profiles” option and Dux-Soup’s Revisit Data tool are definitely handy when it comes to selecting people for further engagement with Dux-Soup.
Find out what the difference is between scanning and visiting here.
Once you have created a list on LinkedIn, click on Dux icon and select “Scan Profiles”:
When you have finished scanning the list (you can scan 1000s profiles within minutes and there is no limit on how many profiles you can scan!), you can download that list, delete unwanted profiles and upload it back to Dux-Soup Revisit Data tool so you can send connection requests only to specific people. Find more details here.
Engage
With Dux-Soup, you can automatically engage with prospects more effectively by visiting their profile, endorsing their skills and sending automated direct messages or follow-ups.
#6. Ensure you get noticed
If you’re planning outreach on LinkedIn, it’s important you know who you’re going to be targeting and the proposition you’re offering.
No one likes receiving cold calls and the same applies to LinkedIn - no one likes receiving the same cut and dried templates talking about their offerings and how amazing their solution is.
It’s the benefits that change people’s minds. They care about themselves and how they will benefit from your product or service. So, in other words, you should be talking about what they will gain from speaking with you and not what makes you so good at what you do. Read this blog to get more useful tips about LinkedIn workflows messaging that works. You can also find some examples of message templates you can use here.
Crafting messaging for your LinkedIn workflows doesn’t necessarily have to be difficult, as long you take stock of what you have to avoid to make sure you’re not just running “any other” campaign out there.
#7. If at first you don’t succeed try try try again!
We all know the statistics - it typically takes multiple ‘touches’ to convince a prospect to buy your product or service.
With Dux-Soup Turbo, you can automate this process by designing and executing a drip campaign to your LinkedIn connections.
Automating this post connection stage of your lead gen funnel saves you valuable time by further qualifying who is really interested in your product or service.
Dux-Soup Turbo allows you to set up a series of up to 11 post connection messages to send after a connection has been added to your network.
Dux-Soup Turbo automatically runs campaigns, stops when the time’s right for 1:1 follow up - and gives you full visibility of the status of your leads (and success of campaigns) through the Funnel Flow feature. We’ll come back to this later!
Read more about how to set up drip campaigns with Dux-Soup. Dux-Soup Turbo can make this process easy if you have the Turbo version, but you can do a lot with Dux-Soup Pro too! Find out how to follow up with Pro.
Lead Management
Dux-Soup used to be more focused on automating the Connect and Engage phase.
But late last year we added functionality that helps with automating the fourth phase - “Routing leads to Sales”. Let’s check them out!
#8. Manage your lead funnel closely - qualify qualify qualify
After all that work getting prospects into your funnel, keeping tabs on who’s where in the funnel and having the ability to route prospects through different flows is essential.
Once you’ve got your campaigns running with Dux-Soup then the all new Funnel Flow is the place to monitor and control all your LinkedIn prospecting.
We’re assuming that you are most interested in prospects who show they want to close a deal with you - so you can now easily mark these people as “Qualified” - which makes the tracking of your potential clientele easy.
Check it out below:
The Funnel Flow, available through the Dux-Dash, provides you with:
- Instant insight into the performance of your lead gen funnel
- Instant access to prospects’ info and responses
- Direct control of the progression of prospects in the funnel
No need to go anywhere else – it’s all in the Funnel Flow! Read more here about exactly what Funnel Flow offers.
Perhaps one of the best features of Funnel Flow is the ability to qualify in and out LinkedIn prospects who’ve responded to your follow-ups/direct messages.
- Let’s assume you received a message saying “Thanks for connecting” or “It’s lovely to meet you”. You might want to put this prospect back into the follow-up queue. To do that, click on the “Reflow” button.
- If you have received a message saying something like “No, thanks, I am not interested in your offer”, you can click on the “Qualify Out” button and Dux-Soup will blacklist this prospect from any future automated activity.
#9. Update and enrich your CRM data directly from LinkedIn
With Dux-Soup Turbo you can take your lead gen beyond LinkedIn, all on autopilot! The ability to add LinkedIn activity to your prospects profile in your CRM means your quest for a 365 view of your prospect just got easier!
Last year we integrated with Pipedrive CRM - used by over 95,000 customers around the world. Dux-Soup can help you to create new contacts in Pipedrive as you visit them on LinkedIn. You can also create an ‘activity’ in Pipedrive once you receive a new message or connection. Learn more about Pipedrive integration here.
For other CRM’s or sales / marketing automation platforms Dux-Soup Turbo also offers the webhook feature.
With its help, you can integrate Dux-Soup with pretty much any other CRM, like Zoho or Hubspot (using Zapier or Integromat to help you). You can learn more about Dux-Soup webhooks here.
#10. Link with other automation tools and systems to extend your nurturing
As you might know, Dux-Soup can help you scrape an email from a profile on LinkedIn.
However, you can also use Zapier and Integromat to send a direct email, create a lead in Mailshake or add a new contact in Mailchimp once Dux-Soup has scraped an email. Find out the ways on how to do it here.
There are endless possibilities to integrate Dux-Soup with an external app by using Webhooks. In this blog, we cover the top 5.
By linking these tools and extending your automation you can start to build up some really comprehensive lead generation workflows that get results! Read this great case study by a company called Pound Social - who have done just that with Dux-Soup!
Watch our webinar to learn more
Watch our most recent webinar here to learn more about the top 10 best practices for putting your lead gen on autopilot. We cover all of the above in a practical way - plus you’ll see a hands on demo of:
- The new Funnel Flow tool
- How to link with other automation tools and systems to extend your nurturing and close the deal
Summary
With the ever increasing increase in social selling, the opportunity for faster customer acquisition is greater than ever. Use our top 10 best practices (and the Dux-Soup tool) to create the foundation you need for putting your lead generation on autopilot.
But don’t just take our word for it - read these awesome case studies of businesses who have done just that!
Next Steps
Try Dux for free!
The great news about Dux-Soup is that you can use our Starter edition for as long as you want to, absolutely free!
If you're not already a Dux user, then give our free Dux-Soup trial a go - you get 14 days absolutely free and we don't even ask for any payment details.
If you have any thoughts or questions email info@dux-soup.com or find us on the live chat!
And make sure you subscribe to our blog to get alerts every time we publish new content or post a new webinar.
