Have you ever wondered how some people seem to be able to consistently secure high volumes of qualified leads every day?
In this blog, David Duccini, Founder of Silicon Prairie, shares his outreach strategy for turning social capital into financial capital. David’s business offers modern finance solutions to organizations looking for alternative ways to raise capital. He does this using his own CrowdBuilder software to generate LinkedIn connections for his clients and connect them with their most likely investors. David is a self-confessed software nerd turned Investment Banker, an avid user of Dux-Soup and is able to consistently convert 20 highly qualified inbound leads; every day!
Watch the webinar recording ‘How to generate 20 leads per day’ to listen to all the tips David shared with us, or keep reading for a summary of David’s techniques for:
- Growing social capital using targeted content
- Converting 2nd degree connections
- Using Dux points for prospecting
- Combining LinkedIn and email outreach
Dux-Soup Free Trial
If you want to follow along to generate 20 leads a day, then you'll need Dux-Soup. Why not take up our offer of a 2-week free trial of Dux-Soup Turbo (no credit card details needed) and see how it can work for you?
Everyone is selling leads….how hard can it be?
David does not recommend buying lists of leads since you just don’t know what you’re going to get. He’s very clear - growing them organically is the best approach for lead generation.
David’s business is fundraising which put simply, is the conversion of social capital into financial capital. Social capital is critical since people work with the people they know, like and trust. People don’t like to be sold to, they like to have their problems solved.
Lead generation is about marketing, and basic Marketing 101 tells us it takes five impressions (+ or -2) before people even have a recall of you. The odds of ‘a one and all done experience’ are very, very low! Therefore it’s critical to plan several contact attempts in your outreach plan.
Make eye contact, wave, say hello!
David describes LinkedIn as a business networking event that happens to run 24/7. At any networking event, if you want to get someone's attention you make eye contact, then you wave and if they’re responsive you get together, say “hello!” and a conversation begins.
On LinkedIn you can use Dux-Soup to make eye contact by visiting people’s profiles. It’s an important start, as Dux-Soup will let them know you visited their profile. You can then give them a wave either by sending a connection request, or sending an email invite. If they’re responsive, you then get to start a conversation and say “hello!”.
The key to the strategy is to be low, slow and respectful. Take a moment and consider how long your average sales cycle lasts. For David it’s around 18 months, so patience is essential for the growth of his social capital.
How to get 20 leads per day using the CrowdBuilder formula
This is how David gets an average of 20 leads per day:
Step1: Using Dux-Soup Turbo and Sales Navigator his goal is to scan <2500 second degree connections at least once a week. This is the warm up and will enable the next step.
Note: LinkedIn does have limits on activities so it’s important to be aware of what they will allow you to do on their platform. To find out more read our blog Using LinkedIn automation safely.
Step 2: Visit <500 profiles per day. David saves his searches in Sales Navigator, using LinkedIn to do the majority of the heavy lifting! On a daily basis it will turn up new results for David to scan using Dux-Soup. David’s searches focus on a specific profile suited to his business; they are secondary connections, founders in small companies, and privately held companies in a specific geography. Most importantly, they are people who have posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. This is a critical component to growing social capital, these are the people who are the influencers on LinkedIn. This is the first list you should scan and connect with, for they are also the ones who will notice that you looked at their profile page. To learn more about creating effective searches read this blog: 'How to search and filter with LinkedIn and Dux-Soup'.
When you engage with a secondary connection, and they become a first degree connection, they may never buy from you, but they know who you are and they may refer you on to their secondary connections, thus increasing your visibility further. This is the magic of the formula!
In one year David went from 4,000 first degree connections to over 10,000 connections just by scanning and visiting profiles using Dux-Soup. Not one connection request, InMail or email was sent!
Step 3: David then extracts email addresses with Dux-Soup points. To find out how to do it, read How to get emails from LinkedIn.
Step 4: David recommends using an email warm up service to build up trust for your email account. This will ensure your emails go to your recipients inboxes and not their spam folders.
Step 5: The Bump before the bite! The Bump is a short email to verify the email addresses in your list are valid. Any that aren’t can be removed before you add them to a drip campaign.
Step 6: The “Call to Action” of the Bump email is to connect. This isn’t an email to sell services - it’s to introduce yourself, to point out the connections you have in common and simply to connect directly.
By adding the Bump email to the formula, David then went from 10,000 connections to over 22,500 first degree connections. Proof this process works!
There are a few things worth noting that David advises not to do…
Don’t send a wall of text; keep your email tight so it fits onto one screen without the need to scroll, and don’t send a calendar link!
Why?
Imagine you're at a networking mixer event, would you run up to someone, stand in front of them, talk AT them and then thrust a calendar in their face? Of course you wouldn’t! Apply the same socialising strategy to your email strategy.
Do NOT run at max speed! If you take a low, slow and respectful approach to your lead generation you will keep your Dux-Soup account safe and avoid a LinkedIn warning. See this approach as a marathon and not a sprint.
Make it personal
If someone makes time to look at your profile and connect, take a moment to thank them. Have a look at their profile and then ask them, “What’s the last book you read?” or “Can you recommend a book?”, if they haven’t read a book, ask for a podcast. When they tell you one or two choices, ask them “What are the one or two things you think about from that book?” (This technique is also known as the Benjamin Franklin Effect.)
Why?
Because you're curious, you want to get to know them and their interests. By doing this you’ve just made eye contact, waved and said “hello!”. Asking about them and not their business is disarming. They become interested in you, they want to know more and so they take look at your profile.
This is how sales leads begin.
In Summary
Keep your strategy low, slow and respectful and you too can generate 20 leads per day by following David’s proven approach:
- Use the Scan function in Dux-Soup Turbo to build up your pipeline
- Visit up to 500 profiles per day. (Remember to start slowly!)
- Once you’ve warmed up your email and you have a list of targeted email addresses send the ‘Email Bump’.
- Accept the connection.
- Be grateful!
Listen to the Q&A with David
There were plenty of questions for David at the end of the webinar from the live audience. If you’d like to hear what he had to say, go to 24:40mins of the recording.
Here are just some of the questions that came up:
- At what point do you include your calendar link in the connection sequence?
- How do you scale up a new LinkedIn account?
- What’s the advantage of using Dux-Soup to scan before you visit?
- Where do you get your email addresses from?
- What do you do to your LinkedIn account to spark people’s interest in you?
For more information about Silicon Prairie, take a look at our success story, ‘Silicon Prairie build lead generation machine with Dux-Soup.’
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch at info@dux-soup.com.
