Are you looking to keep your sales team fully stocked with high-quality leads from LinkedIn? Or perhaps you’re curious how top-performing sales teams are using LinkedIn to drive better results and consistently beat their targets.
In this blog, we look at how to use LinkedIn automation for sales teams. LinkedIn offers huge growth opportunities for B2B sales teams, but scaling results becomes difficult when running your outreach activities manually. The time it takes to monitor your inbox, find and research new prospects, send connection invitations and nurture connections to generate leads can severely hamper your growth potential.
Step in LinkedIn automation. With its ability to automate personalized drip campaigns to your ideal target prospects, you can easily scale your outreach, raising the bar when it comes to the size of your pipeline - without needing more resource. In fact, a 75% time saving is often cited as a key benefit of LinkedIn automation tools.
So, if LinkedIn automation drives more results, and offers a 75% time saving, what's not to love about it? It's why smart sales professionals use it as part of their tech stack, with some outstanding growth stories. But what if you're part of a sales team? Well, it's also excellent for this. With over 1 million profiles on LinkedIn, and factoring in LinkedIn's limits, by scaling your LinkedIn outreach across multiple profiles within a business, you can achieve exponential growth.
But for businesses that want to become proficient at LinkedIn lead generation across multiple team members, some new challenges arise:
- How can sales teams collaborate on their LinkedIn targeting and outreach, and avoid targeting the same prospects twice?
- How can teams easily compare and analyze campaign success to optimize conversion rates?
- How can businesses ensure alignment of their campaign messaging and branding?
This was the topic of a Dux-Soup webinar, as we addressed these challenges and showed you how you can effectively manage LinkedIn automation for your sales team. If you’d like to watch it in full (including demos of how this looks in real life), click here to head over to our YouTube channel, otherwise, we summarize the key highlights here.
If you’re new to Dux-Soup you can take advantage of a 2-week free trial giving you access to all of the features covered here with Dux-Soup Turbo.
First, let's introduce the concept of Dux-Soup's LinkedIn automation Team plan, which was designed to deal with the challenges stated above. Once you're familiar with some of its key features we can show you how you can use it to effectively manage your LinkedIn automation strategy across your sales team.
Dux-Soup Team Accounts
A Team plan is managed by a central Administrator, who manages the LinkedIn automation access rights within a business. They can allocate license keys or seats to your sales team, and also allocate Admin rights to other team members.
Now let's look at some of the Team plan features that help to resolve some of the challenges outlined above:
- With a Team plan, you can share your drip campaigns with other team members. Multiple team members can now get instant access to the exact campaign messaging that is shown to work best. Future updates can be easily shared too, delivering consistency in your company messaging
- With shared campaigns, it's impossible to enroll the same prospect twice. So two members of your company can't send the same prospect the same messages, making your outreach process more efficient, and look more professional
- Team campaign performance can be monitored by anyone with Administrator rights, allowing for real-time monitoring of campaign results across your whole team. Quick decisions can be made on which campaigns are working best, and implemented across your team
- Centrally controlled Team signatures ensures brand consistency so your team members presents a united force
These team collaboration features are available in both Dux-Soup Turbo and Cloud editions.
To find out about all the Team plan features and how they will benefit you if you have more than one person in your team using LinkedIn automation read Dux-Soup for teams
Setting Team Goals and Aims
If you have a team of people using LinkedIn automation there are a few things to consider you should consider:
- What is the structure of your team? How many users or profiles are you going to use? Who manages the reporting?
- What role does each person have in the lead generation process? Each role will have a different profile and achieve a different level of success. We consistently see that a more senior looking title typically gets a better response rate and so a diverse set of roles can be helpful.
- Ensure each individual is clear about how they present themselves on LinkedIn. Is everyone expected to use company branding?
- Establish clear guidelines outlining your team’s expectations for using LinkedIn.
- Set clear, measurable, and realistic LinkedIn targets. As you progress and grow, your goals will evolve, but start with something attainable to build momentum.
With everything in place, the team will be set for a smooth start.
Team Reporting & KPI’s
Establishing KPIs enables the team to monitor progress and pinpoint opportunities to enhance campaign performance. The KPIs will vary across industries and geographical location and you’ll be the best judge of what’s important and achievable for your industry.
Here’s an example of the performance measures a team campaign could focus on:
- When building your network, start gradually. Set realistic expectations, decide how many invitations will be sent per week per account and if you manage multiple accounts, you can scale this number accordingly. In this example, 100 invites per account is a reasonable target.
- The goal for connection acceptance is set at an achievable 20%. If the target isn’t hit, the approach is reviewed, reassessing the messaging and/or the target audience.
- The response rate for those who accepted is set at 30%. If the response rate is being met, conversations are taking place to pivot the target towards a call to action.
- The call to action is to set up a meeting and the goal is a 10% acceptance rate.
All of this should be monitored for each individual in the team. With a Dux-Soup Team license, it's easily viewed in the Multi Funnel.
LinkedIn is built as a social platform, and you'll see the best results by using it as intended—through authentic interactions. Whenever possible, use genuine accounts from real people to maximize your success.
How to achieve collaborative Sales Team LinkedIn Outreach
From a user viewpoint, if you receive two messages from two people within the same organization on LinkedIn, you won't be impressed. Rather than a unique, tailored method of engaging with you, it feels like an automated, mass marketing approach. And this is unlikely to elicit a response - or even an acceptance of a connection invitation.
Collaborating on LinkedIn outreach is essential to success for sales teams, especially those that have fewer, high-value prospects - where you don't want to 'burn' through your prospect lists. Because often you only get one chance.
So what's the answer?
It's all about collaborative outreach. But what do we mean by this? Well, with a Dux-Soup Team license, there are two ways we address this. We allow you to share campaigns with your team members. When you share a campaign, it appears on your team member's campaign dash, ready for them to enroll their prospects into. We make it impossible to enroll the same prospect into the same campaign twice. So you never have to worry about your prospects getting the same messages twice. If you're on a Team plan.
The other way is with a tick box that prevents profiles from being enrolled into a campaign if they are already enrolled into any other Dux-Soup campaign. This ensures that they won't get sent any other campaign messaging either.
So these features stop those embarrassing moments of duplicating your messages to your top prospects.
Coordinating your team approach
Team campaigns provide a coordinated and consistent strategy, ensuring that team members don’t duplicate efforts by contacting the same individuals. But here are a few more things to consider as you build your LinkedIn automation strategy:
1. A clear and well-understood approach reduces the risk of confusion across the team. Profile targets can be segmented across team members in a variety of ways:
- Location
- Seniority
- Industry
- Accounts (requires Sales Navigator Advanced)
- Custom lists (Dux-Soup can create CSV files containing the LinkedIn URLs. These can be allocated to team members with the appropriate Network.)
Note: To find out how to enroll from a CSV file watch the webinar recording at 29.28mins of the webinar.
2. Determine whether the team will use standardized messaging with consistent terminology or if each member will have the flexibility to personalize their outreach and communicate in their own unique style.
3. With a team account you have the option to use a personalized signature in the messaging with Dux_SIG_.
List Building with LinkedIn
Use the LinkedIn filters to create searches and build your lists of targets. It’s worth noting the various LinkedIn platforms offer different options, for example:
- With Free/Premium LinkedIn it’s possible to separate by Territories, accounts or job titles.
- In Sales Navigator there’s the option to include or exclude Company HQ location. Many people now work remotely and their location may not reflect the company location.
- If you have Sales Navigator ,you’re able to include or exclude accounts and lead searches.
Watch the webinar recording starting at 24.01min for a demo of search and filter in LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.
Outreach Tactics
Your approach should be tailored to each target group, so define it clearly for each one. You can create as many Dux-Soup campaigns as needed to refine your targeting. While more campaigns adds complexity, a well-coordinated effort can be a powerful way to fully leverage LinkedIn’s goldmine of information.
There are numerous target groups, here are a just a few possibilities:
- Attendee lists for webinars or upcoming business events.
- Leads that have opened/clicked or downloaded assets.
- Leads that have interacted with content on LinkedIn. This could be members of a discussion group or people who have engaged with a specific post.
- Cold deals to a list of targets based on a keyword search.
- Nurturing existing 1st degree LinkedIn connections to remind people who you are and what you do.
Campaign Performance: Monitor, Analyze and Adapt
Once the team campaigns are up and running, you can monitor the performance of each of your users and campaigns using the Dux-Soup Multi-Funnel.
Give the campaigns time to perform. Since not everyone checks LinkedIn daily, it may take 3-4 weeks for people to engage and respond to your outreach. Conduct regular progress reviews using specific targets or thresholds to trigger the process.
Test different approaches with different profiles to work out which campaign variables give the best results. Use A/B testing to work out the most effective changes and adapt your campaigns to achieve a better response. Read our blog to find out How to A/B test with Dux-Soup.
Plan ahead to keep both Dux-Soup and the team busy. Line up a week or two of activity to ensure the Dux-Soup robot is always working on your behalf. Enroll prospects in batches to ensure there are always actions in the queue. Our guide walks you through how to run multiple, concurrent drip campaigns with Dux-Soup.
Multi-Channel Outreach
LinkedIn outreach could be just one strand of your lead generation approach, you may also be cold calling or emailing as well. If that’s the case, being organised to ensure responses are handled in a timely manner is essential to minimize the risk of untimely messaging/outreach.
Linking with other platforms to assist with the management of responses is one solution. Dux-Soup has direct integrations with a selection of CRMs including Hubspot, Pipedrive, SharpSpring and Freshsales. The Dux-Soup API is an open API included in Dux-Soup Turbo and Cloud editions opening up endless possibilities, How to integrate LinkedIn to your CRM with Dux-Soup shows you how.
To enhance cross-team lead generation, revolutionize communications using a tech stack that includes Dux-Soup, LinkedIn and Slack. This allows the team users to collaborate regarding the responses that have been received from their target profile, and equally allows the team to discuss how best to respond.
Find out how to set up a tech stack, with the blog New tech stack makes sales teams 4x more effective.
Discover how Dux-Soup users have scaled their LinkedIn lead generation with a tech stack: Premonio’s Success Story.
Summary
To become a high-performing sales team and achieve the best results on LinkedIn, working collaboratively within a clear team structure with defined roles and responsibilities is key to success. Setting measurable KPIs, consistently tracked and analyzed, will help unlock your team’s full potential. A centralized strategy that incorporates multi-channel outreach is the game-changer that will skyrocket your conversion rates!
Listen to the Q&A
There were plenty of questions for the Dux-Soup team at the end of the webinar from the live audience. Listen in full from 33:30mins of the recording.
- Does Chrome need to stay open for Dux-Soup Campaigns to run?
- How do I automate the removal of connections from my LinkedIn network?
- If there is no response to a connection invite how do I remove it?
- Can the followers of a company page or a newsletter be enrolled into a drip campaign?
- What is the format of the CSV file for a Dux-Soup campaign?
You can purchase a Team plan online. Or send us an email at info@dux-soup.com and our support team will guide you and answer all your questions.
