Pipedrive, Dropcontact and Dux-Soup Turbo: Combat LinkedIn’s connection limits with these marketing tools.
As many of you are now aware, earlier this year LinkedIn made some pretty significant changes to the volume of connection requests that a user can send.
Today, the LinkedIn limit stands at 100 connection requests per week, and although this creates obvious challenges for businesses that have a multi-channel strategy 😰, it needn't! You can read our article on LinkedIn connection limits.
Now’s the time to work on your revised targeting strategy and stop bombarding LinkedIn profiles with a ‘scattergun’ connection approach. In this blog, we highlight our top tips to identify your target connections, improving your conversion rates whilst remaining within the new connection limits.
💡 Remember - less, is more, so follow this step-by-step approach to revive your lead generation process.
- Fine tune your targeting approach
- Import your leads into your Pipedrive
- Enrich your connection list with Dropcontact
- Use ‘cold connections’ the right way, in LinkedIn
1. Fine tune your targeting approach
Before inviting the entire world to connect with you on LinkedIn, you need to do a bit of homework to find and segment your audience. Here are some questions to ask yourself, to help you work out who’s important:
● Who is likely to be interested in buying my product?
● What is my ideal customer profile?
● Which companies fit my target audience, and are there specific departments that are more likely to buy?
Now you know the kind of people you want to approach, the second step is to do your research in LinkedIn. Here we focus on 3 methods you can use to find out more information about the prospects you are hoping to connect with:
Boolean search
A boolean search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to specify certain keywords, and reduce the volume of results further by using modifiers such as ‘AND’, ‘OR’, ‘NOT’. It allows the combination of five different elements and utilizes the search engine to its fullest potential. Here’s a brief summary and the order in which to use them:
● Quotation marks "": inserting "" ensures the exact phrase is included in the search results.
● Parentheses (): placing parentheses around specific words or phrases, allows you to perform complex searches and combine several terms.
● NOT: using NOT will exclude some specific words from the search. The words noted after the word NOT will not appear in the results.
● AND: putting AND between keywords will include both (or all) of the keywords.
● OR: using OR between keywords will return results containing either set of search terms.
Import your business list into LinkedIn
Maybe you already know the businesses you’d like to target, but you’re missing the name of the individual you need to connect with. Don't panic! LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you with this too!
To find the names you need, simply import your list directly into LinkedIn Sales Navigator and let the system do the rest! It will return a list of all the contacts you need - for a few more tips, take a look here.
Use your existing network
Don’t forget you already have a network of people interested in your services - these may be your own connections, or those of your peers or managers. Prospecting on LinkedIn is not just about acquiring and contacting new prospects, it’s also about using your existing contacts too.
If you add up all the LinkedIn connections your company has, you will already have a considerable lead base. All too often, you contact these connections once, but there’s only a tiny chance that when you contacted them previously, you did it at the exact moment they needed your solution, your product or your service! Now’s the time to revisit these existing connections.
To remind yourself how to manage your prospecting more successfully using LinkedIn, check out these simple tips.
2. Import your leads into Pipedrive
Secondly - once you have your list of leads, you need to import your leads into Pipedrive. Your targeted leads can be imported into Pipedrive in just a few clicks. For those who aren’t familiar with the tool, it’s a cloud-based CRM that helps you to manage and organize your sales leads.
Once you have a Pipedrive account, you can run some clever LinkedIn automation tricks by linking it with your Dux-Soup account. All you need to do is click on 'Visit profile' within the Dux-Soup Extension, and whenever Dux-Soup visits a LinkedIn profile, it automatically adds your new lead into Pipedrive. Hurrah - your sales funnel is now ready for action!
(Check out the Dux-Soup Pipedrive LinkedIn Integration).
3. Enrich your connection list using Dropcontact
The third step, is to enrich your list by making sure you have everyone's email addresses. If you use Pipedrive and Dux-Soup then Dropcontact is the next tool in your armoury! 💚
It takes just a few minutes to install Dropcontact and enjoy its features, which not only include your contacts’ validated, verified and up-to-date professional email addresses, but also:
● Contact titles (Mr. or Mrs.) to personalize your comms
● Correct and normalized first and last name formatting
● Removal of toxic characters (like emojis or encoded fonts)
● Up to date company website and LinkedIn pages
● Up to date Industry sectors and contact job roles
● The Detection and merging of any potential duplicate contacts
Installing Dropcontact is easy: enter your Pipedrive API key into the Dropcontact CRM section, wave the magic wand, and ta-da! Having done this once, every time you add a new contact into Pipedrive and Dropcontact will automaticallyperform this action to ensure all of your contact information remains up to date.
4. The right way to use ‘cold connections’ in LinkedIn
So, you have all the elements to enable you to carry out perfect prospecting with fantastic results! Now, it's time to adapt your messaging and boost the volume of acceptances to your LinkedIn invitations by starting an engaged conversation.
There are many ways to do this, so it’s important to follow a route that feels naturally right for you. Believe it or not, there’s a right time for a ‘cold email’ and there’s definitely a wrong time, and so many people get these wrong!
To get this bit right, filter on your prospects to find the ones you have email addresses for and the ones you don’t, then follow these simple rules:
Prospects with email:
● Begin your conversation with the ‘cold email’ - this doesn’t mean you email them with a meaningless ‘let’s connect message’, you still need to do your homework here so that the prospect feels there’s a benefit in connecting with you.
● Once the prospect has opened the email, that’s when you send your connection request, which should lead to an opportunity for further discussion.
● Don’t fall into the trap here of sending a connection request first, and following their acceptance with a standard introduction style ‘cold email’
Prospects without email:
● After following all the advice above, there will be so few of these that you can afford to send them a message directly in LinkedIn! Just make sure that you focus on the benefits to the prospect - so they know why they should want to connect with you!
For more tips on how to approach these initial stages of connecting, take a look at this tutorial, for some handy ideas! Of course once you’ve nailed all of this, then you’re ready to start working on your multiple LinkedIn drip campaigns with Dux-Soup Turbo. That’s really going to accelerate your pipeline growth.
About Denis Cohen and Dropcontact
Denis Cohen is a CRM and Lead Generation expert, and the Founder of Dropcontact.
Dropcontact’s enrichment tool is unique and 100% GDPR compliant. There’s no database, just well thought-through algorithms. It’s features automatically centralize all of the information about your prospects and allow you to find email addresses, enrich them and merge duplicates directly in your CRM or via an API.
You can test Dropcontact for free in Pipedrive 💚 and if you have any questions, their support is always on hand to help you out.
