In today’s world, massive business opportunity lies within LinkedIn. The art of 'LinkedIn lead generation' begins with understanding what your end goals are, before planning your LinkedIn outreach activities to achieve those goals.
Whether a more passive 'networking' approach, the long term game of nurturing prospects with content to position yourself as a thought-leader, or the direct approach of asking whether there is a need for your services is more in tune with your brand, LinkedIn's ability to connect with hundreds or even thousands of qualified prospects at the same time makes it a powerful sales and marketing tool.
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 generation results without having to invest time in traditional outreach and sales.
LinkedIn automation is designed to automate tedious ‘early-stage’ networking activities - like visiting profiles, and sending out connection requests and messages - so that you can 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 (80,000+ users) and most trusted LinkedIn automation tool, has long been a favorite of entrepreneurs, recruiters, lead generation 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!
LinkedIn lead generation 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. A straightforward LinkedIn lead generation process is highlighted below.
In this blog, we provide best practices for every lead generation 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 1 billion 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 features of LinkedIn 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 starting 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 in our LinkedIn search and filter masterclass blog.
#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. We cover some neat tricks on using LinkedIn lists with Dux-Soup to boost your lead generation.
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 Dux Soup's 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 your personalized message must look 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 personalize your message.
Check out how to write LinkedIn connection messages that get results.
#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 behavior 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 how to use LinkedIn automation safely for a comprehensive review 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 (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.
Scanning Profiles: Once you have created a list on LinkedIn, click on the Dux-Soup icon and select “Scan Profiles”:
Dux-Soup will record basic data of the scanned profiles, allowing you to tidy up the list and revisit it in the next step. You can scan 1000s profiles within minutes with no limit on how many profiles you can scan.
Revisiting Data: Once you have finished scanning the list, you can download the data, delete unwanted profiles and upload it back to the Dux-Soup 'Revisit Data' tool so you can send connection invitations only to specific people. Watch our tutorial on how to revisit data with Dux-Soup Pro.
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 or Cloud, you can automate this process by designing and executing a drip campaign for multi-stage outreach to your LinkedIn connections (check out the difference between Turbo and Cloud).
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 and Cloud plans allow you to set up a series of up to 11 post-connection actions to send after a connection has been added to your network. You can personalize messages with first names, company names, industry etc, and set custom time delays between actions.
Dux-Soup Turbo automatically runs you campaign actions, until someone replies - and that's when the time’s right for 1:1 follow up. You get full visibility of the status of your leads (and the 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 and Cloud offer up to 12 actions, but you can automate a single post-connection follow-up message with Pro too.
Lead Management
Dux-Soup used to be more focused on automating the Connect and Engage phase.
But Dux-Soup also helps with automating the fourth phase of the LinkedIn lead generation process, “Routing leads to Sales”. Let’s check it 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 sales funnel and having the ability to route prospects through different workflows is essential.
Once you’ve got your campaigns running with Dux-Soup then the Funnel Flow is where you can 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.
Drill down into any stage of your LinkedIn lead generation funnel to view and manage your leads, as seen below:
The Funnel Flow, available with a Dux-Soup Turbo and Cloud license, 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 response from a prospect saying “Connection accepted” or "Good to meet you". Any response via LinkedIn will move the prospect to the 'Responded' section of the funnel and the next campaign action will be stopped by Dux-Soup. It could be a little embarrassing otherwise. But you might want to put a prospect back into the campaign workflow. To do that, you can just click on the “Continue” 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.
- If a prospect responds asking for a follow-up or meeting, you can click on the 'Qualify In' button and the prospect will be automatically moved to your 'Qualified stage of the funnel.
You can also choose to message, unenroll and switch prospects between campaigns. Pretty neat, huh?
#9. Update and enrich your CRM data directly from LinkedIn
With Dux-Soup Turbo and Cloud, you can take your lead gen beyond LinkedIn, all on autopilot! The ability to add LinkedIn activity to a prospect's profile in your CRM means your quest for a 365 view of your prospect just got easier!
Dux-Soup has native integrations with Pipedrive, HubSpot and SharpSpring and can add contacts to these CRMs as you visit them on LinkedIn. You can also create an ‘activities in these CRMs once you receive a new message or gain a new connection. Learn more about our integrations.
For other CRMs or sales/marketing automation platforms, Dux-Soup Turbo and Cloud plans also offer the webhook feature.
Webhooks allow you to integrate Dux-Soup with pretty much any other CRM, like Zoho or Hubspot (using Zapier or Make to help you).
#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.
You can use these email addresses for email marketing with tools like Woodpecker (we have a direct integration with Woodpecker, allowing you to create email and LinkedIn workflows from one platform). Or you can use Zapier and Make to connect Dux-soup to other email systems like mailchimp, active campaign 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 Zapier integrations.
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 from Amped Marketing- who have done just that with Dux-Soup!
Summary
With the ever increasing success of 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 that have done just that!
Next Steps
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