Setting aside the right amount of time for quality outreach, networking and lead generation can be one of the biggest hurdles to growing your business. This is where LinkedIn and LinkedIn automation tools can truly help you to up your game.
LinkedIn is the world’s premier B2B social selling network with over 878 million users. LinkedIn automation is the term used to describe software that automates manual actions on the platform. By automating ‘front-end’ manual outreach activities, such as list building and connecting, you can spend more time focusing on your leads in the latter stages of the sales funnel.
Dux-Soup is a leading automation tool that enables users to automate LinkedIn lead generation. In this blog, we’ll explain how to get started with Dux-Soup - from a 1st time installation, all the way through to defining a campaign, getting prospects into a campaign and linking with your CRM.
We’ll take a look at:
If you’d like to watch our recent webinar on the same topic then head to our YouTube channel where we walk you through the entire process, with lots of demos of the tool along the way. If reading is more your thing, then follow this guide to automate your outreach activities and you’ll have a lot more time to focus on winning new business!
What is Dux-Soup?
Dux-Soup is a Chrome extension (also compatible with some other browsers) which you can use to mimic human behavior on the LinkedIn platform, whether that’s with a free account, Sales Navigator or Recruiter. Select the ‘list’ you want Dux-Soup to process and Dux-Soup will run the chosen activities against that list. What’s more, the tool allows you to automate human behavior in the browser to keep your LinkedIn account safe. For more on this topic read our blog Using LinkedIn automation Safely.
There are 3 different plans to choose from: a free Starter plan, Pro plan and Turbo plan. The Pro and Turbo plans are also available for teams and agencies, for businesses that need multi-seat licenses.
When you register for your 2-week free trial, you’ll have access to all the Turbo features, so you can really get your LinkedIn automation journey off to a killer start.
Oh….and if you don’t already have a LinkedIn account, you’ll be needing one of those!
Which LinkedIn account is right for you?
A free LinkedIn account allows you to search for prospects and send a limited number of connection requests. If you need more advanced features and higher limits on the amount of activity you can carry out, you can easily upgrade your account.
Premium accounts are great as a first step-up from a free account if you’re growing your business or looking for a new job.
Sales Navigator is designed for sales professionals and provides advanced search and lead generation tools, while Recruiter provides advanced recruiting tools for those working in the Recruitment industry.
1. Installing Dux-Soup
Let’s get started…
Take a look at our 30-second YouTube tutorial on how to install Dux-Soup and follow the steps to install the Chrome extension.
Dux-Soup is now ready to carry out your chosen activities against your LinkedIn account.
2. Defining and creating your list of prospects
Now let’s find your targets. There are lots of places you can go to in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator to find the right prospects for your business:
You can run your chosen Dux-Soup automated actions against any list of prospects where the Dux-Soup icon turns green and says ‘At Your Service’. This means there is sufficient data on the page for Dux-Soup to carry out your chosen actions.
To find out about some of the more useful profile lists that LinkedIn is able to generate, take a look at our blog: Using LinkedIn lists with Dux-Soup to boost your lead generation
The most useful lists are specific and targeted. To help you achieve this, use Boolean* search queries, like AND, OR and NOT. For example, searching for "marketing AND manager NOT agency" will return results for marketing managers who are not currently working at an agency.
You can only see the people who are in your network so, if you want to see the profiles of those outside of your network, you will need to use a premium account or InMail feature.
* To learn more about the magic of the Boolean search take a look at our blog: LinkedIn and Dux-Soup - Search and filtering masterclass, or if you’d like to watch a demonstration, follow this link: LinkedIn and Dux-Soup - Search and filtering masterclass to watch our recent webinar on the topic.
3. Creating Campaigns
Campaigns are a Dux-Soup Turbo feature built in the Dux-Dash. You can enroll 1st, 2nd and 3rd-degree connections into your campaign and you can create as many campaigns as you want.
A Dux-Soup drip campaign is a stack of up to 12 pre-written connection messages and direct messages that can be sent over a certain period of time.
A drip campaign enables you to nurture leads over time, gradually building relationships with prospects and increasing the chances of converting them into customers. Compared to the manual process it saves you vast amounts of time. It's win, win!
Take a look at our quick demo on how to Create Drip Campaigns in Dux-Soup Turbo for more information.
4. Enrolling prospects for outreach
Now we have created our campaign(s), how do we get it all started?
We need to enroll some of our prospects by going back to the lists we created. There are a few ways to get people enrolled:
Individual enrollment
When you’re manually browsing LinkedIn you can use the Dux-Soup Tricks Widget to enroll a prospect. To do this, open a profile and click on the enroll button.
Take a look at the Dux-Soup Trick Widget guide to see how it works.
Enrolling in bulk
To add profiles into a Dux-Soup drip campaign in bulk, make a search on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or Recruiter, and when the ‘At your service’ message appears, hit the Dux-Soup icon. Afterwards, select the ‘Enroll Profiles’ option from the drop-down, verify the campaign name and adjust the number of profiles you want to enroll:
Once you hit ‘OK’ Dux-Soup will start to enroll prospects from the top of the page. If you’ve already enrolled some prospects into the campaign, it will skip over them. Dux-soup cannot enroll a prospect into the same campaign twice.
5. Messaging connections
Now we have our campaign set up, we can create the connection message, the follow-up messages and the activities that we want Dux-Soup to perform for us.
A word of advice - do not bombard prospects with multiple messages in a short period of time. The longer your campaign lasts, the greater the chances of genuine interaction with a prospect.
Tip: Give more time than you think you need to between your follow up message! A lot of people don’t log in to LinkedIn everyday, it may be once a week or once a fortnight. There’s nothing worse than logging in to see five messages from one person. Don’t let those messages be yours!
The content of your message can go a long way to making or breaking your LinkedIn outreach. For guidance on your connection strategy take a look at how to write LinkedIn connection messages that get results.
6. Monitoring Campaigns
Once your campaign is set up, it will run automatically, sending the pre-written messages to the prospects at the specified intervals. It's important to track the progress of the campaign and make adjustments as needed. Campaigns are monitored in the Dux-Dash Funnel Flow.
The Funnel Flow consists of several stages, each representing a different step in the user's lead generation process. You can track all of the following simply by clicking on one of the column:
If a prospect responds to a message, they will be moved to the ‘responded’ stage and campaign activity will stop. At this stage you can correspond manually, or choose to re-enroll them.
You can also see a list of the profiles and any message exchanges.
In the Dux-Dash you can view the Queued Activity and as those actions get done, the Activity Log gives you full visibility of everything in the campaign that’s completed.
7. Connecting Dux-Soup with your CRM
Dux-Soup has direct integrations with Pipedrive, Hubspot and Sharpspring CRM’s (with more to come in the future). These can be ‘enabled’ via the Dux-Dash. This allows you to enroll and message prospects (either individually or in bulk) into campaigns within the CRM environment.
Dux-Soup also has integrations with Zapier and Make giving you the possibility to connect with hundreds of other platforms. This means that the visiting and messaging data that is being gathered by Dux-Soup, will be added straight into the appropriate platform. Data from every LinkedIn profile that you open using Dux-Soup is available for you to download from within your browser, or you can use webhooks to gather that data automatically.
Take a look at our integration page to see all of the options.
And that’s how you get started with Dux-Soup!
Remember to register for your 2-week free trial if you’re not already a user, and then you’re good to go, simply follow this guide and you’ll be a lead generation professional in no time!
If you need any help along the way, feel free to send an email to Dux-Soup support: info@dux-soup.com.
For more product tips, take a look at our blog and webinars pages, and if you’d like to learn more about Dux-Soup integrations, then head to our website
Handle your entire sales pipeline, track your performances, and in the end, close more deals.
