An Introduction to LinkedIn Outreach Automation for Sales Teams
LinkedIn can be used for all sorts of purposes, and yet if you are only leveraging it to further your own career aims, you could be missing out.
Lead generation and prospect outreach are two things that can be achieved with surprising efficiency on LinkedIn, for example. So let’s look at what sales teams stand to gain from harnessing this social platform successfully.
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Automation makes things easier
The biggest benefit of embracing LinkedIn as a lead generation tool is that you can automate many aspects of outreach, making it far more efficient.
LinkedIn automation outreach software like salesflow.io has been made specifically with this in mind, enabling you to connect with prospects, send initial messages and even follow up without needing to wrangle all of this manually.
With the power of automation on your side, you can also scale your outreach efforts with ease, while building brand awareness in the process.
This is obviously advantageous if you have a modestly sized sales team and limited resources at your disposal. Rather than spending a lot of time and effort on lead generation, LinkedIn combined with the right automation tools will let you pick out prospects and make first contact with them, while still being able to get on with other tasks.
Personalization is important
Having discussed the merits of being able to automate outreach on LinkedIn, it is necessary to emphasize that you still need to be implementing a degree of customization when sending out messages to prospects.
The unavoidable fact is that this is a social platform, and so people who occupy it expect that people who want to join their network will have done a cursory amount of research into who they are, what they do and what interests they might have.
If you don’t do this, outreach messages can come across as spammy, generic and impersonal. This is a quick way to put people off your brand altogether, rather than drawing them into it.
As you might expect, the aforementioned LinkedIn automation tools enable you to personalize your messaging to avoid this scenario unfolding. It also helps to be able to target the right groups, so homing in on users with specific skills listed on their public bios can assist you here as well.
Unabashed sales strategies won’t get you far
Another important thing to note when using LinkedIn for outreach is that your sales team should not treat it like other platforms for communication in terms of the way they approach interacting with prospects.
So while you might go right ahead with a straightforward sales pitch during a cold call to a client or customers, it is a bad idea to make a similar pitch part of your opening gambit on LinkedIn.
Once again this comes down to it being a place for social communication and networking, not for selling to one another. Initial messages must be friendly, approachable and crucially not geared towards hawking a product or service. Other skills are needed for writing marketing copy for emails, for example.
Your team needs to build connections carefully and foster them over time, in order to extract the most value from them.
This is why it is necessary to ensure that your outreach begins with a broad, wide-ranging approach and then as things get narrower when replies pour in, the real work of fostering prospects with a view to an eventual conversion can begin.
Ultimately you still need to follow the golden rule of sales, which is to demonstrate that you are offering value to your contacts gained via LinkedIn. Except in this context, it needs to be more of a two-way street, or else your efforts won’t hit home.
