Sales professionals constantly seek innovative ways to connect with potential clients to grow and scale their businesses. Global business competition is rising as AI and other technologies continue to level the playing field for individuals and teams worldwide. Accessing new markets and customers anywhere is now easier than ever. One platform that has revolutionized the B2B sales landscape is LinkedIn. With its vast network of professionals and businesses, LinkedIn offers unparalleled opportunities for individual sales teams to engage with their target audience. However, harnessing this platform’s power requires effective sales automation strategies. Across most industries, about one-third of sales tasks can be automated, according to McKinsey, the global consulting firm. Mastering multichannel sales automation remains critical to growing revenue and lowering costs for businesses, large and small.
In today’s business environment, multiple technology solutions exist to support developing an effective sales pipeline. These technology solutions also lower barriers to entry, leveling the playing field between solopreneurs and larger organizations. In this article, we’ll explore the world of LinkedIn sales automation, discuss multichannel approaches, and provide some tips for success. We’ll also highlight how leading multichannel sales automation tools like Closely can help you get the most out of LinkedIn and boost your competitive advantage. Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn. Now let’s get started.
Top 20 Countries for LinkedIn Users in 2024
Understanding LinkedIn: The Professional’s Social Media Platform
Across social media, LinkedIn remains the go-to platform for professionals seeking to build impactful connections and advance their careers. Before implementing any sales automation initiatives on the platform, it’s essential to understand its unique features and advantages.
LinkedIn Overview
LinkedIn is a social networking platform for business and professional connections. Founded in 2002, it has become the world’s largest professional network, boasting over 1 billion members in more than 200 countries and territories. LinkedIn’s Vision is to “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”
LinkedIn is also the oldest social media platform that still exists today. Generally, social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc, primarily focus on personal relationships and entertainment. However, LinkedIn targets professional networking, career development, and business opportunities. LinkedIn is billed as the world’s largest community with key features that include:
- Professional Profiles: Opportunities for users to showcase their work experience and skills.
- Company Pages: This is an area for businesses to establish their presence and engage with customers and employees. Over 67 million companies are on the network.
- LinkedIn Groups: Industry-specific networking and knowledge-sharing groups. There are over 3 million groups on LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn Jobs: A comprehensive job board and content-sharing capabilities
- LinkedIn Learning: Curated content for learning and skills development.
The United States ranks #1 for the LinkedIn user base. However, countries in emerging markets, such as the Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, Columbia, etc., have quickly adopted the platform, which is available in 24 languages.
Benefits of LinkedIn for Sales Professionals
For sales professionals, LinkedIn offers numerous advantages.
- It provides access to a vast, targeted audience of professionals and decision-makers across more than 150 industries, making it a must-have tool for lead generation.
- It allows sales teams to identify and connect with potential clients based on specific criteria. These targeted connections significantly improve prospecting efforts.
- LinkedIn also serves as a platform for thought leadership, allowing sales professionals to build credibility and trust by sharing valuable content and insights.
- The platform’s design facilitates relationship building, enabling sales professionals to nurture professional connections and maintain long-term relationships with clients and prospects.
- It’s an excellent source of sales and competitive intelligence, providing access to company information and professional insights that can inform sales strategies.
Engaging with Audiences on LinkedIn
Successful sales strategies on LinkedIn require active engagement. Additionally, engagement on LinkedIn goes beyond mere visibility. It’s about creating meaningful interactions that resonate with your prospects, positioning you as a valuable resource in their professional lives.
Numerous strategies exist to help maximize your engagement on LinkedIn—these range from content marketing to direct outreach and everything in between. For any sales professional, the goal is to understand and master these engagement techniques to build a strong presence on the platform and lay the groundwork for successful sales automation. Let’s dive in.
Content Marketing
LinkedIn offers multiple avenues for sales professionals to engage with their target audience. Content marketing is a powerful strategy, allowing you to share valuable insights, industry trends, and thought leadership pieces to attract and engage potential clients. The goal is to provide value to your network and drive engagement. Through meaningful content marketing, you can increase the likelihood of engagement and connection requests.
LinkedIn also offers an InMail feature with connection requests, another effective way to reach prospects. However, it’s crucial to personalize these messages and focus on providing value rather than seeking a quick sale. It’s important to note that the InMail feature is a paid feature.
LinkedIn Growth Hacks
Source: Chris Donnelly
Participation in Industry Groups
Participation in relevant LinkedIn industry groups helps highlight your expertise and create and build relationships. More than 3 million groups exist on LinkedIn. Group categories include companies, industries, job functions, regions, etc.
Contributing to discussions, answering questions, and sharing experiences can help you build thought leadership and become a helpful resource. Techniques such as liking, commenting, and sharing content from prospects and clients help you stay top-of-mind and build rapport.
Hosting or participating in LinkedIn Events provides opportunities to connect with prospects more effectively and demonstrate your industry knowledge. This relatively new feature, launched in 2021, continues gaining traction on the platform.
Sharing content with your prospects and clients help you stay top of mind
Lastly, encouraging your team members to repost or share company content can significantly expand your reach on the platform.
The Power of Multichannel Sales Automation
When building sales automation strategies, it’s crucial to understand that LinkedIn, while powerful, is just one part of the bigger picture. The true potential of sales automation lies in a multichannel approach, which creates various communication platforms. The key takeaway is to develop a holistic approach to maximize your reach, streamline your efforts, and significantly enhance your sales performance across relevant channels.
The Advantages of Multichannel Sales Automation
Multichannel sales automation refers to using technology to streamline and coordinate sales activities across various communication channels, including email, social media, phone, and more. It has several benefits for the sales process, such as,
- Increased efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks allows sales teams to focus on other activities requiring a human touch. Automation efficiency saves time and reduces the risk of human error in routine tasks.
- Consistent messaging: Multichannel automation ensures consistent messaging across all touchpoints with prospects, reinforcing your brand identity and value proposition.
- Improved lead nurturing: You can more effectively guide prospects through the sales funnel by creating personalized, timely interactions across multiple channels.
- Higher conversions: The average conversion rate across industries is 2.9%. Accelerating the process increases the likelihood of achieving these results.
- Better data management: Sales success lies in part in understanding the data. Implementing multichannel sales automation facilitates better data management by centralizing customer data and interactions, providing valuable insights to inform and fine-tune your sales strategies.
From a customer perspective, multichannel automation enhances the overall experience by providing a seamless journey as prospects move through different stages of engagement. Perhaps most importantly, automating your approach offers scalability, allowing you to reach and engage with more prospects without proportionally increasing manual effort. Scaling your business with reduced effort should be a core objective for companies seeking to grow and create value.
LinkedIn Sales Automation Strategies
Given the importance and value of multichannel sales automation, how do professionals integrate these strategies into sales activities within the LinkedIn platform? LinkedIn’s professional network and B2B focus offer unique opportunities for automation that can boost sales.
LinkedIn sales automation strategies encompass various techniques designed to streamline your efforts on the platform. Profile optimization is an essential starting point, as it involves using tools to automatically update and optimize your LinkedIn profile with relevant keywords and content. SEO for LinkedIn is as important an exercise as it is for any other social media profile. Solutions like Semrush provide powerful keyword optimization tools that sales professionals or businesses can use on the platform.
SEO is essential for LinkedIn as it is for any other social media platform. Companies such as Semrush provide keyword optimization tools to increase visibility on the platform.
Profile Optimization
Profile optimization ensures that your profile remains current and appealing to potential clients. Connection request automation allows you to set up automated requests to target prospects based on specific criteria, expanding your network efficiently. Engagement automation tools can automatically like, comment, and share content from your network, maintaining visibility and nurturing relationships without constant manual effort.
Messaging Sequencing
Message sequencing is another powerful strategy. It allows you to create automated message sequences that nurture leads over time with personalized content. This approach helps maintain consistent communication with prospects without overwhelming your schedule. Content scheduling tools ensure a consistent flow of content on your LinkedIn profile, keeping your audience engaged and showcasing your expertise regularly.
Lead Generation
For lead generation, implementing tools that automatically scrape LinkedIn for potential leads based on your ideal customer profile can significantly boost your prospecting efforts. Integrating these automation tools with your CRM ensures the efficient tracking and management of all interactions. Also, you get a holistic overview of your sales pipeline and process. Finally, utilizing automation tools that provide detailed analytics and reporting on your LinkedIn performance allows you to tweak your strategies with real-time data.
Introducing Closely: Elevating Your LinkedIn Sales Strategy
For LinkedIn sales automation, it’s essential to highlight tools that can truly transform your sales process. Enter Closely, a comprehensive solution that embodies the principles of multichannel excellence we’ve discussed. The platform provides:
- Reduced automation costs
- A solution that is seven times cheaper than alternatives, with its combined offering of outreach mail and LinkedIn automation.
- AI assistance.
- A built-in global contact database.
Let’s dive in.
Average Time to Prospect on LinkedIn
Source: Closely
Building Outreach Campaigns
Closely is an all-in-one seamless sales automation platform providing features to streamline your LinkedIn sales efforts and beyond. At its core, Closely provides a unified prospecting platform that allows you to centralize all your sales activities, individually or as a team. This centralization capability is critical to maintaining consistency and efficiency in your sales process. One of Closely’s core features is its ability to manage multichannel campaigns, enabling you to coordinate your email outreach alongside your LinkedIn efforts for a truly integrated approach. Closely is an all-in-one seamless sales automation platform providing features to streamline your LinkedIn sales efforts and beyond. At its core, Closely provides a unified prospecting platform that allows you to centralize all your sales activities, individually or as a team. This centralization capability is critical to maintaining consistency and efficiency in your sales process. One of Closely’s core features is its ability to manage multichannel campaigns, enabling you to coordinate your email outreach alongside your LinkedIn efforts for a truly integrated approach.
Closely Surfer: The LinkedIn Scraper
Closely Surfer, the company’s LinkedIn Scraper, is available as a Chrome Extension. It allows you to scan profiles and export data from LinkedIn quickly, vastly improving prospect information gathering. Complementing this is Closely’s email finder feature, which helps you find email addresses for leads you’ve identified on LinkedIn, individually and in bulk. This combination of LinkedIn data extraction and email discovery makes Closely a powerful tool for comprehensive lead generation.
The “Scanlist by Closely” feature takes things a step further, acting as an AI-powered marketing assistant that can scan business contacts, write personalized message sequences, and create marketing copy faster than traditional methods. This AI assistance significantly accelerates your outreach efforts while keeping a personalized touch.
Robust Global Contact Database
Closely also offers access to a vast database of over 132 million business contacts, with easy filtering options to help you find your ideal prospects. This feature can be a game-changer for sales teams looking to expand their reach and target new markets. At the same time, the 132 million contacts are reasonably robust. However, it’s less than others, such as the 300+ million offered by ContactOut. The “Appoint by Closely” feature streamlines organizing meetings with prospects, further enhancing the efficiency of your sales pipeline. Users can save up to 40 hours on tedious tasks such as multichannel letter distribution, advanced analytics, and team management.
Achieve Efficiency and Improve Win Rates
Closely claims to help decrease the time from prospecting to demo by 50%, potentially leading to faster sales cycles and increased revenue. It also helps sales teams increase win rates by 22%, generate 3x more outbound leads, and increase demos by 123%. Closely integrates with HubSpotCRM. Salesforce and other integrations are on the way.
Additionally, the company’s versatility is another key selling point. Closely serves a diverse customer base, including:
- Startups
- Growth marketers
- Online agencies
- Recruiters
- Sales teams
Best Practices for LinkedIn Sales Automation
It’s crucial to remember that even the most powerful tools, such as Closely, are only as effective as the strategies behind them. Below, we offer a few guidelines to help you balance efficiency and personalization. Ensuring your automated efforts enhance rather than detract from your sales relationships is essential. Following these rules, you’ll benefit from automation while maintaining the human touch that’s so crucial in sales.
Developing Personalization Strategies
Automation tools like Closely can significantly enhance your LinkedIn sales efforts. However, using them responsibly and effectively is essential. Personalization remains critical, even in automated processes. Ensure that your messages and interactions feel tailored to each prospect, avoiding generic, one-size-fits-all approaches that can be impersonal or spammy. The increase in spam is an ongoing risk to LinkedIn as its user base grows. However, the platform has implemented an aggressive framework to combat spam and fake accounts with a 99% success rate through automated defenses and manual reviews.
Respect LinkedIn’s policies and terms of service, avoiding practices seen as spamming or violating platform rules. Adherence to LinkedIn policies protects your account and maintains your professional reputation.
While automation is essential, so is the human touch. Striking the right balance is vital. Use automation to handle repetitive tasks, but be ready to step in personally for meaningful interactions. This hybrid approach allows you to scale your efforts while still providing the personalized attention that builds strong business relationships. Continuously refine your approach by analyzing your automation results and adjusting your strategies based on what’s working best. This data-driven approach ensures that your automation efforts remain practical and relevant.
Always Add Value
Focus on providing value in all your automated content and outreach. Your goal should be offering your prospects genuine insights, solutions, or opportunities, not just promotional material. Maintain a consistent brand voice across all your automated touchpoints to reinforce your brand identity and build trust with your audience. Finally, ensure your LinkedIn automation aligns with and complements your broader sales and marketing efforts. This integrated approach creates a cohesive experience for your prospects across all channels.
Strengthen Your Social Selling Skills
Finally, social selling remains an effective strategy and will only grow as online becomes the primary source for buying decisions. LinkedIn sales automation, particularly with a multichannel approach, offers immense potential for sales professionals to streamline their efforts, reach more prospects, and close deals more efficiently. Tools like Closely provide comprehensive solutions to embrace this potential, offering features from initial prospecting to closing the sale. However, it’s crucial to remember that automation is a tool to enhance, not replace, the human element of sales.
The most successful sales professionals will be those able to leverage automation to handle repetitive tasks while focusing on building meaningful relationships and providing value to their prospects and clients. This capability is true for solopreneurs and those who are part of larger organizations. The digital sales landscape continues to evolve. Utilizing the correct strategies allows professionals to stay ahead of the curve. By embracing LinkedIn sales automation and multichannel excellence, sales teams can position themselves for growth and success in an increasingly competitive economic landscape.
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