Welcome to this episode on LinkedIn sales strategy : “How to turn your account into a sales machine”. This article is based on one of our Waake Up webinars 🚀.
In this article, you will understand how to properly set up your LinkedIn account and turn it into a sales machine.
You will obtain excellent 🤩 tips from Quan Nguyen about all you need to do to be a sales monster. In this article, you will find information on:
- How to create a professional profile.
- How to target your perfect client.
- How to design an irresistible offer.
- How to send your message to a large contact base.
- How to manage and nurture your leads.
Today, we are going to talk about the 5 step formula for generating leads on LinkedIn. They are 5 tips that will allow you to automate the whole process so that leads come into your inbox effortlessly.
5 step-formula for generating leads on LinkedIn
You are going to discover all the steps you need in order to be a sales machine on LinkedIn. Let’s have a look at this. Obviously if you want to listen to Quan explaining his methods, here are the links to watch the two videos we are summarizing on here:
LinkedIn sales strategy: creating a professional profile
There are two types of people here, the ones that do it themselves or people who ask a professional to do it for them. The only thing you need to know is that your profile must be optimized ✅. You have to think about your LinkedIn profile like a landing-page or a sales-page. You are advertising your products or services, so it needs to be a really good profile.
Now, there is a difference between a good profile that you think is optimized and looks good and a profile that is specifically made for leads generation. If you want to know more about how to put in place a strong LinkedIn profile, it’s all in this 👉 article.
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Target your perfect client
Ok this is not science 🧪 but in order to sell your product, you need to find THE client. In order to do so, you’ll need to target precisely what kind of consumers are going to buy from you.
You can do so by using your own criteria and then pick all the prospects you need. But know that you can also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. For Quand, it is a very powerful 🔥 tool that will help you filter your prospect according to your needs. It will also help you complete your lead-generation. If you are considering making money on LinkedIn, then, you might want to go for Sales Navigator.
But what exactly can you target?
- Job titles.
- Industry.
- Location.
- Company size.
These are the four main criterias that people look for when prospecting. And it is important for you to focus on targeting your ideal client. Because you want to create this specific list that you’ll be able to use to create the perfect message 💌.
LinkedIn sales strategy: create your irresistible offer
There is a specific way to talk to people on LinkedIn and there are some type of messages that work very well. The most important thing you need to ask yourself is, “how do I create a sequence to get people to say yes to my offer?”.
This question might result in you asking what exactly do we mean by “offer”? Whatever you’re offering (service/product) has to be attractive 💖 and irresistible to your audience. It needs to be relevant to your target audience and align with their interests.
Automation without a strategy is a waste of time. If you are using automation without really thinking or understanding what makes people vibrate, then, you will lose some clients.
We say that to you because, actually, it’s quite easy to make connections on LinkedIn. The real difficulty is to transform an interest into a client. The conversion. That’s why, your offer needs to be perfect.
Send your message at a scale
Once you’ve got an amazing profile 😮, once you’ve targeted the right people, and once you’ve got an offer that works, you can send them into the sequence, and sit back and watch the magic at work. It just literally becomes a numbers game.
Let’s say that you send out a hundred connection requests to the right people and you have got a great profile, then 30% will accept it and then, out of these 30%, 3 of them will say yes. So every hundred connection requests you send, you will get 3 warm 🌶️ leads but also 30% ideal clients in your network.
The framework of a winning message sequence
There are really five things you need to do:
- Connect request: it’s actually reaching out and connecting 👋 with somebody.
- Intro message: this is not an offer message, but an introduction message (sent 24-48 hours after the connection request has been accepted).
- Irresistible offer (the number one which is sent after 14-20 days).
- Irresistible offer ✨ (number two sent after 7-10 days after the first one). Here we do not talk about a sales-y offer, but it’s an offer to see whether they’ve got a need or a problem.
- Nudge message (sent after 7-10 days): reminder messages.
After five messages, we don’t send any more message, we leave the person alone for a few months and then if they are in the list for another offer, you can send them your offer from a different campaign.
If you wait 14-20 days, that is perfectly normal. It’s because you want them to see your posts, that is why we talked about the importance of copywriting. Because you have a digital content strategy running inside of LinkedIn, it’s what we called inbound marketing.
The framework of a connect request
There are four approaches when it comes to a connection 🔌 request:
- The polite approach:
“Hi {name}, I hope you don’t mind me reaching out. I saw that you were a leader in the {industry} sector so I’d thought I’d send a request. Hope you’re open to connecting”
- Curious approach:
“Hi {name}, I notice we have some mutual connections in the real estate industry. We post a lot of content here to help agents so I thought I’d reach out and connect. Hope to see you in the feed.”
- Direct approach.
“Hi {name}! I always find great value connecting with other leaders (especially in the tech space). You seem like a great contact to have and it’s even better that you’re local. I hope you’re open to connecting so I can follow your activity and exchange some insights”
- Flattering approach.
“Hi {name}! Looks like you’re doing some great work in the construction industry! We recently provided {signature solution} for {company X} so we know the space well. Hope we can network and share opportunities”
The framework of an intro message (the 4 x s’s)
Here Quan talks about the message that you send 24 hours after you have got an acceptance request. The first thing you need to know is to keep your message short and sweet. Here are four things to do:
- Show appreciation 😍. Be grateful and personable by saying:
- Thanks for connecting with m {name}.
- Great to connect with you.
- Thanks for accepting the connect request.
- Show interest with:
- I’d love to learn more about what you do at some point.
- Even better that you are local.
- I look forward to following your work.
- Seed the elevator pitch:
- A bit about me. I work with {target market} to {result}.
- I just helped {company} so I know the space.
- Nike and Adidas are some of our clients.
- Sign off:
- Let’s keep in touch.
- Let me know if I can endorse you for any skills.
- Perhaps we could catch up/zoom at some stage.
Lead management and lead nurturing
It is actually easy to get a lead on LinkedIn, it is getting the sale that is hard. So once they show interest 💥, how do you convert that interest into a client? That’s the tricky part of LinkedIn.
You need to dissociate the two terms. Lead nurturing is a specific part of lead management which takes place at the end of all your process (your are going to nurture the relation with your potential clients or people who are already your clients).
Lead nurturing 🌱 is where you are going to reinforce and develop relations with your clients at any given time of the funnel. For that, you might need a lead scoring system.
Use cases for LinkedIn
Most of the time, people think about LinkedIn for their leads generation. But that is not the only case where you can use this professional network, you can use LinkedIn for so much more than generating leads. You can use it to:
- Recruit people into your team.
- Establish partnership deals (referral partnerships).
- Find and select investors (there are a lot of investors on LinkedIn and you can absolutely pitch your investment opportunity to them).
- Sell physical and digital products.
- Send brand awareness messages ✉️ (by showing them what you are doing through your posts).
- Blog/send newsletters URL campaigns.
About Sales on LinkedIn
You might not be aware 🤯, but when you are going to implement your strategy, one of the best thing to do is to clear your LinkedIn. Actually, you don’t want to have your teachers and previous colleagues (well you can but they will not be part of your prospects).
You need to have a LinkedIn account where the people you add are most likely to buy things from you (and that might mean having two LinkedIn accounts : one for you and your personal branding, and one dedicated to your business).
By the way, you think that having a lot of people who are not your target audience is a good idea? That your content will be multiply because seen in other feeds? According to Quan, when you post something on LinkedIn, not every single person is going to see your post or engage with it.
Moreover, if it’s not relevant to them, they can hide your content and that is a bad sign for LinkedIn algorithm and as a result, a bad sign for your visibility. So, you’re wasting your time on people who will never buy 💸 from you.
A trust-based platform
In order to sell, you need to gain trust from your clients. And guess what? LinkedIn is a trust-based ❤️ platform and there is two reasons why LinkedIn works very well :
- People trust people on LinkedIn and people trust LinkedIn. It is the most trusted platform in the world because when you go to a landing page or a sales page, it is a lot easier to trust a LinkedIn profile than it is to trust a website. This is explained by the fact that you can see everything on it:
- Who the person is connected with.
- If the person is connected with people that you know.
- You can see their whole history.
- Things that they post.
- You can determine if they are actual experts.
- The second reason why LinkedIn works so well is because you can talk directly with the decision maker and you can bypass all the gatekeepers, all of the personal assistants and talk directly to the founder of the product or CEOs .
Just for your information, LinkedIn’s lead generation conversion rates are 3X higher than other major ad platforms, including Google Ads. We can explain this by saying that being on LinkedIn is part of an active strategy where it takes time and effort to create leads and to creates sales.
So you are actively spending time on the platform whereas running ads on Facebook or on Google is more of a passive strategy where you create the funnel, the sales, the landing page, the offer and then you run the ad. The difference between the two? LinkedIn is free.
B2B strategy with LinkedIn
If you are a btob business, every single opportunity is sitting right inside of this platform. All the leads, the prospects , all of the sales that you will ever need is sitting right inside this platform. You need to focus on three things, or what Quan calls, the three C’s. It’s all about turning a complete stranger into a connection and then be able to make a conversion 🌡️. The three C’s are:
- Connect.
- Converse.
- Convert.
It is all about understanding how to take that stranger and turn him into a connection then how to turn this connection into a conversation and then how to turn that conversation into a conversion.
Once you get that, every opportunity is sitting and waiting for you.
LinkedIn sales strategy: larger market formula
There is something important you need to understand, it is the larger market formula, which is really important ⚡ inside of LinkedIn. Indeed, people on LinkedIn have a certain type of segmentation. A larger market formula tells us that at any given time for any product or any industry :
- Only 3% of your target audience are ready to buy or in buying mode.
- 17% of your target market at any given time is in information gathering mode. They know they’ve got a problem and they are gathering information on how to solve that problem.
- 20% of this target market have just become problem aware but they are not yet looking for information.
- 60% of your target market is not even aware that they have a problem.
Adapt your sales strategy
A lot of people on LinkedIn market their message in such a way that it is only relevant to the top three percent of the larger market formula: the ones who are ready to buy.
For example, if you have ever seen an ad on TV 📺 about car, it is typically what they do, they only focus on the top three percent of the market and maybe a bit of the 17% of it too.
That type of messaging does not work inside of LinkedIn but you end up alienating all of these other huge part of your target market. If you want to make money on LinkedIn, you have to market your message and structure your message in such a way that you are not only talking to the top three percent but you’re also talking to the 17, the 20 and even some of the 60%.
Because once you market your message more broadly in such a way that you are not actually only trying to sell something but you are trying to solve a problem, you are going to be able to catch a much larger portion of your target market.
People tend to think that it’s a sales page but it’s not. On LinkedIn, it’s all about networking if you want to be successfull.
You don’t use LinkedIn to make sales, you use LinkedIn to create connection and to create introductions and to create conversations. The sales happen outside of LinkedIn, it happens when you make an offer to help somebody or solve a problem.
Your target market has been bombarded 💣 with messages on LinkedIn and your competitors are going hard after this top three percent. If you do the same, there is not going to be any market share left.
Larger market formula as a funnel
You want to market your message broadly in a way that you are coming helpful and you are coming off as a problem solver rather than saying : “Hey I’ve got this product, are you interested, do you want to have a meeting ?”.
What you want to do is getting people that are interested enough to go:” Oh this is interesting but I’m not ready for something like that yet, but I’ll be happy 🤗 to receive information”. You will have people that are problem aware and you will be able to put them in your funnel and you will be able to educate them.
The idea is to get as many people as you can, put them to your email sequence or your email funnel and educate them and put them in the position where they are ready to buy. You will be the one taking them to that journey because you will have lead them to that point, because they see you as an expert. They already see 👀 you, so they know you and they can trust you.
LinkedIn sales strategy: Short game vs Long game
Inside of LinkedIn, there are two games 🎲 that we play. There is a sort of short game and the long game.
This is all about getting leads today and getting leads this week. That brings some revenue and cash flow which is great but that is not how you scaleness inside of LinkedIn. If you want to escape your business, then you have to play the long game.
So warm leads right now might be important but you want to be on LinkedIn, you need to look at it over the long term, look at it as you are going to be doing this for five, ten years. In that time, you are going to build a list of 30,000 people.
Because LinkedIn gives you 30,000 first degree connections limit and each one of those 30,000 people are highly targeted prospects that are highly likely to buy from you. They are prospects that fit perfectly in the target market for the product or service that you promote or sell 💵.
The importance of copywriting
The difference between making money and not making money is your sales copy ✍🏽 inside of LinkedIn. Your approach, your wording, your copywriting will make the difference. And there are two types of copywriting:
- Inside of your LinkedIn profile.
- In your messaging, in your introduction, in your offer.
It’s all got to do with your copywriting. If something goes wrong in your LinkedIn approach, it’s because of that.
The 12-step about summary formula
Here, you will have an insight into what Quan believes are the best copywriting techniques. This is to capture your audience, show your expertise, explain your product or service and get them to like, trust and buy into you.
- Capture attention and address audience: this is really important, because LinkedIn gives you three lines to “describe” yourself and convince somebody to click on the “see more” button on your page.
- Debunk a myth to demonstrate your expertise.
- Ask a question to highlight a problem.
- Highlight the result they want without the pain 😢.
- Tell them the “missing link” to achieve the result: the missing link is your product or service.
- Tell them how it works/the sign up process.
- List your product or services.
- Highlight the problems it solves/ solution provides.
- Highlight any time/money saving features.
- Promise a time-frame.
- Make an irresistible offer/offer lead magnet.
- Provide a call to action.
Don’t forget, it is not about you, when you are writing your description on your profile. It’s all about how you can help your target audience.
FAQ of the article LinkedIn Sales Strategy
Right, in this article, Quan gave you the best methods to be a complete sales machine.
Generating leads on LinkedIn
Throughout these two videos, we learnt that there are 5 essential steps to generate leads on LinkedIn:
- For your sales tactics, you must have an excellent ✅ profile. You need to create a professional profile showing that you are an expert in your area of expertise.
- You may have read what we are about to say everywhere in our articles, but we cannot emphasize this enough: make a persona. By persona, we mean that you need to create the profile of YOUR ideal client. Who are the people who are likely to buy from you? What are their needs? Answer all the possible questions about them before trying to sell anything.
- Create your irresistible 🔥 offer: your solution must answer all the frustration points that your audience is susceptible to have. It must be so attractive that your customers can only say one thing: “I definitely need this”.
- Send your message at a scale. By doing this, you have many approaches and Quan gave many examples throughout the videos.
- As a salesperson, last point is to do lead management and some nurturing. You will need to polish and maintain your relationship with your prospects.
Using LinkedIn for your business
Don’t forget that LinkedIn can be used for so many reasons. For example, you can use LinkedIn to:
- Recruit for your team.
- Improve your marketing strategies by selling physical products or digital products.
- Improve your social selling by demonstrating your area of expertise.
- Find and contact your prospects.
Sales on LinkedIn
When you want to sell a product or a service on LinkedIn, as a marketer, you need to clear your account. What must be on your sales account are subjects and potentials clients that are related to your solution. Quan insists on this: what you are going to post must be relevant to them.
By the way, LinkedIn is a trust-based platform. Yes! It is much easier to sell on LinkedIn because you can speak directly to the founder of the solution or the directors. You don’t have to pass all the barriers and you bypass ✨ the gatekeepers.
Important notions to keep in mind
On LinkedIn, you need to be aware that your sales process must encompass all LinkedIn’s segments. As previously explained, on LinkedIn, among your target 🎯 audience, you have:
- 3% ready to buy.
- 17% are gathering information.
- 20% have just become problem aware.
- 60% are not aware that they have a problem.
This is the larger market formula that you need to keep in mind and you must adapt your strategy according to it. Don’t forget that you are not only writing your post for the top three percent in your network but for everyone in the funnel.
And perfect! We have nothing else to add, now, you know everything about LinkedIn Sales Strategy. Don’t hesitate to try it out yourself 🔥.
