Besides email, social media platforms, in B2B mainly LinkedIn, are well suited to starting potential business relationships. We recommend preparing your leads for contact first by liking and commenting on their posts and taking part in discussions, so you get into a first conversation. After that, you can contact them directly via Sales Navigator.
Sales Navigator helps you find the right people and keep track of them, which takes social selling on the platform to a new level: personalised outreach is far more effective in acquisition than cold calling. As a B2B sales professional, you can reach potential customers all over the world, even if you do not have their contact details. How to get the most out of it is covered in our LinkedIn Sales Navigator hacks.
Besides Sales Navigator, you have other ways of reaching people on LinkedIn:
- Connect without a note: if you have recently met in person or been in touch in another way, you can send a connection request without a note. The recipient will most likely know the context. This kind of contact is mainly suited to expanding your network; it brings less business value, at least not immediately.
- Connect with a note: where there is no obvious context, or for business purposes, leave the recipient a short, crisp message of at most 300 characters.
Example: making contact with a short message
Hi Maria,
Congratulations on your new role as CMO at Velo AG. I would love to talk to you about cycling. I may have something interesting for you. Would a ten-minute call next week suit you?Best regards
AntonioPS. Sebastian Matti pointed me to you.
- InMail: with LinkedIn InMail you can send messages to people you are not connected with. Compared with classic emails, InMail is very effective for lead generation because recipients get fewer InMails per day than emails.
The advantage is obvious: the chance that your message is noticed and read at all is much higher. Open and reply rates are therefore usually much higher than for emails. Your message also gets a «face», because it is linked directly to your profile, your career, mutual contacts and so on, which makes you more human than a mere email address.
All this comes at a price. You can only send InMails with a paid premium account, and the number per month is limited. To make InMail as effective as possible, check the potential customer's details thoroughly and mention something specific. You can, for example, use Sales Navigator to filter leads who have recently changed jobs. Or you simply look for relevant LinkedIn groups and connect with their members. That is a good starting point for a conversation.
Whichever way of making contact you choose, always keep these tips in mind when you write to someone on LinkedIn:
- Prepare your LinkedIn profile first. Optimise and update it before outreach. Nobody likes accepting requests from strangers they have nothing in common with.
- Make sure your tagline and summary reflect what you have to offer.
- Start with only around ten connection requests a day and monitor your account regularly. If all goes well after about two weeks, you can slowly increase the number. There are tools that scale outreach on LinkedIn through mass messages and automation. But beware: these tools can damage your personal reputation, and LinkedIn takes action against such activity, for example by lowering the reach of your posts or (temporarily) restricting your profile. We therefore do not recommend them. What automation can still do today is covered in AI and LinkedIn automation in outbound.
LinkedIn has become a platform that does more than connect professionals. Today, savvy entrepreneurs use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a powerful lead generation tool. LinkedIn was founded only about two decades ago, but it has changed the way sales works. Social media has created new channels for researching potential customers, making contacts and building relationships. If you do lead generation on LinkedIn right, you also build your network, and with it your social capital, over time. But do not forget: LinkedIn is there to connect with other people in a human way. Keep that in mind in everything you do there. For a detailed playbook, read LinkedIn for B2B lead generation: from 0 to 5,000 impressions.
