How to generate leads on LinkedIn – webinar

Freshsales partnered with Jake Jorgovan (Founder, Lead Cookie) for a webinar on “How to generate leads on LinkedIn” on April 25, 2018.

In this webinar Jake talks about:

• The top two tactics for generating leads on LinkedIn

• An exact framework of scripts to use with LinkedIn outreach

• Tools to help you streamline and automate the process

• How to nurture leads you generate on LinkedIn

How to generate leads on LinkedIn – webinar transcript

Today’s agenda

Here is the agenda for what we’re going to cover today,

1. I’m going to share with you what we learned and some of those things of who this works for, who this doesn’t and some things just be wary of as you go into these tactics.

2. I’m going to share with you the exact process that we use to generate leads on LinkedIn.

3. I’m going to teach you how to nurture those leads because when you get these leads generated on LinkedIn, it’s very different than an inbound lead or even a cold email response. So it takes a little bit of nurturing these a little different to really convert these leads, get them on the phone calls and turn them into customers.

So my goal here is to give you that complete end-to-end picture of how to be successful with LinkedIn outreach.

What we learned

So to start off, I want to dive into what we learned running the sixty-eight different LinkedIn outreach campaigns.

1. So the first thing we’ve learned is that niching wins, so if someone has a narrow niche and a really good value proposition, they’re going to see really great results with LinkedIn outreach.

2. If you kind of has a niche or your value proposition is kind of weak or your commodity or you’re the same as a lot of other competitors, you’ll do okay.

3. If you’re a generalist if you’re out there and you’re saying hey I’m selling you know digital marketing just like everyone else to anyone who will buy, you’re probably not going to get good results.

We saw this over and over again and you know for us at Lead Cookie we’ve come to the point where we basically only take customers on when we believe that they have a good niche and a good value proposition that’s actually going to resonate and get people’s attention.

So this is the most important thing that we’ve learned and I mean must understand, that if you go into these tactics in your value proposition or your messaging isn’t dialed in, you aren’t going to see results from this.

Failure!

So I’ll give you some examples of this, so one of the first failures we had was this generalist design agency in San Francisco, there’s a very reputable firm, they’ve been around for twenty years, they had all these really big you know client names all over their website that you know but they hardly got any engagement.

Now what we were able to eventually do with them is they actually had a really large nonprofit portfolio and so actually about fifty percent of their work was nonprofit, so what we ended up doing was actually niching their LinkedIn profile, we didn’t change anything on their website but we nice the LinkedIn profile around saying we’re a design agency for nonprofits and we started doing that and going after just the nonprofit market, we actually started to get engagement and get those bookings.

But as a generalist, hardly anyone responded, any responses was a really weak engagement but as soon as we made that focus and we said hey we specialize in nonprofits then that’s the point where we started to actually get those conversions and convert those leads to phone calls.

Success!

Now another example of a success of this one that was right out of the gate of success, is we have a specialist development shop in Birmingham and their tagline was; I help blue collar companies automate manual processes with custom software. So extremely niche, they work with manufacturing companies, companies that are out there doing manual work and they help them automate their processes by doing custom software.

The first three months we generated sixty-three leads for them and they’ve been a customer with us for nine months straight just getting consistent results out of this process. So this is an example of a really good customer that they knew what their niche was, they knew what their focus was, they had that good positioning going into this on the front end and that’s led to them having success with these tactics.

(your value proposition) x (LinkedIn outreach) = (Results)

And so the way we like to think about it is that, if you look at it, we have run basically sixty-eight customers through this exact same process. We have this as LinkedIn outreach, this process that I’m going to share with you today, this exact framework of scripts, this exact same approach and we have you know a customer’s value proposition and the results someone gets is always dependent upon their value proposition, literally we take them through the same approach, if they have a good value proposition, we’ve had people that have had to turn off the service because they’re getting too many leads and then we’ve had people that literally just get no results and get crickets.

The value proposition, your messaging, your positioning, everything there that’s extremely important to have nailed down before you dive into these tactics. Now one of the other things that we learned is that this is also a very large time investment if you end up doing this on your own.

If you go in and you do all these tactics that I share with you today and you do them on your own, you’re looking at roughly a ninety minute investment per day, it’s going to take a bit of time, it’s a lot of work and so that is roughly what the look time is, if you look at doing on your own, now that’s kind of why we created our service Lead Cookie is to help minimize that time, but another alternative is we know a lot of you we’ll go and they’ll hire a virtual assistant off UpWork or they’ll have an assistant or someone else at their company kind of support and help doing this and if you do that, you can basically kind of get that handled to the point where you’re looking at about a twenty-minute investment per day.

So I mean that twenty minutes though, it’s kind of spent looking at actually nurturing the leads, responding to people, having conversations, trying to convert them to get the call booked. So a lot of this is simple stuff that you could hire out or get support on but regardless you’re going to have the actual responses, the conversations, trying to get people to phone call, even if you hire an assistant, you’re going to need to invest at least roughly twenty minutes per day working those leads.

Start slowly!

The other thing we learned was that you want to start slowly with this. This is really important, so there are a few things here, the tactics I’m going to teach you today, they work incredibly well but they are a little bit a gray hat in term with LinkedIn’s with like their limits and everything, so what you have to do is make sure to play safely within the limits that LinkedIn has.

So basically I’ll share with you later, you can send up to a hundred connection requests per day but if you aren’t using LinkedIn that much and you just have a you know a stagnant profile that sits there for five years and then out of nowhere you go from zero to sending a hundred connection requests every single day. LinkedIn will flag your account often or say hey this is abnormal activity, what’s going on here, so what you want to do with Dux-Soup or sending connection requests or messages or any of the tactics I teach you today, you want to start doing this slowly.

So if you’re looking at this you know the first few days, you might send fifteen to twenty connection requests, the next few days you might ramp that up to twenty to forty connection requests and then ramp that up to seventy and then over the course of about two weeks is typically our ramp up time that we’ve found is safe eventually get up to going to that full speed of a hundred connection requests.

The other thing that is important to know with that is in addition to starting slowly, you must have LinkedIn Sales Navigator for everything I’m going to teach you today, so if you try to do this with LinkedIn Premium or with basic and you don’t have sales navigator again, there’s a chances of your account being flagged so be cautious with that, I know that was a question here and before we even started but you need LinkedIn Sales Navigator to do these tactics that I’m going to show you today.

The cookie cutter lead gen process

So with all that being said, those are just kind of some of the main things we learned, who this works for, so I want to set that precedent before we dive into what we call; the cookie cutter leads generation process.

So basically what I’m going to teach you today is there’s three core ingredients or pieces of this.  

1. The first thing we’re going to talk about is optimizing your LinkedIn profile, because if we’re going to do all these things to ramp up traffic and send these people or connect with people on LinkedIn, obviously we want your profile looking pretty good before you actually start doing all that.

2. The second piece of that we’re going to talk about is sending outbound connection requests and how you can do that in efficient way  

3. Then third we’re going to talk about how to ramp up traffic to your LinkedIn profile.

So these are the three core pieces, these core tactics. There are other things you can do on LinkedIn but this is what we found, it’s been really powerful, something you can even outsource or you can just get going in kind of an automated fashion and it just becomes a really powerful lead generation tool.

Linkedin profile optimization

So the first piece here we’re going to talk about is the LinkedIn profile optimization, so with your profile optimization there’s a ton of stuff you can do obviously, you want a good photo and you know you want to go through and fill out your skills and fill out your school and all that stuff so you know LinkedIn has the little standard thing that they walk you through and you want to try to get that up to a hundred percent complete.

So there’s a ton of stuff we could go on LinkedIn profile optimization but what I want to teach you today is the 80/20 or the two most important tweaks that we look at whenever we’re optimizing someone’s LinkedIn profile.

This is one of the most important pieces of your profile and the reason is that this is basically_ if you think about it it’s like the headline of a blog post or a website, and this is going to follow you all over LinkedIn, whenever you post in the newsfeed, this shows up right underneath it, whenever you’re in a suggested people to connect with, this shows up right there in it and so whenever you say people who recently viewed your profile or even on a message thread. This tagline shows up right under your name, all over LinkedIn.

One of the biggest mistakes people make here is they make their tagline president or CEO or sales rep or whatever they put in there and basically you know that’s not exciting, that doesn’t entice people and so what you want to do is create some sort of benefit oriented tagline that’s going to hook your prospects in.

At the time when I was doing consulting prior to starting leads cookie, this was my tagline. I hope agencies and consultants win their dream clients and so basically you know, it’s a simple formula, I help X you know do or accomplish why and so it’s a really simple formula that I recommend if you’re struggling to figure out what to put here, just I help X, X being who you targets do or accomplish Y and basically kind of what is the benefit you help them bring and then if you need more clarity sometimes you can do through Z, which Z would be basically the what you do or how you actually do that.

But basically the most important thing is here you know don’t make this president, don’t make this a CEO or sales rep, make this a benefit oriented statement that is going to hook your prospects and get them intrigued to click into your profile, so that’s step one. The profile optimization, the first most important tweak.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is that they make their profile copy this kind of résumé style, this whole background in history of everything they’ve done in their career or where they were born or where they went to school and the truth is no one cares about that and instead what you want to do, is you want to make your profile more like a sales page, where you’re talking about who you serve, how you help them, what benefits you bring them, you can even put testimonials from other customers in there but you want your profile speaking to your target customer about how you’re going to help them and kind of have a call to action on there, to actually contact you or get in touch.

This is the kind of the shift you want to make from that résumé style profile to actually getting this to where it’s actually about your target customers. So those are the two most important tweaks in the LinkedIn profile again, a lot of other things you can do, but those are the two most important things that I recommend everyone needs to do before you start doing these other tactics.

Lead generation

Alright, so next we’re going to start talking into the actual lead generation tactics and what we do here and so this is actually a pretty simple process.

So basically what we’re going to do, is we’re going to use LinkedIn sales navigator here to put together a search queue of our target customers and in a moment I’m actually going to take a break from this and I’m going to pull up LinkedIn sales navigator and just show you how targeted and some of the really cool stuff you can do with that.

But basically what you’re going to do is, so this is an example where I believe I was targeting design agency owners in the San Francisco area. You’re going to pull that up and you’re going to start sending connection requests to people and you’re going to send a short and sweet casual connection request, you can try to find different ways or personalize this or put some personality into it, if you want, but this is a really safe simple script.

Now as browsing your profile and those who work on similar space so I thought I would reach out to connect, so this script is very casual, very basic, you’re not trying to sell in this, if you actually try to sell in these too much it’s another way to get your profile banned, you don’t want to pitch ever in a connection request.

So this is kind of a simple framework again, we actually see better results when people find some way to kind of personalize this or be quirky, we’ve had people put smiley faces in here or just add some personality to this or kind of if you can frame this around a common interest and use a keyword there, so there’s a lot of stuff you can do there but basically this kind of low commitment just saying “Hey, I wanted to connect is kind of the goal here”.

Then what I’ll do is I’ll put my name and we can put the tagline there at the bottom and basically use that as a way to kind of position or intrigue someone and the interesting piece is just sending connection requests like this with your tagline, you’re going to have people respond and say “Hey, you sound interesting, I would love to hear more about what you do”.

So if your tagline is good and your value proposition is good and you reach out to the right customers, just sending those connection requests alone is going to actually make a lot of impact.

So what we do then and what we recommend is eventually over the course of those two weeks after you scale this up, you can get to a point where you’re sending about a hundred connection request per day, every once in a while LinkedIn might get a little finicky and you may need to bump that back down, but on average for most of our customers were able to send up to about a hundred connection requests per day.

Out of those hundred connection requests that we send out. What we typically find is about fifteen to thirty percent accept, if you’re targeting really difficult decision makers or maybe you’re looking at a less tech-savvy industry like; manufacturing, then you might get a slightly lower response rate but on average when people are targeting small to medium-sized businesses, what we typically find is a fifteen to thirty percent acceptance rate.

Drip non-salesy messages over time

Now once someone accepts a connection request, what we then do is we drip non-salesy messages to them over time. We’re not pitching, this is probably the biggest thing, this non-salesy piece, I want to just emphasize that like crazy because whenever your salesy on LinkedIn, it’s you know it’s like trying to kiss on the first date kind of thing, it’s a silly analogy but it is so true anytime our customers pitch too early in their LinkedIn conversations, it just kills the thread and the person stops responding.

So this is kind of the standard framework that we use:

STEP ONE: We send a connection request is the first piece and I shared that with you,

STEP TWO: Second thing we’ll do is say hey, thanks for connecting and then we’ll try to ask a question you know something that’s going to frame around their business you know something that’s going to kind of position the conversation in a way, so my question, whenever I’m reaching out, is I say you know a what are your primary lead generation sources you know or how do you getting most your leads right now. So that gives me you know starts a conversation, people answer, I get some information, we can have a dialogue about lead generation which is what our business does, we’ve got some other clients, we had a one client of speaking with yesterday, that specializes in Amazon AWS services so you know our question is hey, you currently using AWS or have you ever considered that for your business and so again, he’s not pitching his services, he’s just asking you know do they use Amazon AWS or are they ever considering it and so it’s a conversation starter just something to provoke and start a conversation but again we’re not being too salesy you know we’re not pitching and that second message.

STEP THREE: After we send that question which will typically do that right after someone connects or that basically the next day, about a week later between two and three, there’s a week delay, we’re going to try to send over some sort of useful article or information, so something valuable, it’s actually going to be meaningful or useful, you don’t want to just send our five tips to doing this, you want to send over some really kind of cornerstone content, something that’s going to be useful, typically don’t recommend podcasts or videos, unless the videos under two minutes,  you want something skimmable you know, you want to make it a small simple commitment, so blog posts or you know sixty to two minute long videos are probably about kind of the type of content that you want to share, we’ve sometimes seen case studies work well here, you got to be careful not to be too salesy with it and what you ideally want to do is make your case study something that’s kind of educational on how you actually achieve this for the client and not just “Hey, we did this for the client and then XYZ accomplishments.” You want to kind of make it educational or show the process or show the details if you’re going to do a case study.

STEP FOUR: Those are the first three messages and then basically one week after we send the article, we’ll send one more drip message asking for a meeting. So basically we’re not pitching or making a direct sale until message four and a message four will would say something like; “Hey, I was looking at your profile, I think it could be worthwhile for us to have more of a discussion because I really think I could help you, this is what we do, here’s our value proposition, would you be interested in a quick call to talk more and so really it’s only after that fourth message do we ever actually make a direct pitch, so very simple, very straightforward but as you see the first three messages are not salesy and we just find that that works super well to kind of just have that much more laid-back approach and just try to start conversations on LinkedIn. And doing this kind of conversation approach, it’s just how people like to engage. LinkedIn is a chat platform, it’s different than cold email, so starting conversations is just really one of the most important things here, one of the tip is just put your tagline again in the signature of each message here, just to kind of reinforce that value proposition and what you’re doing and again it’s just another kind of way to help increase that conversion. Now before I dive into the traffic piece, I told you guys I wanted to share and actually do a sales navigator demo here.

Question: Your technique seems more and you’re in the SMB lead gen, do you feel if our prospect is a fortune 5000 company, does it make sense? because CEO to CEO usually is more logical because of posturing/ego etc.

Jake: This is a very good approach, I’ll say also for businesses where you have a large number of prospects, I believe the exact same approach will work, if you are going to target_ say if you’re looking at you know your pool of customers is one hundred or two hundred people, this approach will still work but you may want to kind of scale this back or be a little bit more customized and in each of your messages. So that’s kind of what I would recommend, kind of looking at is if you are targeting a smaller pool of customers or you have a very finite number of prospects, you may want to kind of take this and go less templated where you’re not doing a hundred per day but maybe you’re doing twenty a day and you just kind of put a little bit more time into customizing each of those, but literally this still the same full approach is very effective of using the drip sequence but just kind of being a little bit more custom.

Linkedin sales navigator – boolean searches

Great, so before I dive into this next tactic on traffic, I want to just give you guys a brief overview of sales navigator and just show you guys some cool tricks here again, this will just kind of make things a bit more actionable for you guys but for anyone who’s not familiar with sales navigator again, you’re going to need to upgrade to this for any of these tactics but once I’m in here, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to go to advanced and I’m going to search for leads up here and I want to show you guys some of the cool tricks just that you may not be familiar with, with LinkedIn sales navigator which is going to help you put together really advanced search cues.

So for this example, what I’m going to do is I’m going to look and let’s say I am targeting New York City and I’ll target that as my location and I’m going to basically put together a search key focused on management consulting firms basically in the range of eleven to fifteen employees and I want to look at the partners and the founders of these, so the next thing I’ll do is I’ll come down here and I’m going to go down to the company headcount and you’ll see you can filter by all different sizes here with this company size and actually zoom in here, make it a little bigger and so I’m going to say, I’m going to target you know eleven to fifteen management and Industry. I’m going to go to management consulting, and so I can basically kind of get a bit narrower here.

So now we’ve got in New York City 6.8 thousand people that work at management consulting firms in that eleven to fifteen size, now let’s say that I want to get more specific and I want to go after just the founders, so this is a really cool thing is that I could just type founder here but one of the really cool things you can do with LinkedIn, is you can do what’s called a Boolean Search and so what I can do here, is I can do founder and quotes and you’ll see I have a parentheses and then in all caps, I can say or principal or CEO or Chief Executive Officer and I can basically kind of create this and so I put in a parenthesis there at the end.

What that does is that’s going to kind of basically searching for all of those different titles and so it’s a really interesting way where you can kind of build these and another cool thing you can do is let’s say we want NOT, you can put a not here and say I don’t want their assistant or anyone with a sales title.

So you can use this not keywords here, another one you can do is AND which is also often very useful if I were to say I want to target a you know vice-president titles and marketing, anything like that, so these Boolean searches, you can do some googling around for some more kind of detailed training on this, but they’re super powerful in terms of just giving you the exact types of prospects.

You’ll see now I’m down to one point one thousand prospects and we’re basically looking at the founders and the CEOs of these management consulting firms of this eleven to fifty person size in New York City. Again you can then target second and third just to make sure that we don’t target anyone that we actually know.

So again, that’s just kind of some tips other cool thing we could do, we could go up here and we could put a Boolean here and let’s say we want to go after health care or sustainability and we target those two specific ones, we’re now looking at these are people that have health care or sustainability somewhere in their profile.

I have to be a little cautious with these because this could pull, if they used to work at a health care company, it’s pulling any keyword anywhere from their profile, but you see it does can get us a little bit more interesting or you know a bit lower, so if you look at a you know maybe like a chain or current trend like Blockchain you know you can get really targeted and now we have these you know twenty people who are interested in Blockchain which is this news emerging trend that our management consulting in New York City, so very cool stuff you can do with that, you can get really focused with this.

I love doing things if you have a trend like this or I’ve done this with like design thinking or other kind of cryptocurrency or other trends, what you can do in that first message then is say hey, I saw you noticed you were also interested in Blockchain thought I’d reach out to connect. Those convert really high just because it feels even more personalized because the person looks and noticed that they had you know some sort of interest in this technology in their profile.

So again, those are a few quick tips, let me know if anyone has any other questions and I’m happy to dive into some sales navigator tricks more but super powerful tool that’s just kind of a quick overview, there’s a lot more you can do and even more filters but that’s just kind of a quick overview on some of the kind of 80s, 20s of how to use sales navigator really effectively.

Traffic

Alright, I’m going to dive back in now and I’m going to show you our next tactic here which is all about how to ramp up traffic, so for actually both the tactics that sales navigator stuff I showed you is really powerful, but in this tactic I’m going to show you specifically how to ramp up traffic.

So basically what we use at Lead Cookie, we use this tool called Dux-Soup and this is a tool where basically there’s a lot of ways you can use it and you have to be careful. But there is because again if you flag LinkedIn’s limits or you aren’t using this tool and then you just ramp it up really quickly overnight, you could kind of tweak LinkedIn or kind of freak them out.

So what you want to do is again ramp this up slowly but what we use this tool for is basically to ramp up traffic to your profile, so basically we’ll set this to go visit five hundred profiles of your target customers each day and so what this looks like is we build a search queue here in LinkedIn sales navigator and then you have Dux-Soup installed as a google chrome plugin and what it’ll do, is it’ll go and it’ll just visit five hundred profiles each day.

So we don’t use the tools, you can have it send connection requests, you can have it like things or endorse and we don’t use any of those features because I don’t think that those are ideal but what we do it for is just this profile visits, where it’s going to go and just visit their profiles.

So you might ask okay, why would I want to just go visit five hundred profiles per day and pretty simply what happens is if you do this then the basically are going to visit 2500 profiles each week and what happens is you start to show up in this who’s viewed your profile section on LinkedIn and so you’ve been on LinkedIn you’ve probably seen these notifications and gotten these before where you know says so-and-so viewed your profile.

When you go click this, what happens is it pulls up this little screen here where you can basically see these people’s names and right here you’re going to notice basically that they have their tagline here and this is again isn’t a perfect example of a tagline that doesn’t tell me anything, he’s a senior center Enterprise sales executive at signal but I don’t know what signal is.

So again, making these benefit oriented taglines something that’s going to hook you, make you interested as a result some people will see this, they click through your profile and they add you as a connection and typically what we see if we’re running that and we’re doing those five hundred profile visits each day you’re going to see somewhere between five to thirty inbound connection requests per week.

So it’s really intriguing and basically you’re having these people that are now reaching out to you and adding you as a connection and basically what we’ll do is when we see those connections come through, we’ll say hey, thanks for reaching out to connect, I was browsing your website and noticed you know X Y and D, so we’ll try to personalize it a little bit and actually do some research if they look like a good lead and then I’d ask you know can I ask why you added me as a connection on LinkedIn and so it’s an interesting way to frame this because they’ve added you now, so you’re kind of they’ve taken this first action now I’m just asking you know why have you added me on LinkedIn.

Basically it’s turning that conversation that way and so it’s an interesting one and what we typically find is you don’t get as many leads through this Dux-Soup or the traffic tactics but a lot of times your higher-quality leads will come here because someone has basically kind of come almost as an inbound lead where your niche and your value proposition has resonated with them enough to add you as a connection.

So again, super powerful tactic if doing the connection requests and the drip messages is too overwhelming for you, this tactic is something you can run literally just a few minutes a day just setting this up Auto turning on Dux-Soup and just having it run while you’re not there, is a super powerful way to just get leads and this was actually the first tactic I ever did with LinkedIn outreach and so it was super powerful and where I first started seeing leads convert and then eventually I added the connection requests and saw that that added even more firepower to it.

So that’s kind of the overall, just the two kind of core tactics, we have the profile optimization, we have the lead generation by sending those outbound connection requests and drip messages and then we have the traffic tactics that I just taught you.

Question: Why do you recommend waiting for a week between asking a question and then sending a useful article, a week seems like a long time if you get an answer to your question, wouldn’t you want to send the article sooner?

Jake: Yes, so I should clarify on that, that we wait a week if they don’t respond if someone engages, so yeah, that’s one thing I should clarify so those drip messages, we send those until someone engages or responds. So we send the first message, we send the second one, if they don’t respond and we try to provoke with a question, if they don’t answer the question then we send the article, if they don’t respond to the article then we send the meeting ask but if someone responds and engages with you at any point in that process then we’re basically going to stop that drip sequence and just kind of handle an actual natural conversation and we’ll talk a bit about that in the nurturing section coming up but that’s kind of the drip messages go until someone actually engages.

Question: How do you track which stage each client is in? Can you automate the drip? Do you use any kind of CRM feature in LinkedIn or how do you efficiently connect those leads or prospects into Freshsales to track who and when to follow up with which message?

Jake: Yes, so I’ll show you just the process that we use, so we use AirTable, actually I use different serums and everything from my actual primary sales process but what we do is we use this air table which is a good way to just manage this process. So if I go to status view here, you’ll see basically we have_ this one actually got a little muddy I guess because this was mine and we’ve done some experimenting but basically we kind of put all this leads and everything into air table and we have these different statuses of connection sent and then we have an accept it and thank you sent.

We have drip one sent and then meeting asks and so basically air table is the tool that we used kind of manage or organize the outreach campaigns but it’s not a great overall CRM, it doesn’t have reminders or anything like that but it’s good to manage the outreach campaign. But definitely it’s not an ideal for a long-term CRM solution but it’s good for just kind of keeping your campaign organized and the different outreach messages you sent.

Question: Do you automate the drip feed?

Jake: So we do not, we actually do this all by hand, there are some ways that people do this with Dux-Soup or LinkedIn helper or some of those tools out there. We’ve experimented with that but ultimately for our company we don’t want to be reliant on those as some of those tools shut down or they break whenever LinkedIn user interface changes.

So for us, we literally actually do this all by hand, we have assistants that help us out with it and so that’s kind of one of the values of our service and how I see most successful people doing this is that they basically either have an assistant or some process, they’re the software tools can get a little muddy, you can you can do it for the first and the second message but to actually do a drip sequence gets a little challenging with some of those tools.

Question: Can you use not in the company feed?

Jake: Yes, so that’s actually a very common one so let’s say you know want to say I don’t want to_ because the common thing here is you don’t want to accidentally target your current customers or current prospects, so often our customers will give us you know a list of company names so maybe we don’t want Acme or you know I don’t know whatever company name so you can basically kind of do that but yeah, the Booleans work in the company field, they also work in the title field and the keywords field as well, so you can definitely do that here as well, so you can actually use Booleans in this field.

Question: As a marketer, I don’t have LinkedIn sales navigator but I use LinkedIn extensively and we just tried out the Boolean search on LinkedIn and it seems to work. So is there any limitation except for maybe the number of categories are not so many but apart from that what’s like the other things which are available on_ which are probably_ which will be missing out on LinkedIn?

Jake: Yeah, so those there is actually no limitation to the length well, I guess there’s some limitation if you get massive but we have some Boolean that are literally would fill up you know they fill up an entire you know a word document page, so we’ve had some of those because one of the one other interesting thing that we’ve done a lot is let’s just say you know let’s take off.

Let’s just go to United States and let’s kind of just switch this up and let’s say we want to go_ this is kind of useful if you’re targeting big companies but let’s say we want to go target you know design and so the other interesting things, I can do kind of parenthesis so let’s say I want to do like VP or director or producer and so you can kind of do these parentheses and kind of do it that way, so it’s really just kind of like algebra.

So I could kind of do all these or you know or senior so say I’m looking at like kind of senior people in design or my targets and let’s take off the New York City and I want to take off the Block Chain and let’s say I wanted to go after these big companies, so I could say okay, I want to go after Google or Microsoft or Apple or Nike and you can do that and what you’ll see here is now we’re looking at you know the VP of Nike design and you’re filtering by these companies and so we’ve had a handful of customers that they may have you know fifty to a hundred target you know fortune five hundred accounts but there could be you know hundreds of buyers at those and so what we’ll do is we’ll filter by those targets and then add all those company names to the queue here and you can get really targeted here and just basically happen oh it’s a kind of like account based marketing in a sense but you can get really specific and go after a lot of those different buyers that those big companies.

Question: Is there a way to personalize and automate first connection request?

Jake: Yes, the that is something you can do through Dux-Soup, so you can set Dux-Soup to go send you know fifty or hundred connection requests per day and it’ll automatically mail merge in the first name again, just something to be careful with on those and sometimes you know they’ve Dux-Soup, one of the reasons I think works better than a lot of those, they have a scheduler because if you do it all in kind of a robotic fashion they may think you’re a bot or they’ll log you out at times and say hey, just making sure you’re real human here.

That’s going to no another one of the reasons we do it by hand but you can’t do that with Dux-Soup and some of the other tools out there which can help kind of with those connection requests. So just always be careful with those is some of them are kind of very much breaking the Terms and Service and LinkedIn have some issues with them but currently Dux-Soup we found has been pretty safe at the moment.

Question: Do you think InMail is a bad medium for cold messaging?

Jake: In mail, it’s interesting, I used to like it more when you got your credits back before they_ if someone didn’t respond but nowadays, it’s really limited, I think you only get a handful a month and so I use in mail in situations, it’s not something you can do at scale anymore, it’s not affordable to and so in mail is really effective what I find is if you’ve got a really specific target customer and you need to get a message in front of them and you’re struggling to get through, so cold email or phone, it’s another medium there.  

But it’s the way I look at it is almost like when you when you get an In Mail, it’s just kind of like Oh someone’s trying to sell me, it’s like a flag of its sales pitch because someone has used one of their very limited in mail credits to get a message to you, so not a bad thing but I just think it’s a different use case and you definitely can’t do it at volume. so I reserve those kinds of specific situations if I get a lead that I just can’t contact otherwise.

Say you want to eliminate people like other energy companies? so one thing you can do like we often do this, if we have a consulting firm and they’re going after an industry you know for this case we know we might say like not design agency or consulting or something like that, so that’s common thing, this actually doesn’t make sense in this context of having this but you can often do those with keywords and try to put not around you know say your_ I don’t know, a energy provider or energy consultancy you know just try to think of what are the exact ways that your competitors describe themselves and you can put that as a not keyword to try to eliminate them.

Question: What’s an assured number of connection requests you can expect from this method?

Jake: All of this varies based on value proposition and by industry you know on my profile, I’m probably getting close to that thirty amount, I personally managed another one for someone who’s targeting a lot higher level CIOs and kind of private equity firms and on that one we’re probably getting five to eight, so it’s you know obviously a slightly more challenging niche.

So it’s you know rough you know it could definitely vary by industry but that’s why I’d say even unlike the more challenging issues you typically see about five inbound connection requests per week, if you’re running that you know five hundred a day for five days a week.

Question: Can Dux-Soup specified on target certain areas like the Netherlands are specific industries, I don’t want super random leads if I decide to use Dux-Soup?

Jake: Yeah, so with Dux-Soup, the way that this works is you actually set up your search queue, so say I wanted to go after the Netherlands. I would add that in here as my search queue and obviously that again is not making sense because we’re targeting those big companies that don’t have a location there but basically you would set up your search queue here and then you run Dux-Soup on the search queue you create.

So you set this whole thing up, we have all these leads here and then we say okay Dux-Soup go and it would go after this search queue, so basically, you create the search cues that Dux-Soup is going to go visit. So that does take a little time each day but again even a few minutes each day you can kind of set that up and let Dux-Soup go do its thing.

The results

We’ve got a few more minutes left I will power through that and then we’ll be finished up here so great, so typically what I want to get into now here is just a little bit on the results of the service here and just kind of our just a result of running these tactics if you were to go kind of full speed, what we’d see for most people do and I say well in East agencies here but I should have kind of changed this because this really again can work well for any type of business but we see most people end up converting roughly four to twenty leads per month into phone calls.

So you know on average that’s if you’re doing and you follow these nurturing tactics and you have a good value proposition, most people are booking at least four calls a month, we’ve had some people with really good value propositions booked up you know in the range of almost twenty calls in a month.

That’s kind of roughly just the kind of expectations or what they have but again you’ve got to have some decent sales abilities, we’ve seen some people that just even when we generate the leads for them, they kind of botch it on the back end of the conversations and they don’t follow the advice I’m about to give you.

How to nurture leads

I’m going to go into how to nurture leads, which is just super important here because we have so many customers who have just_ they’ve blown it and we’ve had to start getting really good at training our customers on how to nurture these leads and how to respond because it is definitely the LinkedIn is a different platform than a lot of other ways you get leads.

Don’t be salesy

So the most important thing I can share with you is just don’t be salesy on LinkedIn, do not pitch in your initial messages when someone responds to you, don’t then immediately go and pitch or send a link, what you want to do is just kind of converse back and forth actually, I try to not send links on LinkedIn as long as possible into the conversation because LinkedIn does the thing where it extrapolates it and creates this whole thumbnail and it just kind of looks overwhelming.

So one of the biggest things is just try to have a conversation with the person, go back and forth and ask questions but just do not pitch from the get-go you know if someone asks you know tell me more about what you do, you can share that but then you want to ask them a question and so the biggest thing can just_ don’t be salesy, wait as long as you can to go for that meeting ask or that pitch.

Start conversations (Don’t try to close the deal on LinkedIn)

The other thing which goes right on top of that is to just start conversations, I LinkedIn, it’s a chat platform you’ll literally see the little green dots sometimes on people and they may be live on LinkedIn right there and just chatting back and forth with you and you can even see when they’re sitting there typing.

So you want to have conversations with people, you don’t want to write a whole giant essay to them, you want to just kind of mimic their conversations, you want to marry their style and this you know don’t try to close the deal on LinkedIn.

The whole goal of this is to have a conversation with someone, qualify them and kind of evaluate that they’re a good fit and then you want to move this to email or a phone call to really get that to the next stage of the sale.

Research before you respond and personalize

The other thing is just to research before you respond and take some time to personalize your messages, it’s easy especially when you start getting_ if you get a lot of volume of this to just pop open a message and just you know sit fire off the same exact response to each person but that’s again, going to kill your conversion and if you said to take some time to personalize and research the company, you’re going to see a lot better results.

So here’s an example of this, you know this guy says you know Jake went through and troll your site and I’m generally interested in the process, what all looks like at the end of the day. So I said, “Hey Jared, that’s great to hear, I’m equally intrigued by super top secret as well.”

I actually looked at his profile and even looked at his website. So I say hey, I love the work you guys did for Far Cry. I played the hell out of that game years ago. So it’s a video game that they did a bunch of design work for, so hey let’s set up the time to talk more, you can grab a time on my schedule here.

So that converted because again it shows I’m real, I’m a person, I took some time to actually respond and make this real and conversational. So take some time to research your prospects before you respond, to look at their LinkedIn profiles, look at their company websites and just see what you can find to try to personalize that message on.

Ask questions to quality and position yourself

The other thing is to just ask questions and to qualify and position yourself, you’re going to get a lot of responses on here and some of those people might not be qualified or they might not be a right fit, so using questions again, it’s going to create conversation, it’s going to kind of help give you information as well.

So here’s an example of a guy who says cool let me know more about what you do, he sent a smiley face, so I said sure thing Paul, I focused on helping agencies and consulting companies win more clients to make sure of consulting and outreach services, so again this with my offering before we lead cookie and I say your client list for brand tactic looks quite impressive.

I’m curious, how do you get most your clients so you know look at his website you know he had a bunch of great clients on there, I mentioned that. Then I asked you know how do you get most your clients? That question for me is going to give me a lot of information because if he you know says all these lead gen channels he has going, that’s going to tell me one thing versus if he says oh word-of-mouth and referrals, that kind of tells me a different way to kind of approach this conversation or where he’s at in his level of maturity of marketing his own business. So again just asking questions is going to help you qualify, it’s going to help you get information and keep that conversation going.

Move conversations to email or phone

The other thing is you want to eventually just move those conversations to email or phone, using a widget like calendly super powerful, you can ask people for email, you can actually get someone’s LinkedIn email off of LinkedIn once you’re connected to them on a first degree connection, although sometimes it gives you their personal email which can be a little weird.

So I typically like to ask for their email or basically use the booking widget to try to convert that over to a phone call, but booking which is I typically find are the best way to convert calls off LinkedIn.

So that is kind of the core of it you know again that’s you know main things want to cover, so I know there’s a lot more questions but if anyone has any questions, you can feel free to reach out to me, happy to answer that stuff or we’ve got a lot more resources on our website as well but I’m happy to dive into any more questions you guys have.

Question: You only get one chance to make a first impression, if you reach out to connect and they don’t respond, is there a way to try to connect again over time or do you get only one chance?

Jake: Yeah, so basically you’ll only have one ability to send that kind of connection request initially but let me go and find this specifically, you can withdraw connection requests over time. So if someone doesn’t respond to it while you still have an outstanding connection request, you can’t send another one but if you come here and you go to My Network, you go to manage all up here and you go to Sent, what I can do is you can actually withdraw a connection request here and if you once you have one withdrawn, you can actually then send a new one to that person.

So one thing we do commonly because actually, if this number gets too high, you actually have to kind of bring that number back down, so basically what we’ll do is we often withdraw ones that have been sitting there for about two months and haven’t been accepted and so in that case you could withdraw that and then that person another connection request or try again after the fact.

Question: If I have a LinkedIn Premium account, should I cancel it and move to Sales Navigator?

Jake: Yeah, it’s horribly confusing, they will literally let you buy premium and sales navigator at the same time which makes no sense, so you would want to cancel premium and move over to sales navigator. So they’ve been working on it, it’s kind of they’ve reorganized their product tiers over the past year, but yeah, you would definitely want to move to sales navigator and cancel premium before going forward with these.

Question: How much does LinkedIn sales navigator cost for a month?

Jake: I believe it is $79 per month, so it’s decently investment you get a good discount if you pay annually, we believe it’s $79 per month, last I looked so.

Question: How do we get Dux-Soup?

Jake: Yeah, so Dux-Soup is just dux-soup.com and this is the website here so you can go here and it’ll take you through the whole process of signing up and everything, it’s basically a Chrome extension and then you have to kind of sign up there and link it to your Google Chrome account. So it’s kind of again a little grey ahead of time so be careful with it but again a super powerful tool and we haven’t had any issues using it so far.

Question: What’s the difference between Premium and Sales Navigator?

Jake: Basically, it is just basically premium just gives you kind of_ so it’s literally a whole different interface, so you’ll see I’m in LinkedIn right now and if I go to the search, I can kind of you know search for people or anything up here and I have this you know these filters here but what you only have is like first name, last name, title company, school, kind of location, current companies and so it’s a lot less stuff.

I mean the other thing, really the important reason so like you have less filters, that’s one, but the most important reason is the little limits are totally different and so you know if I tried to send a hundred connection requests per day with premium, my account would get flagged and shut down but they let you do that with sales navigator, I guess because you pay them a lot more money.

So literally again, you can just see like this is the interface and the filters you get with premium, first sales navigator, you have all these much more detailed filters, you can search by company headcount, you can do like years and current position, another actually, one other cool trick that I will show you all before we go.

Let’s see if we just type in CMO as a title, one other thing I didn’t show you guys right up here at the top, you have this one of saying; these are twelve hundred CMO’s that have changed jobs in the past days, so they’ve recently been hired into the CMO role, so that’s another cool filter, you can do this on any search result but you can basically look at people mentioned in the news, people have posted on LinkedIn and the biggest one that I think’s most useful is just finding people that have just recently been hired into a position. So it’s another just a little useful nugget or tip for you guys there.

Question: How do you pitch your business or your company for thirty to forty-five seconds, in particular, how do you charge for your services?

Jake: Yeah, so I’ll just give the quick overview and basically lead cookie, we basically are done-for-you, LinkedIn prospecting service, so everything I taught you guys today basically we do all of that for you and we hand it off to you at the point where someone engages and actually starts a conversation.

So basically that’s kind of the high-level overview of what we do, we have a thirty day money-back guarantee with our service as well here and then the pricing for it is very simple, it’s fifteen hundred dollars a month with a three month minimum commitment and then we have a five hundred dollar setup fee basically just for the initial scripting and everything but if you guys actually reach out to me.

I will discount that down to two hundred and fifty dollar setup fee for you guys if you reach out and sign up within the next week here but that’s kind of just the quick overview basically we do all this for you so that you’re only spending time actually nurturing and responding to the leads.

Question: How many connection requests can you send per day which is Navigator, if you have a high limit?

Jake: I see up to a hundred connection requests per day, it is kind of the limit there, so you don’t want to go higher than a hundred, I think the actual limits a hundred and fifty but if you do that every day, you’re going to kind of get yourself flagged so up to a hundred is where we play safely, occasionally we have seen some customers getting into a spot where they basically are_ it’ll start asking for emails and typically what happens is that it happened somewhere around the having three to four thousand outbound connection requests sent.

So it’ll start saying oh we need to email before you add this person, if that ever happens or you get that, what you want to do is come here and to the my network, go to manage your invitations and basically just withdraw your oldest you know five hundred or one thousand invitations and that typically fixes that problem within twenty-four hours, so up to a hundred a day and then if your connection to get over three thousand, you might run into some of those issues and need to withdraw some of the old ones.

Question: I’m a head of sales, are you going to be using my LinkedIn account to be doing this?

Jake: Yeah, so what we typically find is when working with companies, it’ll sometimes come from the head of sales, sometimes the owners want to do it to have it in their profile, it’s really all just kind of company culture and who they find the most fitting again, well the owners a lot of times we actually see the highest conversion rate with them there but if you’re at a bigger company and you’re a head of sales, you can do this and often like handle leads off to individual team members using a calendly booking widget with a round robin. So there’s a lot of different ways we set it up but we often just kind of talk and just figure out what’s the best set up for your current situation.

Nivas: Cool, I think that’s about it Jake with respect to questions. Thank you so much Jake and as promised all of you will be getting a recording of the webinar and if you have any questions about Freshsales, feel free to reach out to me at support@freshsales.io thank you so much Jake, it was really interesting for us to have you over to talk about LinkedIn sales navigator Dux-Soup and other tools. So hopefully thank you so much and hope you had liked addressing questions coming your way.

Jake: Yeah, thank you for having me on here I had a great time and great questions, everybody so feel free to reach out to me if you hupave any other questions or need any help.

Nivas: Sure, thank you, everyone, have a great day and feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect as well, so thank you so much for being here and do attend all our upcoming webinars, you can check them out on the Freshsales webinar page and we have a series of interesting upcoming webinars. Thank you so much, everyone, thank you, Jake.

This webinar was brought to you by Freshsales. Freshsales is a sales CRM built to help you stop juggling multiple tools. It’s ideal for small businesses and refreshing for enterprises.