Top 6 Strategies for Selling with LinkedIn

Ultimately and logically, the first metric you should follow from your LinkedIn marketing / prospecting efforts is sales.

By looking at how much revenue you generate from each marketing channel, you have a much more objective way to identify your most effective tactic. The same goes for LinkedIn.

You can have the best profile on LinkedIn , high engagement, your posts going viral every time you write an article…

But if they’re not contributing to your bottom line, what’s the point?

There are several ways to generate leads from LinkedIn. For example, focusing on LinkedIn ads , content creation, personal branding , prospecting , and growth hacks .

In this guide, we will focus on the latter. After seeing the basics of prospecting on LinkedIn , I’m going to show you 6 strategies for selling LinkedIn starting this week . Here they are :

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile.
2. Engage your right target audience.
3. Join and get involved in LinkedIn groups
4. Content retargeting / Post engagement
5. Reach and engage your prospects
6. Use LinkedIn Automation , Multi-Channel to Boost Your Sales

By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to turn LinkedIn into a selling machine.

Are you ready to get started?

Why sell on LinkedIn?

With more than 750 million members in more than 200 countries, LinkedIn is an El Dorado for finding clients.

Indeed, according to a study by Neil Patel , more than 80% of B2B prospects come from LinkedIn. In other words, not using the network in your sales strategy is like shooting yourself in the foot.

Compared to other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, Linkedin would be 277% more interesting to generate leads.

In a few words, LinkedIn is the ideal network for:

• Develop your notoriety

• Valuing your expertise

• Get in touch with potential customers

• Communicate about your company and its news, your products and your services

Without further ado, let’s get to the heart of the matter with the first step to selling well on LinkedIn.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Before you even close a sale or add your leads to your LinkedIn connections, the first thing to do is optimize your LinkedIn profile .

Why is it important to optimize your profile to sell on LinkedIn?

Imagine getting a LinkedIn connection from someone you don’t know.

The first thing you would do would be click on their profile and try to figure out who they are and why they are adding you, right?

What if their LinkedIn title was so appealing that you had to click on their profile, found their summary to cover all of your sensitive points and issues, and their professional experience dispels any doubts you had – well, their product stands out. would sell on its own at this point!

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Imagine … someone clicks on your profile, and you showcase your brand so well they’re ready to book a call immediately.

On LinkedIn, the first impression is everything. So here’s how to turn your profile into your own personal home page.

Let’s start at the top.

LinkedIn Banner (Background Image)

The majority of people put a royalty-free and impersonal image. I say it’s boring and you can do better .

You don’t have to be a top-notch graphic designer either. You just need to display your logo , your proposal for value and your solution ( ideally the three ).

The ideal size for a LinkedIn background banner is approximately 1600 × 400 pixels in resolution – make sure nothing is cut off when previewing your image.

If you are not a designer, you can get a decent banner on Fiverr for only 5 €. You really don’t need anything fancy. The simple fact of having a personalized banner already puts you above the rest!

LinkedIn profile picture

Keep it simple and elegant.

Yes, people are going to use your profile picture to decide if they can trust you. There is nothing you can do about it.

So choose a profile photo that best represents your industry. Make sure it is high quality , well lit and of course, professional .

What is rule number one in selling?

That’s right, build trust.

Try to be believable and give the impression that you know what you are doing (because you do!).

Profile Title

So subtle and yet so important.

This is arguably one of the most important parts of a LinkedIn profile if you want to make a good impression and get people to click on your profile.

If you want a higher conversion rate and more people accept your requests, you should describe the outcome of your services.

This is about converting your offers in a certain results (solution).

Here’s a classic formula you can use if we’re talking about sales:

Who + Effect + How.

Which – Your target audience.

Effect – The result, which is what people get by working with you.

How? ‘Or’ What – How you get these results.

Profile Title Example

“Up to 10X more prospects in social selling 🚀 | Success guaranteed with the system: The LinkedIn Growth Stack – Methods, strategies and models to generate 20 clients with multichannel ”.

Which – people interested in raising awareness on LinkedIn and social selling (growth-hackers / marketers).

Effect – 10x more leads in social sales.

How? ‘Or’ What – “The LinkedIn Growth Stack” (encourages people to ask for the guide / system).

To sum up: this tagline will get people to click on the profile, the banner will give them an idea of what to expect at a glance, then the profile and abstract build trust.

Looking for more information on how to polish your resume and other sections of LinkedIn to build trust and make sales?

2. Engage the right target audience before selling

Once your profile is ready to go, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right audience .

Because, after all, you can have the most optimized LinkedIn profile in the world, it won’t matter if you’re trying to sell to the wrong target audience.

In other words, having the right target audience can make or break your LinkedIn social selling campaigns .

At this point you should have a good idea of who your KPI (Ideal Customer Profile) is. Ideally, you should also know things like:

• Which influencers and content creators they follow
• What are the types of posts with which they commit the most
• What are their “pain” points and how you can solve them

You should also be aware of the difference between 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree LinkedIn connections. What is as a reminder:

• 1st degree connection – People with whom you are already connected.
• 2nd degree connection – People who are connected with your 1st degree connections. You have mutual connections and you will want second degree connections in most cases.
• 3rd degree connection – People who are connected to your 2nd degree connections.

Once you have a few keywords associated with this information, you can search LinkedIn and use their filters to get the most out of your targeting.

Let’s say we want to target marketing specialists .

We would make a filter like the following:

• Connections – 2nd degree and 3 ^e degree.
• Location – Our city (to begin with).
• Sectors – Marketing and advertising.
• Profile language – French (or your local language if you are looking to do business locally and maybe even meet them).
• Services – Growth Marketing, Marketing, Digital Marketing.

Let’s apply this filter, and here’s what we get:

5,100 results (prospects) to start with, not bad!

It is important to note that we do not recommend NOT to connect and go directly to sales mode.

On LinkedIn, people hate that we sell to them immediately. Believe me, they get a ton of connection requests every day.

Instead, we would approach them with a more personalized message.

Sample message for a prospect

“Hello {first name},

I saw that you are based in the same city as us and that you also work in online marketing and growth.

It seems that we have these promising subjects in common.

I write a lot of content on LinkedIn marketing and growth.

I would love to get in touch with you.

Pierre “

OR, you could take a totally different approach here and:

• Comment on their content , then send a connection request so you can track them and stay up to date.
• Write articles they might enjoy and let them know the value that they would get by connecting with you.
• Mention how and where you found their profile (e.g. on Twitter, from their article or podcast that went viral recently, etc.)

advice : personalize your request on LinkedIn and mention something specific. In most cases, they will be happy to connect.

Always keep this in mind when working on social selling or when simply connecting with your prospects:

Why should they care about you?

What makes you special that they want to connect?

Think about the value you can deliver. Start there.

Remark : LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another very underrated way to find your sales leads on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is specially designed to help those looking for advanced prospecting and sales functions. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be tricky for some users due to the complexity of the tool if you’re looking to use it all. For this reason, we have prepared a guide on the growth hack of LinkedIn Sales Navigator to see if it’s worth it and when you should invest in the price of $ 65 per month, which is the cost of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

But what if you could search somewhere for your prospects instead? A place where they hang out naturally, where they post content for the whole world to see, and where they go out to meet and connect with people?

3. Content retargeting / Post engagement

Want to quickly find a long list of your prospects on LinkedIn, based on common interests?

It’s simple ! Start by reviewing the posts viral with a high engagement rate (comments / likes).

As an example, we already ran a content retargeting campaign on LinkedIn targeting people who engaged with posts:

Based on the post, we know that the people who engaged with the post are marketers , from vendors and “ growth hackers “ (our target audience).

And now we have something to start the conversation just with the connection request.

Something like :

“Hello {first name},

I saw that you also liked the LeadGenius post and I guess we have common interests in growth, social selling and automation!

Looking forward to sharing my network with you,

Pierre “

Now you could go through the comments section and reuse this template one by one. It would take a lot of time manually respond to 364 comments, but if the leads are relevant, it’s worth it for your business, right?

Well, you MAY do that. Or, you can just grab the post and contact automatically everyone who attended.

So you get the best of both worlds: hot leads and one time saving to contact them manually.

And yes that’s exactly what we did and we got a acceptance rate of over 70% (we will be doing an article on the subject soon so stay tuned 😉).

You can use automation on LinkedIn to target your ideal audience, based on what they like.

Another very underrated way to find your sales leads on LinkedIn is through LinkedIn groups .

Here’s what you need to know:

4. Join and get involved in LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn groups have a bad reputation.

People post a lot of over-selling content there and don’t take the time to engage in the community.

Often times they link to their article or job posting and disappear.

But guess what?

This gives you a great opportunity to stand out and establish yourself as a expert within the group.

Obviously, it will take longer, because you will have to actually create some content. original and of value .

LinkedIn groups allow you to reach a targeted audience of industry professionals and build authentic relationships with them.

It is NOT just a place for businesses to serve ads. The sooner you start leveraging these groups, the more you’ll be rewarded in hot leads and new sales on LinkedIn.

If you want to search for a LinkedIn group by name or keyword:

Select Groups in the drop-down list

1. Enter your keywords .

If you need to narrow your searches, you can do so using the filters on the left side of the search results page.

For example, for the social selling :

Remark : This is not always the case, but sometimes with a lot of people in a group, some lower quality content may appear. And it can be difficult for you to make your voice heard in the group. So you need to aim for a mix of high quality content and an active community around your niche.

Sometimes just having your LinkedIn groups and interests listed at the end of your profile is a good social signal to your prospects about what interests you.

And that brings us to the next point: the community .

In LinkedIn groups, you will usually find reference experts and influencers.

So, once you’ve joined a group, you should start:

• Create and publish content.
• Connect with relevant people.
• Engage prospects and potential sales leads on LinkedIn.

2. Create content

This part is pretty straightforward.

Just browse the group, see the questions people have, what type of content they resonate with the most, and create content based on their reals. pain points .

Remember that some LinkedIn groups do not allow the promotional content .

It just means that you can’t post a link to your last blog post and run away.

Take the time to list the main ones points and the knowledge gained in your article, share them, and be sure to answer any questions in the comments.

Since this is not a promotion and you are only bringing value , most groups will allow it.

And if someone asks where they can read more, you can post a link to your blog only AFTER . Remember, the goal is to deliver value first.

By positioning yourself as an expert, people will naturally want to connect with you.

And once they visit your profile to do so, which needs to be highly optimized at this point, they’ll see who you are and how you can help them.

Pro tip : If you want to encourage conversions, you can even include in your summary a link to your calendar where they can book an introductory call.

3. Connection with prospects

Once you’re in a LinkedIn group, you have access to a list of all the members that make it up.

From there, you can search for keywords and see all of the people in the group who are related to those keywords.

4. Engage Prospects

Once you have access to the above list and – for example extract the profiles in French – you can:

Send a LinkedIn connection request , saying something like:

“Hello {first name},

We are both in the same group (group name).

I really appreciated your ideas in your last article. In particular your point on (mention something specific in your article).

I would love to be part of your network so that I can follow your content outside of the group.

Thank you,

Pierre “

Or, here’s another very underrated tip for LinkedIn groups.

You can their send message directly .

Not many people know this, but if you’re in a common LinkedIn group with someone else, you can just send them a private message directly.

And this, even if it is a second or third degree connection .

5. Reach your prospects

We’ve finally come to one of the most important sales tactics: the prospecting .

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer because your approach to sales and prospecting on LinkedIn will be different from ours.

But here are some sales tactics that have worked for us that you can use to reach decision makers and make sure your lead generation isn’t wasted.

6. Find their email

Sometimes it is better to exit LinkedIn .

It can be as simple as going to your prospect’s LinkedIn profile, clicking on their contact information, and using their public email.

With this information, you can email your pitch directly to them and be sure they will read it.

Note : you’ll want to make sure you’re very personal and not sounding “seller” or “generic” as the overwhelming majority of email addresses you find at this point will be personal addresses … you want to avoid any issues related to compliance. We do NOT recommend that you use this technique for GDPR compliance reasons and to avoid complaints. To do this, we recommend that you search for the email address professional of your prospect (everything can be automated in unlimited LeadIn by adding a simple “email discovery & verification” step).

This method is also ideal for reach decision makers .

So if you already have your target audience in mind, you can:

1. Go on their LinkedIn company page .
2. filter by job title relevant (eg “CEO”, “Marketing Manager”).
3. Retrieve their email and explain why your offer is relevant.

Remark : As mentioned above, not everyone has their email address in their profile this way. In this case, you can use any tool to find e-mails associated with domain names (ex: LeadIn ). Check out our campaign launch strategy to see how we used LinkedIn automation and achieved a 44% opt-in rate and 29% follow-up response rate .

7. Go multi-channel

This sales tactic is another of our favorites. Concretely, you connect with your prospects on LinkedIn and you send them a personal e-mail .

It might sound a little complicated, but it can be incredibly powerful when it comes to prospecting. The last time we ran this campaign, we got a 72% acceptance rate on LinkedIn.

And one 95% open rate with our emailing campaign.

Here’s how this campaign works:

1. Create a perfect offer / lead magnet that you know your target market will appreciate (see ours below) and make a post on LinkedIn telling people to comment if they want to have access to it.
2. Support the message by sharing to your network to increase the number of views , the scope and the comments .
3. Start a campaign on LeadIn to get in touch with all those who have commented .

Does this sound complicated to you?

In fact, it’s easier than you might think.

You just need to perfect your offering and find original message templates that suit you.

8. Use personalized prospecting messages

To further improve your open rate, you should personalize your email prospecting messages, as people will be more likely to open them if they see that you’ve spent time and effort on their message.

However, sometimes it is difficult to personalize more than a few inMail messages. This is why we have developed a unique integration on the market.

Using our integration, you can personalize all of your messages with dynamic images and GIFs, making your LinkedIn prospecting messages as personalized as possible, which should improve your overall lead generation and sales efforts on LinkedIn. Click here to see the examples .

6. Use Automation On and Off LinkedIn to Drive Your Sales

Finally, we’ve saved the best for last.

So far, most of the LinkedIn lead generation and sales tactics we’ve featured have been somewhat time consuming .

You need to browse your prospects’ profiles, find their information, use personalization to tailor your messages, etc.

And of course, while they appreciate the effort you put into writing your connection request, this approach isn’t exactly scalable.

Instead, you can use Automation Sequences on LinkedIn.

What does this mean exactly?

Well, basically using a tool like LeadIn , you can automatically engage a list of prospects in the tool and have it contact them automatically.

So you remember the LinkedIn group strategy we talked about above?

With LinkedIn automation, you can automatically send a connection request to the right people AND continue to personalize your messages.

You win as well MANY time to manually log in to everyone, when you could focus on more important tasks. And if you do it right, your social selling campaign on LinkedIn will run in the background and will generate leads automatically .

And the best?

Once you get the hang of it, there are plenty tips / “ hacks ” and of prospecting campaigns that you can use to get more appointments.

For example, we once ran a campaign to retrieve leads from Facebook groups (this also works with the LinkedIn groups mentioned above) and contact them automatically.

Due to the nature of the group, we already knew what they were interested in and what their pain points were, and we made sure to mention them in our messages.

And don’t worry, our process, unlike almost every other LinkedIn automation process, won’t get you banned from LinkedIn. If you’d like to learn more about how to reach people on LinkedIn without getting banned, check out our guide .

Anyway, here’s a brief overview of the process :

1. Find the Facebook groups where your audience is
2. Scrape people’s names in the group and find their LinkedIn profiles automatically using Phantombuster .
3. Create an engagement campaign in LeadIn that will contact them automatically and follow up on its own.

It may take up to 1 hour ( to the maximum , with the research and writing of your prospecting messages), and save you dozens of hours thereafter.

You can also copy our models. Check out the full guide to see how we generated over 40 demos per week on autopilot, with no ad spend .

In other words, these are 42 demos reserved:

• In Automatic pilot .
• Without ad spending .
• Full of hot leads .
• Synchronized with the CRM to keep track of everything.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We have tried many outreach and social selling tactics on LinkedIn. We have turned many of them into case studies which we share on our blog where we give our exact ideas, tactics and models.

If you want to understand other ideas and get better information about LeadIn, click here .

Ready to explode your sales on LinkedIn?

You succeeded !

Hope this guide has been helpful to you.

All of the sales tactics and strategies we cover are the ones we’ve tried ourselves. And we always make our ideas and case studies available – based on what worked .

Now, if you’re ready to start generating sales and leads on autopilot, here’s what I recommend:

Contact us through the chatbot on our site and let us know that you would like to start generating 10x more leads with the world’s most advanced multi-channel LinkedIn automation tool.

We’ll be more than happy to give you a 14-day free trial of LeadIn plus a few additional days – no questions asked.

So you can test the above growth hack and our approach strategies for yourself, without spending anything.

You may also be interested in these articles

• The best prospecting tools on LinkedIn
• Which social networks for its B2B acquisition strategy?