The battle for the customer is never-ending. If your company used to be inbound-only but could use some help, appending outbound sales tactics will infuse fresh ideas into your strategy.
With the slight difference in who initiates the sales process (when we talk outbound, a sales rep engages with a lead first not the prospect), outbound selling remains a powerful means to improve brand credibility, trust, and skyrocket your sales.
So if you’ve agreed that outbound sales should be good for your brand, this article highlights the basics of outbound marketing and outbound sales automation tactics on LinkedIn.
Without further ado, let’s dive right into it.
What is Outbound Marketing?
Outbound marketing (also known as interruption marketing) is a strategy where the company acts as a conversation initiator and uses agreed-to techniques to promote its products or services.
Such techniques include but are not limited to PR, advertising, promos, PPC, social media post boosting, etc.
What Outbound Activities Can You Perform on LinkedIn?
If you’ve opted for this social network for professionals, consider starting with the following means of sourcing and connecting with your prospective clients:
- Connecting. As basic as it may seem, connecting with the right person can literally make or break a sale. No matter whether you are doing B2B or B2C, a human being is behind your sale, and LinkedIn allows connecting with them.
- Sending messages and InMails. After you connect with a prospect, the platform enables you to take a step further, and craft expanded pitches with more details about your offerings. You can share them either within a private message (your connections only) or via InMails (a premium LinkedIn feature that allows messaging a limited number of users outside your connections — conversely, available within a LinkedIn automation software).
- Data scraping. With the right tool at hand, you can extract practically any details from the targeted LinkedIn profile. Think, emails. How many possibilities do having your leads’ names and email addresses create? It can be cold emailing and even calling as a starter.
- Joining LinkedIn groups and communities. With the trend of community-based selling picking up steam, groups on this social network are an effective means to connect with your leads in a most natural and unobtrusive way. Besides, communities help you manifest yourself as a professional.
LinkedIn Outbound Sales Shticks to Bookmark
Having tested dozens of outbound sales shticks, we’ve cherry-picked the following sure-fire ones you’ll certainly benefit from:
LinkedIn Automation with Linked Helper 2
Drip campaigns — sending a chain of messages that get triggered by how the receiver interacts with one of the writings in the sequence — remain an effective sales tactic.
According to the stats, over 40% of sales reps give up on a prospect after one follow-up message.
Why?
Outreach campaigns can be time-consuming and zap much of your efforts.
However, not with safe-to-use LinkedIn automation software.
Linked Helper 2 could serve as a good example. The non-cloud software allows imitating the actions of a human being and browses profiles that match your targeting goals. Next, the system will send a chain of outreach messages and InMails, analyze replies, and forward subsequent content depending on how the receiver interacts with one of your emails.
Thus, instead of having to track all the interactions manually, you get to focus on writing a more elaborate copy and being more creative with your outbound sales strategies.
Free Value First — Selling Next
An essential aspect of any outbound strategy is gaining your prospect’s trust and loyalty. It will increase the chances of transforming them into your steadfast customers.
How do you achieve that?
That’s when the creative part starts. You should already have or come up with one of the following options:
- A lucrative freebie
- A lead magnet
No matter how professional your potential clientage is, people like getting access to something they will enjoy and appreciate. It can be a free ebook, webinar, research, study, podcast, or lesson, i.e., whatever brings the receiver value and portrays you as a knowledgeable connection.
Only then you are ready to connect.
Tackling Above-Surface Personalization
It may sound trivial, but personalization has a direct influence on how your LinkedIn prospects will interact with your messages.
Addressing leads by name and/or the last name is only surface-level personalization. It’s not enough.
Any regular LinkedIn user can quickly detect a cheesy sales pitch from the first characters. So what else personalization can you include in your draft?
Think profile details. Think interest. Think pain points.
When your lead is not that cold (and even when freezing), it’s a must to study their profile pages, read the content they share, attend webinars they organize, etc.
These details should be sufficient to demonstrate your interest in the person and their professional background/pain points/interests/your variant.
When they consider your pitch unique, prospects are more likely to engage.
Summary
LinkedIn can be a treasure trove for your outbound sales activities.
The tactics that we share in this article will assist you in engaging with high-scoring sales leads on LinkedIn most efficiently.
Don’t be afraid to experiment, try new tools, and polish your outreach and follow-up messages to perfection.
Which tactic will you start with?
