LinkedIn prospection
If you are a freelancer, a B2B founder, or a salesperson : sending LinkedIn invitations and DMs is often the first stage of prospection
6/6/20264 min read
LinkedIn prospecting is one of the key components of B2B growth hacking, and it's generally the first thing that comes to mind when people think about sales prospecting.
After all, LinkedIn is theoretically the least intrusive platform for prospecting. As a professional network, you're supposed to be able to contact professionals who have accepted your connection request and added you to their network.
However, that doesn't mean people will always appreciate being contacted. Just look at all the public posts from people who proudly take on the role of the person being prospected.
Being approached by a salesperson can apparently give some people an unexplained ego boost, making them feel smarter than everyone else. They'll then publicly explain why a particular prospecting approach was wrong, what message would have made them reply, and so on.
I imagine it's a way for them to artificially boost their social status: "I'm the person being prospected, therefore I'm important."
What these people fail to understand is that everyone gets prospected on LinkedIn. It doesn't mean anything. And prospecting, especially on LinkedIn, isn't supposed to book meetings with everyone. It's primarily about reaching people who are actually interested. Generally, that's going to be a minority of your audience.
So if you're not interested, that's perfectly normal. It doesn't necessarily mean the prospecting was poorly executed.
See here for more information on how to prospect without being overly intrusive.
Even if you book just one meeting for every 150 messages sent, that's still a very interesting result! And that's perfectly fine for the people who aren't interested.
However, even generating one valuable meeting for every 150 messages requires some real skill. It's not easy at all.
In fact, sorry to break it to you, but one meeting for every 150 messages is actually a very good result, and something most people will never achieve.
Anyway, let's take a look at how to prospect effectively on LinkedIn.
Limited Volume
LinkedIn isn't a high-volume prospecting channel. Unfortunately, you can't just send a billion messages!
Over the past few years, LinkedIn has significantly restricted the ability to send messages at scale.
When it comes to automation, it's best not to push volume too aggressively if you want to stay safe and avoid getting your account restricted.
The problem isn't so much the number of messages you can send to your existing first-degree connections. You can generally send 50 to 100 messages per day to this audience without any issues.
The real problem is growing your first-degree network with the right people. That takes time.
You can only send around 100 to 200 connection requests per week, and the average acceptance rate is around 15%.
That means you can theoretically grow your network by just 22 to 23 accepted connections per week.
In other words, building a pool of 150 newly identified prospects to message is going to take a while! 6.5 weeks, to be exact.
At that kind of volume, you'd better make sure your messages are well-written and manually personalized to maximize their impact.
You want messages that feel personal and genuinely human.
But, sorry to break it to you again: you'll need to send quite a few messages to get meaningful results. Most people receive plenty of similar messages every day, and they won't necessarily be interested in what you're offering, even if they read your message.
How Can You Automate LinkedIn Prospecting?
If you really want to automate LinkedIn prospecting at scale, you'll need to create additional LinkedIn profiles dedicated to prospecting.
However, be careful: this comes with significant risks. Creating fake profiles is against LinkedIn's rules.
The better approach, if you're working in a company with multiple employees, is to use their genuine profiles to send additional connection requests and messages, within the applicable volume limits.
This way, you can double, triple, or even further increase the number of connection requests, connections, and messages you send every week.
There are several tools you can use to connect and automate these profiles, including cloud-based solutions such as LaGrowthMachine (relatively expensive, at around $80 per identity) or locally installed tools such as LinkedHelper.
LinkedHelper is significantly cheaper (around $15 per identity), but it's more complex to use. You also need to be particularly careful when configuring your campaign limits.
If you exceed LinkedIn's permitted activity levels, you risk having your accounts banned.
How Can You Send Large Volumes of Messages Through B2B Growth Hacking?
In reality, unless you're using fake LinkedIn accounts (which are prohibited and carry certain risks) or leveraging your colleagues' genuine profiles, scaling LinkedIn prospecting to generate large numbers of meetings can be quite difficult.
For high-volume B2B growth hacking, email sequences are generally much better suited.
However, to avoid landing in spam, you'll need a dedicated email infrastructure and must keep sending volumes sufficiently low across a large number of different email addresses.
LinkedIn can certainly add another layer to your prospecting strategy, but sending connection requests takes time.
You need to think long-term: send connection requests every week, ideally through automation, targeting the right people and using a tool such as LinkedHelper.
See here how to write an effective B2B cold email.
Then, once you've sent enough connection requests and built up your network, you can start sending messages.
There's one important limitation, though: on LinkedIn, people can see whether you've already tried to prospect them.
You can't simply send them another message three or four months later as though nothing ever happened.
Every message and interaction stays there permanently. So be careful about what you say!
In this context, it can even be worth creating a weekly newsletter and simply inviting people to subscribe to it.
People in your network will also be more likely to see your daily content and potentially reach out to you themselves.
And if someone visits your profile after seeing one of your posts, even if they haven't booked a meeting with you, they could be worth targeting through either a LinkedIn message or a cold call.
See here for more information about LinkedIn setting and the results it can generate.
Finally, if you're looking for more structure and knowledge to grow your business commercially in your market, you can contact me for personalized coaching or subscribe to my e-learning training programme, which covers these topics in much greater detail!