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Increase Your LinkedIn Outbound Sales Results with 5 Proven Strategies

LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B. But you have to use it to its full potential! Today, our team walks you through the 5 tenets of LinkedIn outbound sales success with battle-tested tips.

LinkedIn is the most effective channel to drive high-quality leads for your B2B business today. If you’re not using it to its full potential, you’re missing out on a lot!

While LinkedIn rewards both inbound and outbound sales efforts, your outbound sales can really take off with the right strategies. 

Let’s discuss five proven strategies that can help increase your LinkedIn outbound sales results and boost your sales. Whether you're a seasoned sales professional or just starting, these strategies will help you unlock your sales goals!

1. Keep Your LinkedIn Account Alive And Active

While that’s a given, many sales professionals fail to maintain their LinkedIn profiles when outreaching for sales. This proves to be rather repelling to most leads. 

Think about it—say you reach out to someone on LinkedIn and catch their attention. As a result, their natural instincts would urge them to check out your profile and get to know you better. But when they see a profile that hasn’t been updated for ages, has no profile photo, and a very vague headline and summary, they’ll bounce off and forget about you. 

How to Make a Memorable First Impression 

  • Optimize your headline: Create a headline about your work, value proposition, and passion. Keep it short and relevant.
    Example:
linkedin headline example
  • Upload a good cover image: Keep a cover image relevant to what you do or mention your offerings—services, and products.
    Example:
great linkedin cover image example
  • Nail your professional summary: Use this section to provide an overview of your professional journey and experiences. Use storytelling to lure your lead in and engage them. If you need to display your portfolio, take high-quality screenshots.
  • Keep adding relevant connections: The kind of connections you have or the people you engage with help your leads form an impression. Try to build meaningful connections on the platform and, if possible, leverage a mutual acquaintance to build your business on LinkedIn and strike up a conversation with your lead. 
  • Update your profile regularly and stay on top of the latest LinkedIn profile optimization tips.
  • Are you a sales rep? Keep an eye on your LinkedIn SSI index.

2. Don’t Just Lurk - Engage with Your Prospects

Remember: no one on social media expects unsolicited advice or pitches from someone they haven’t heard of before. This is why it’s always a good idea to warm up a lead before contacting them on LinkedIn. 

And the best way to warm up a lead is to be present where they’re present, i.e., engage with their activities and updates. 

For example, if they published a piece of content on LinkedIn, don’t just leave a reaction on their post—leave a thoughtful comment too. 

Example:

how to engage with sales leads on linkedin

You see, this comment not only appreciates the post but also adds a unique POV to the original post. Moreover, it gives the author the satisfaction that they’ve actually followed their advice and performed the CTA mentioned in the post.

3. Always Aim to Build Relationships and Nurture

I know, I know: your ultimate aim is to convert a lead. 

But here’s the thing, if you do it with the intent of making sales, you won’t get it right for the most part. However, if you genuinely try to connect with someone and build a relationship with them, things naturally start falling into place. 

At the very least, you’ll have more information for your Sandler pain funnel questioning

Tips for Building Relationships with Leads

  • Find common ground to bond over. It could be anything—a mutual connection, a common interest, or your common line of work. 
  • Do your homework before the outreach—see what kind of content they consume and like, what’s happening in their organization, what role they are playing in their organization, etc. 
  • Leverage that information to strike up an interesting conversation. Ask questions, give suggestions, and bring up a topic for discussion. All in all, aim to get their attention and response.
  • Nurture the lead through your content. Publish valuable LinkedIn content and stay on your target audience’s radar. Monitor your metrics with Inlytics, a personal profile analysis tool.

4. Use an Omnichannel Sales Outreach Approach

While LinkedIn is a great platform to warm up a lead and make the first move, emails are the ultimate way of converting them. 

That’s where you can bring up more serious discussions and get them to take action, such as booking a product demo, picking up a meeting slot, enrolling for a free trial, etc. 

With omnichannel outreach, you’ll get the best of both worlds!

How to Leverage Omnichannel Outreach for Outbound Sales

  • Create a lead magnet around a burning challenge your target market is facing and offer an actionable solution to it. 
  • Distribute the lead magnet all over your LinkedIn profile—publish it on your profile or run LinkedIn ads to reach more leads.
  • Connect with everyone who downloaded or engaged with your post and gather their email IDs.
  • Create a multi-sequence campaign with outreach tools like Super Send. Send sequence 1 via email and sequence 2 (follow-up) via LinkedIn messages.

5. Templatize and Plan in Advance

Coming up with great hooks and engaging intros every time you contact a new lead can be challenging, especially if you’re doing it at scale. 

Creating templates for your outreach messages not only helps you save time but also helps you refine your LinkedIn outbound sales strategy to acquire more customers. 

Tips to Create Templates for Your LinkedIn Outbound Sales Messages

  • Create cold outreach messages for different situations—LinkedIn connection notes, 1st follow-ups, 2nd follow-ups, sales pitches, etc. 
  • Try to create different variants of an outreach message and perform A/B testing to get the winning templates. 
  • For best results, use an outbound sales tool that automates the whole outreach process for you, where you can simply create the templates once and use them as and when required. 
  • Create multiple user personas for your ideal customer and craft unique outreach messages for each type. 

Level Up Your LinkedIn Outbound Sales Strategy

All it takes to succeed on LinkedIn is the right mindset, approach, and execution.

The key is to be strategic and consistent while adding value to your network. By using these LinkedIn business development strategies, you can effectively build relationships, generate leads, and close more deals.

Start implementing them and take your LinkedIn outbound sales to the next level! 

WRITTEN BY

Lana Rafaela

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