The sales world is rapidly evolving as new technologies and social platforms emerge. Modern social media sales have become an integral focus for high-performing sales teams, thanks to their ability to overcome some commonly faced sales challenges. Among these platforms is LinkedIn. In this article, you’ll discover how to increase your sales performance using LinkedIn Outreach Automation.

Why Is Sales Performance So Important?

We live in a highly competitive world, and many businesses fail simply because they cannot stay afloat long enough to reach their sustainable growth phase.

One key aspect of staying afloat is selling your product effectively and efficiently. Research finds that 38% of all businesses fail because they run out of cash. As such, having a well-performing sales team is more important than ever. This means you need to equip your sales team with the right strategy, tools, and skills to be able to keep up with expectations to grow your business by closing deals.

Current Challenges of Sales Performance

The two challenges that can wreak havoc on sales teams' ability to attract prospects and close deals are "effective targeting" and "scalability. Targeting the wrong people is arguably the biggest obstacle for sales teams. Finding people that match your ideal customer profile is hard and time-consuming. It is even harder to scale that process because even if you find the right prospects, manual work that you simply may not have time for makes increasing your outreach efforts difficult. Luckily, you can solve both problems using professional social platforms like LinkedIn with automation tools that are tailor-made for them.

LinkedIn as a Powerful Sales Channel

In the age of social media, it should not be a surprise that LinkedIn has become a prominent tool for sales teams to source leads and convert them into paying customers. LinkedIn is particularly beneficial for targeting B2B prospects. LinkedIn’s business department reported in 2019 that sales teams globally source around 80% of their B2B leads from LinkedIn alone. The reason behind such dominance in the B2B sales market is the range of unique benefits that sales teams experience using LinkedIn.

Unique Advantages of LinkedIn

LinkedIn has long been known as the social media platform where professionals search for jobs or discuss career- or relevant industry-related topics. This makes it the ideal place to sell both B2B offerings and B2C products aimed at increasing individual work productivity.

On top of this, some other unique advantages of LinkedIn include:

• Better targeting: LinkedIn gives users an advanced filter that can help you target prospects based on their location, profession, past career experience, industry, and more. The result is a list of prospects that are significantly more relevant to you and match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

• Social Selling: You can engage with your prospects by commenting on their posts, liking them, or sharing useful content. In doing so, you can create a better bond between your brand and potential customers, increasing the chance of them converting into paid customers.

• Analytics: LinkedIn has its in-house analytics suite that can help you measure engagement with your prospects and refine your strategy based on that data.

Despite these advantages, manual outreach and sales on LinkedIn are time-consuming. Thankfully, you can automate this.

What is LinkedIn Outreach Automation?

As the name suggests, it is the process of automating the tedious process of reaching out to prospects over LinkedIn. There are several types of actions you can automate using LinkedIn, such as:

1. Send automated direct messages via InMail or a 3rd party LinkedIn automation tool.
2. Engage with prospects by liking or commenting on their posts.
3. Send follow-ups or additional nurturing content (e.g., white papers) after the initial outreach.

What sets LinkedIn's automated outreach apart from other channels (e.g., email) is its ability to personalize your communication flow with prospects using the data they have available on their profiles and the way they engage with your posts or previous messages.

Considering these benefits, it’s easy to understand why sales teams are opting for automated LinkedIn outreach. But how do you integrate Linto your team’s day-to-day work?

How to Increase Sales Performance with LinkedIn Automation

Below are 5 steps that sales teams can take to significantly improve their sales conversions by incorporating LinkedIn outreach automation into their tech stack.

Step 1: Refresh Your Ideal Customer Profile

Chances are that it’s been a while since you’ve discussed with your team who your ICP is and how you communicate with them. It’s also likely that the needs and challenges your target prospects face have changed. So, it’s a great idea to refresh your ideal customer profiles and your team’s knowledge of them. This is a vital first step needed for success in the upcoming steps in your automation process.

Step 2: Add Personalization to Your Outreach Message

Automation without personalization can be seen as spammy. Luckily, most modern LinkedIn automated outreach tools allow you to personalize your message based on your target audience’s interests, posts, comments, location, and more. Below, you can see what a personalized message template looks like. While the example message below could certainly be sent to a mass audience, it appears organic and tailored-to-the-recipient once the personalization variables are replaced with actual information from your target prospect’s profile. You can personalize both connection requests and subsequent messages. Without optimizing the rest of the message, personalization is not enough. Let’s move to the next step to discover how.

Step 3: Improve Your Connection Requests

A connection request is the first impression for your target audience. Write a bad one, and few people will be ready to engage with you. The value proposition is arguably the most critical aspect of a great connection request. You already know your recipients' needs and pains from the knowledge you gained during your ICP-refresh, so use these to guide your messaging. Address their most substantiated need and position yourself or your offering in a way that highlights how you can solve their problem.

Connection requests are important. However, they are only the beginning of the conversation with the target audience. You will also encounter follow-ups, messages with additional information about your product, and more questions that you should be prepared for.

Step 4: Set up Automated Follow-Ups

Sales teams often make one major mistake here. They are sending a follow-up message that is not relevant without providing any additional value to the prospect. Drip campaigns are a series of messages sent to prospects based on their LinkedIn behavior or how they’ve interacted with previous messages. LinkedIn automation tools’ drip campaign feature can solve two problems. First, you don’t have to keep track and send follow-ups manually. Second, a well-designed follow-up sequence will increase the chances of your lead responding to you. In the following drip campaign (image below), a prospect would receive two follow-up messages after a couple of days if they ignore the previous ones, gently nudging them and typically improving your chances of a response.

Step 5: Monitor Performance Metrics and Adjust Your Campaign

There is always room for improving your campaign performance and outreach. LinkedIn outreach tools offer a built-in analytics suite that helps track campaign KPIs. However, with competition only getting tougher and LinkedIn becoming more saturated, this analysis does not always cut it.

More companies are opting for specialized sales KPI dashboard tools that can track the core performance metrics of your campaign in real time! Based on these metrics, you can adjust your campaign if it’s underperforming to course-correct and get your team back on track to hit their outreach and conversion goals.

If you’re unsure what you should be focusing on, start by looking at the following metrics:

• Connection acceptance rate: The percentage of people who have accepted your connections out of those you have tried to contact.
• Response rate: The number of prospects who have responded to your message out of all recipients.
• Engagement rate: Calculate this by combining all engagements with your LinkedIn posts and dividing the total by the number of people who have seen them.

If your analytics tool does not have a specific measure of engagement rate, you can measure it using this formula:

All metrics mentioned above can be found in your LinkedIn analytics.

Use Real-Time KPI Dashboards To Encourage Competition In Your Team

Real-time dashboards show key performance indicators (KPIs) for each sales representative and/or the entire team. The data on these dashboards update automatically and in real time, so you’re always showing your team the most recent state of their KPIs and progress toward targets.

The logic is simple–by sharing team and/or individual sales reps' performance on dashboards publicly displayed to others in the office, everyone in the company knows how sales are going. By doing so, sales teams create a natural and healthy feeling of competition and a desire for reps to show off their prowess, secure their top spot, and be seen as “number one” on the leaderboard. This results in a more motivated sales team, who, with the intended effect, are more likely to go beyond reaching to exceeding their sales targets.

When you combine your outreach metrics with data visualization dashboards, you end up with a very powerful solution where your sales development reps know exactly how many contacts they’ve reached out to and how far they are from their target. You can accomplish this by using a dedicated sales dashboarding tool like Plecto.

Here’s what your dashboard could look like in Plecto:

On the above dashboard, you can see overall team performance, as well as highlighting the top team performers based on sales data that updates in real time. Tracking and showcasing outreach performance in this way can significantly improve sales teams' performance. Better yet, teams that take advantage of LinkedIn outreach automation campaigns with well-drafted messages, follow-up drip campaigns, and real-time KPI monitoring are oftentimes those that see the most success when it comes to outreach conversions.

In fact, you could be next if you start implementing LinkedIn outreach campaigns, follow-up drip campaigns, and sales outreach dashboards. The last thing to consider is which automation tool you should choose.

How to Pick the Right Tool For LinkedIn Outreach Automation?

The best LinkedIn automation tool for you will vary based on what industry you’re in, your team, and your company’s structure. To help guide your decision, you should consider the following factors:

1. Personalization capabilities: Does the tool have the token variables you are looking to personalize? Which parts of the message are important to you to personalize?
2. Analytics: Do they track the metrics that you use in your performance reporting?
3. Integration with other tools: Do they seamlessly integrate with your CRM or other sales tools you currently use?
4. Compliance: Do they comply with your security and privacy policies?

Start converting more with LinkedIn automation and Plecto

When used correctly, LinkedIn automation is a powerful tool for sales teams to save time and improve their outreach capabilities. Thanks to its ability to scale seamlessly without hurting personalization, you can easily target your target audience (no matter how big or small) without additional resources–and improve your likelihood of receiving positive responses from more potential leads.