LinkedIn Outreach: How To Get More Prospects Without Breaking a Sweat

LinkedIn is a perfect platform for prospecting – you have a whole network of professionals at your disposal, and most of them are open to new opportunities and partnerships.

There’s only one catch: the generic, sales-y approach has been figured out a long time ago, so cold messages with little value won’t do the trick. In 2023, you need to rethink your outreach strategy with your audience in mind. Whether you start creating powerful content or invest in LinkedIn outreach message automation, you need to approach your prospecting strategy with more thought.

Here are some tips on how to get more prospects on LinkedIn, while focusing on providing value to your customers.

How To Get More Prospects Through LinkedIn Outreach?

a) Create a Strong Brand

As Forrester Research proclaimed more than seven years ago: the Age of the Seller is over. Enter – Age of the Customer. What this means in practice is that today’s consumers have more decision-making power than in the previous decade.

So, the hard sell approach where you try to convince the user that they need your product or service won’t do anymore. The customer doesn’t need you as much as you need them. That’s why you need to provide value to your users and position yourself as someone worth listening to.

When we say that you should create a strong personal brand, this is what we mean:

• Make your profile stand out. Your profile and background photos, headline, summary, and skills should all be optimized. That way, your whole profile will display professionalism.
• Create valuable content. The best way to position yourself as an industry expert is by posting content people will be interested in. Study your target audience and find out what kind of content they’d like to see, then produce this content.
• Join groups. Although they sometimes get a bad rap, LinkedIn groups are still a good place to share knowledge and make connections. Join a group from your niche, engage in conversations, and put your name out there! Alternatively, you can create your own group, which will increase your profile even more.

b) Search Your Competitors’ Connections

People who already follow your competitors are likely to be familiar with the product or service you’re offering. As such, they could be easier to sell to than people who first need to be educated on the subject. Not only that, but the people who follow your competitors might be interested in what you have to offer, especially if you’re promising to outperform the competitor in question.

Fortunately, other users’ networks are searchable, unless they went out of their way to protect them. Feel free to find valuable prospects in other salespeople’s connections, since they’re probably connected with their customers and leads.

c) Target People Who Interacted With Your Posts

If you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, you won’t be able to see all the people who have visited your profile. That’s unfortunate, as we can all imagine that there might be some great prospects there.

However, regardless of whether or not you have a free LinkedIn or a premium subscription, you can see who has interacted with your posts! Simply click on your profile picture in the top right corner (where it says “Me”), and select “Posts and activity” from the dropdown menu.

A new page will open up, showing all of your posts and activity, as well as all the people who have interacted with your content. You’ll also be able to see all your latest followers in one place, which could be useful if you want to take a look at some potential new leads.

d) Use Advanced Search

Again, LinkedIn Premium offers some awesome search options, but even without those, the basic LinkedIn search is a powerful tool if you know how to use it. Most people stop at searching a particular industry or area, but you could do so much more.

For example, you can search for people who just recently got a new job (which is one of the best trigger events out there), people of different seniority levels, or even a previous company they worked for. The last one is particularly useful, as searching for employees of a particular company will only include the people who work there at the moment, but their previous employees are also likely to be a part of your audience.

You can also use Boolean strings like OR, AND, and BUT to combine multiple filters.

e) Start Personalizing Your Cold Messages

Finally, your prospecting efforts will be much more fruitful if you start personalizing your outreach messages. And we don’t mean simply including someone’s name and job title at the beginning of your message. We’re talking about advanced personalization that can achieve amazing results when used properly.

Personalization starts with finding the right people using some of the methods we mentioned above, as well as other methods like finding people in Facebook groups, content retargeting, and others.

After that, your job is to turn those people into hot leads with quality messages tailored to each one of them. Creating good LinkedIn cold messages that will get the attention of your prospects isn’t easy, so make sure you do your research before sending out generic messages that could end up having terrible response rates.

Final Word

Getting more prospects on LinkedIn requires a lot of work, but if you work smarter, you’ll increase your chances of converting without burnout.

Instead of spending hours sending out connection requests in bulk, try to approach your outreach efforts more strategically and take the time to completely evaluate your LinkedIn presence. Then go through all these tips and recognize where your outreach strategy needs work. And lastly, review your email list building strategies to organically grow and convert your prospects to loyal customers.

We promise – once you start making these changes, you’ll notice that your prospecting results will start improving.