Uncategorized

Social selling, more than a trend, has become a habit now. Particularly, selling on LinkedIn.

According to a Hubspot study, LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating leads than Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, LinkedIn boasts over 740 million users in more than 200 countries and territories across the globe.

With all this growth, the platform has truly become a treasure trove of prospecting for salespeople. 

But why do SDRs love using LinkedIn?

This question has a prominent answer –

  1. LinkedIn offers a lot of smart features to enhance lead generation.
  2. LinkedIn has more than 55 million companies, making it one of the popular social networking platforms for getting accurate information about organizations.
  3. According to LinkedIn audience 360 study, your target audience has two times the buying power of an average web audience. In addition, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions. This means that you have an opportunity to get in contact with the decision-maker directly.

Despite how powerful it sounds, there are also some challenges with it.

Obviously you cannot send connection requests to every single profile available on LinkedIn. Here comes the role of LinkedIn-specific automation tools.

As the name implies, LinkedIn automation refers to using specific software to automate manual efforts such as sending connection requests, messages, etc. Benefits of using these tools include –

  • Saves a lot of time as you don’t have to manually send requests or messages.
  • Personalize messages for bulk outreach. Your communications will always appear as if they were sent by a human.
  • A/B testing – you can test different messages’ templates to see which ones work better.
  • Most importantly, you can integrate the tool with various other applications to leverage your process of lead generation via LinkedIn.

Although ‘bulk outreach’ sounds great, there are chances that your profile might be flagged by LinkedIn, preventing you from fully utilizing the platform.

All you need is a safer way to increase your network gradually without getting blocked. For this, you’ll need targeted ICP and search filters on LinkedIn. To achieve this, we took the help of a cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool – Expandi.io.

Moving ahead, you’ll see how to export 1,000 contacts at once based on specific search filters on LinkedIn.

Let’s get started.

1. Build your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Ideal Customer Profile is the description of your ideal customer. Defining your customers will help you with creating tailored marketing campaigns to resonate their requirements. This means that an ICP can help you get a more appealing shape for your target audience. Thus, you don’t have to be on the fence anymore. 

With a defined ICP, you’ll be able to send personalized messages to connect with your customers deeply to understand their pain points.

But strangely, many business owners ignore or never bother about this concept. For instance, let’s say you build a product and you think that the relevant customers will come along. But how will they “come along”? They won’t, unless and until you put in the efforts to target the exact audience to market your product and generate leads.

Therefore, it’s always wise to stick to an ICP to develop a strong base of customers for your product.

Here are a few points that could help you with developing your ICP:

  1. Review your current customers. Who is paying the most? Are they satisfied with your service? Are you solving their problems with your product? How long have they been with you? Try to answer these questions.
  2. Analyze the trends in this customer list. There could be a few or more common attributes among these customers. Note them down. This will help you progress with the process of building your ICP.

The most common attributes that you should look for –

  • Industry
  • Company size
  • Location
  • Number of customers from this organization
  • Pain points
  • Current goals of the customer
  • Revenue

This list is just to help you get started. You may find more attributes and criteria as you analyze your customers. Feel free to consider those too. It will definitely enhance your ICP building process.

2. Build your contact filters on LinkedIn

It can be quite difficult to prospect on LinkedIn since it only shows a few results even though it has millions to display. This is where LinkedIn’s filters come into the picture.

You need to target your search for effective prospecting using filters. LinkedIn’s basic search is a powerful tool for general searches on the platform. The basic filters are –

  • Connections (1st degree, 2nd degree, 3rd degree)
  • Connections with other colleagues
  • Location
  • Current companies
  • Past companies
  • Industries
  • Profile language
  • School
  • Services

Now, you might not need all the filters at once to find your potential leads. The most common filters used in B2B LinkedIn prospecting are title, industry, and location. For example, you may include these three filters first and add on based on your target audience.

Sometimes you may not even need a title, industry and location. Therefore, filtering profiles to search for your potential leads truly depends on who specifically you are looking to target. A classic case of finding a needle in a haystack.

You can also use advanced search if you have a premium account on LinkedIn.

3. Start sending invites to 1,000 contacts at once with Expandi

Let us now create a search name in Expandi to get access to 1,000 contacts at once.

Before creating a search name in Expandi, let’s understand the prerequisites. There are two types of searches – basic search and Sales Navigator search. 

Anyone can access the basic search, while the sales navigator search is accessible only to LinkedIn premium users. Every search is limited to 1,000 results.

Let’s now see how to create a search name and export 1,000 contacts from Expandi.

  1. Login to your LinkedIn account.
  2. Click on the search field and click Enter on your keyboard.
  3. Choose the required filters and click on ‘show results’.
  4. Copy the URL from the results page in LinkedIn.
  5. Go to Expandi.
  6. Go to Search.
  7. Create a New Search.
  8. Name the search and paste the URL into Basic Search.
  9. Click Search.

Once you click ‘search’, you’ll be able to export 1,000 contacts. You can upload these to your LinkedIn profile and start sending connection requests without getting banned!

Bottom line

In conclusion, SDRs looking to generate potential leads on LinkedIn are in for a treat. It is especially useful when paired with cloud-based automation tools like Expandi.

You get to send connection requests to 1,000 people at once safely without getting banned or blocked. Expandi offers a 7-day free trial with access to all its features.

So, what are you waiting for?