Generating B2B Leads on LinkedIn
There's a saying in B2B sales - only 5% of your qualified leads are ready to buy at any given time. Therefore, any good lead gen strategy will involve not only casting a wide net, but also showing up again and again for your qualified leads so you're top of mind when they're ready to buy.
In this article I'm going to cover how I use a combination of targeted connection requests, DMs, and consistent posting to generate 10s of thousands of impressions and dozens of leads per month.
And don't worry, you don't need to be a certified LinkedIn influencer for this to work. I'm not a LinkedIn influencer. I have only 2,337 followers, most of which are just standard LinkedIn connections. But my posts get an average of 20k impressions. That's a lot of free impressions!
LinkedIn Growth Channels
On LinkedIn, there are 4 channels for acquiring leads. You can (1) Create content that shows up in the timeline (2) DM target accounts in their regular LinkedIn inbox (3) DM target accounts via LinkedIn Sales Navigator (4) Run paid ads
If you have the bandwidth, it's worth investing in all 4 of these channels. Personally though I've seen the most success with (1) & (2), so will start the discussion there.
Seeding your LinkedIn Follower Base
The average LinkedIn post is complete garbage. You probably associate LinkedIn posting with cringe, humble brags, and contrived workplace stories - and you're right. Fortunately, this presents an opportunity for you. It's easier to stand out when a platform isn't saturated.
If you're starting with 0 followers (or close to 0 followers), fret not. You can build up your follower base by simply sending out a lot of LinkedIn connections. Using the LinkedIn search bar, generate a list of people within your target audience and start slinging 20 connection requests per day.
Of course, some people will be more likely to accept than others (Elon won't connect with you sadly) but in my most recent connection frenzy targeting Demand Gen Managers, I found that 27% of my 300 requests were accepted. Even if you're starting from 0 you'll get to 1k in ~6 months.
Pro tip: do not include a message in your connection request. Trust me on this one.
Writing Quality Posts
The biggest objection I get is that people are afraid to post on LinkedIn because it's cringey. To that I say: (1) You don't have to post cringey content to get results (2) Toughen up and embrace cringe. If you're too afraid to put yourself out there then stick to paid ads.
If you're facing writer's block, don't resort to ChatGPT. Thousands of people are posting ChatGPT generated content and it's all the same.
Go through your feed, pick out a couple of posts you like, and try to emulate them.
My most popular post was inspoired by this famous Wall Street Journal advertisement.
In my post, I repurposed the advertisement for my target audience:
For more inspiration, check out
- Jack Raines, the Shit Poster
- Kévin Moënne-Loccoz, the Cheat Sheet guy
- Pete Huang, the Breaking News guy
- Mac Reddin, the Domain Expert
Hitting the DMs
On top of showing up in your prospects feed, you need to hit the DMs. There are two types of LinkedIn DMs:
(1) The regular inbox that you use to message your existing connections
(2) Sales Navigator InMail for reaching out to people you haven't connected with yet
The regular inbox is your preferred outreach method because (1) it's free and (2) you can send follow up messages. Cold messaging copy is out of the purview of this article but there are plenty of resources online for writing copy that converts. If you want to automate your outreach, consider using a platform like PhantomBuster.
If you subscribe to Sales Navigator ($99/mo), you'll recieve 50 credits to message non-connections each month. Some people believe that InMail messages don't convert, but I can promise you they do. Here are the results of my most recent InMail messaging campaign:
Overall: 150 messages sent, 10 meetings booked
- VP of Sales: 71 messages sent, 2 meetings booked
- Revenue Operations Leaders: 11 messages sent, 2 meetings booked
- Account Executives at Design Agencies: 19 messages sent, 0 meetings booked
- VP of Engineering: 25 messages sent, 0 meetings booked
- CRM Implementation Specialists: 24 messages sent, 6 meetings booked
Some audiences, like engineering leaders, spend less time on LinkedIn and are naturally more averse to taking meetings. Salespeople take meetings for a living and are perpetually on LinkedIn.
Paid Ads
LinkedIn ads are the most targeted, and potentially most expensive, ad network for B2B sales. As a benchmark, we spent $881.44 for 20,039 impressions and 656 clicks. That comes out to $43.99 per 1k impressions and $1.34 per click. I should note, our CPC was 5x higher before we enabled the LinkedIn Audience Network which allows your ads to be shown on 3rd party sites as well as the LinkedIn feed.
Unlike the strategies shared above, Paid Ads are not free so whether you pursue this strategy will depend on your budget and goals.
Conclusion
Until you get to 1k LinkedIn followers, keep firing out connection requests.
Once you've seeded your initial follower base, take inspiration from one of the LinkdIn legends I shared and start posting.
As your connection acceptions start rolling in, DM qualified accounts to let them know about your product.
If you found the article helpful, shoot me a connection request here and I'll be sure to like & comment on your posts to give you the initial boost you need!
