How We Generate An Avalanche of B2B Leads on LinkedIn™ (6 Easy Steps)

“LinkedIn is Dead!” — loudly proclaim all the B2B sales professionals around the world as soon as they fail to generate B2B leads and sales on LinkedIn… The. Worlds. Largest. B2B. Network.

If this is you, or you’ve been starting to feel like LinkedIn’s turning into the “Facebook for professionals”… You know… the mudslinging battleground really more fit for teenagers then the place to be for professionals looking to drum up new business, then I’m going to flip that paradigm on its head for you, and hopefully nudge you in the right direction for LinkedIn success.

In this post you’re going to find an inside peek into our exact methodology for how we get a steady stream of leads and sales in our ideal customer market.

LinkedIn may be getting a little long in the tooth, but, it’s still the leading platform for qualified B2B leads on the web. In fact, we get 10-15 leads and 200+ new connections on LinkedIn every week. Week after week.

Even better than a constant flood of interested and eager business executives in your target market? Sales. Yes. We convert the leads from this method into sales regularly, and if you stick with me, I’ll show you how you can too.

You’ve Tried to Acquire Leads from LinkedIn Before, But Haven’t Had Success…

It’s rare we don’t have a customer who says this. They’re consistently tired and frustrated with LinkedIn. They’ve spent hours, days, weeks, and months with little success generating leads from LinkedIn.

Truthfully, you’ve tried a lot. But you simply haven’t done the right things yet.

LinkedIn still rocks all other social media networks for B2B lead generation. In fact, 80% of all leads generated on social media come from LinkedIn, data from Kissmetrics shows.

And you’ll learn how you can can do it yourself in this post. Step-by-step. With little-to-no difficulty at all.

We’ll show you our step-by-step proprietary method for generating 5-10 highly qualified leads each week.

It’s a simple process. Anyone can do it. You do have to invest some time. But you can use it as a repeated system that consistently generates qualified leads and revenue all year long. Potentially, you could generate 2,000 new connections yearly and 120+ highly qualified leads.

Is LinkedIn Still Relevant? 

Microsoft just acquired LinkedIn this past December for $26 billion. LinkedIn has more money, people, and technology behind it than ever.

LinkedIn’s continuing to grow nicely. According to data from Statista, it had 433 million users at the end of Q1 2016. That increased to 450 million in Q2. And it sits at 463 million as of Q3.

See the overall growth in the chart below:

NOTE: At the end of this post, we have a nice free bonus for you that’ll help you generate more qualified leads from LinkedIn. So make sure you stay with us the whole way.

Step 1: Upgrade Your Account to a Free Trial of LinkedIn Business Plus

LinkedIn lets you try a free trial of their “Business Plus” account. It’s easy to find. Obviously if you’re already a business plus user, skip this section and move on to Step 2.

Just go to your profile image, with the “Me” label just below in the upper right of your profile.

Click it.

Choose “Settings & Privacy.”

Scroll down to “Subscriptions” and click “Try Premium for Free.”

You’ll come to a screen with 4 options:

Choose the “Business” option.

Then, you can scroll down and choose “Start My Free Month.”

Note: Once your free month is up, you’ll be charged $79.99 monthly. You can cancel your choice anytime if you decide you don’t like it.

Anyways, you get 30 days to start seeing results and generate leads so make it really count! Take action with this method, and it will be a no-brainer to keep paying for the premium LinkedIn account.

Step 2: Turn Your Profile into a Lead-Generation Machine

Now, here’s where you can’t afford to skimp on a single detail. Think of your LinkedIn profile as a “virtual handshake.” You’ve got to do every part right. You can’t be a hair off.

If you are, you’ll scare your ideal prospects away. And you’ll either attract nobody at all. Or you’ll get the prospects that turn into bad customers.

Click the “Me” icon in the upper right just below your profile headshot. The click “view profile” in the light blue text.

Next, click the pencil icon to edit your profile, like so:

That brings up this screen:

Here’s what you should change on your LinkedIn profile:

• Profile photo: You must have a friendly profile photo that appears professional. Make sure it doesn’t look dated. Don’t use a charicature. You don’t have to drop a couple hundred bucks at a professional photographer. Just snap a photo with your smartphone against a nice background.
• First name: Enter your first and last name
• Last name: Add your job title and company name
• Headline: Include all your job titles
• Summary: Don’t summarize anything here. Instead, include your value proposition here. If you don’t have a clear one yet, state the benefits you offer your ideal prospects. Detail the problem and pain they have, and show the solutions/results you deliver. Include a call-to-action here. For example, that could be a “free consultation” or “free analysis. Also include a way to connect. You could add your email address and or a link your prospects can copy and paste to schedule an appointment with you (Travis does both).
• Media: Here, you can add links to things like explainer videos or video testimonials, depending on what you have available. You could add links to reputable websites you’ve been published at. Basically, any third-party credibility rocks here.

Now, you have a profile worthy of attention. As you gain additional testimonials and other third-party endorsements, add them.

The more the better. Your prospects won’t be able to argue with your credibility when you have a truckload of endorsements. They’ll close quicker. And with less hassle.

Step 3: Create a Search Profile of Your Ideal Prospect with Advanced Targeting

Remember the LinkedIn “Advanced Search” feature? It still exists. But for whatever reason, they decided to make it harder to find.

Here’s what you do to get to it:

• Type in a search, like “Wells Fargo” (an industry or title that you’re interested in…)
• But don’t press enter just yet…

You’ll get a screen like this:

• Click the “People Who Work at Wells Fargo” option.

That results in the Advanced Search functionality appearing, like so:

You can save your search by creating a “Search Alert” when done. So, don’t panic if you spend a lot of time on this.

Anyway, let’s do a sample search so you can get the hang of it. In this search, we’re interested in CEO’s of marketing & advertising firms in the United States:

• Keywords section: add “CEO” under “Title”
• Locations: check “United States”
• Industries: check “Marketing and Advertising”
• IMPORTANT: Click “Create Search Alert” at the bottom to save your search and get automatic notifications when new people meet your search criteria

Now, you have your first prospect list. And if you get prospects you know will never have a need or interest for your services, then you can refine it now so they’re highly qualified right off the bat.

Here’s how the search looked for me:

Step 4: The Daily Actions You Need to Take

Every business has to take a little action to succeed. Fortunately, you don’t have to invest much time.

Spend 15 – 20 minutes daily clicking (only clicking, nothing else) on profiles of your target prospects in your saved searches lists.

Here’s where the back-end LinkedIn algorithm starts to work in your favor:

1. Your prospects get an email at the end of the week. The email shows who’s viewed their profiles.
2. Some will click through and view your profile in return. Since you’ve done a great job at creating an attractive profile, you’ve done some of the sales work already. A few may reach out to you.
3. You’ll also get a digest of who’s viewed your profile.
4. For prospects who view your profile, click “Connect.”

Now you’ve got a steady flow of visitors in your target market to your profile and you’re sending connection requests to the ones that are checking you out. This is where the magic starts to happen. It’s a snowball effect, and if you capitalize on the momentum, you’re going to be significantly expanding your reach with your target group.

Step 5: Turning Connection Requests into Conversations

Some prospects will accept your connection requests. For those that do:

• Respond with a message stating “Glad to connect.”
• Include your company’s value proposition and show how it solves a problem for your prospect.
• Add a call-to-action at the end that gives your prospects something free, like a free consultation or analysis. Adding a link to a calendar scheduling app like Calendly, which allows your prospects to schedule a time to meet with you, makes the process painless for them too. You could also send them to a whitepaper, webinar, landing page, case study, or other action you think will help them convert.
• If you don’t hear anything back from them within a week, follow up with another LinkedIn message. Your message should state additional benefits you offer, and pain you help your prospects avoid.

If they completely ignore, no worries. Just move on. There’s plenty of opportunity out there.

Step 6: How To Scale To 15 – 20 Leads Per Week And Hundreds of New Connections

Once leads start to roll in for you, you have a decision to make.

Should you go with what you have and keep your lead flow small? Is that all you can handle right now, or are you ready to scale like crazy? You’re going to need to click on hundreds of profiles every day, and that’s not easy for one person to manage. Not only that, it becomes tedious quickly, and the goal here is to bring in new business, not give you a new part-time job as a “profile clicker.”

If you want to scale, hiring extra help to take the burden off of you, so you can focus on selling, is the next step. You can bring on help internally, or get virtual assistants that you trust and have them click on profiles for 1 – 2 hours daily. You will have to train them and go through the typical hassles of management like you would an employee. Or we can recommend you to the services we use in our free email course, Ignite Your Sales Pipeline (more info below).

Warning: do not use third-party tools that automate the profile clicking! You could get your profile removed. LinkedIn explicitly asks you not to do this in their “User Agreement:”

[Do not] Use manual or automated software, devices, scripts robots, other means or processes to access, “scrape,” “crawl” or “spider” the Services or any related data or information;[Do not] Use bots or other automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages;

Next, you can add in some retargeting ads from Facebook and Google Adwords. Since people are showing an interest in you, some will also go to your website and check out your services and pricing. This is a great opportunity to put them into your digital sales funnels via ads and email marketing.

Retargeting ads “follow” your prospects around the web as they go to websites that participate in the retargeting network you use (Google, for example). Your retargeting ads would then drive your prospects back to a landing page where they could opt-in to your email newsletter.

You can offer email sign-up forms throughout your website to build your email list. Some prospects who aren’t ready to have a direct relationship with you will opt-in for your newsletter so they can learn more about you, especially if you provide some upfront value to incentivize the sign-up.

Ready to get started? Let’s take it to the next level!

Join our FREE 3-day mini course, “Ignite Your Sales Pipeline.”

We consistently generate high-quality leads with this strategy and we reveal exactly how you can too in our 3-day course, IYSP. These 10 minute lessons + companion worksheets are easily digestable and actionable. If you have 15 – 20 minutes to spare, you can do this.

Join the course by inputing your email below and we’ll immediately send you to a FREE report which shows exactly why most sales teams are failing, and the steps we’ve taken to fix the problem in our own business. Included in the report are our email and voicemail scripts that we use to convert more prospects into sales.

Next up are the 3 days of Ignite Yours Sales Pipeline, delivered over video format with complimentary worksheets. Here’s just some of what you’ll see and learn:

• IYSP Day 1: Generate a LinkedIn Leads Avalanche. Travis shows you in-depth how we use LinkedIn to generate an avalanche of leads in our ideal customer market.
  • Companion Worksheet Checklist: 6 Step Checklist to LinkedIn Lead Gen Mastery.
• IYSP Day 2: B2B Lead Nurturing Done Right. Peek into Travis’ method for nurturing these leads for more conversions more closed business and greater scale.
  • Companion Worksheet Action-guide: Everything you need to do B2B lead gen nurturing the right way including our 6 proven email follow-up templates you MUST use for every prospect to convert more sales.
• IYSP Day 3: How to Automate Your B2B Sales. Get our proven automation formula to scale your LinkedIn sales outreach for better results. We show you all the tools you need including the free gmail plugin that turns your gmail account into a mini-sales CRM.
  • Companion Worksheet: Tools, resources, and recommendations for products we personally use to grow our sales.

This is a simple, scalable, and effective strategy anyone can use to quickly grow their network on LinkedIn. Reach out to us at any time if you have questions on how this can grow your business!