Ever wanted to leverage LinkedIn to find more clients and grow your business? If the answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place.
This post is for those of you interested in using LinkedIn as a funnel to find clients.
Thought we’d share my own experience with the platform along with everything I learned from everyone here.
After using this social media for many years, we’ve found LinkedIn works best for business coaches, and digital marketing agencies selling high-ticket offer who can directly approach and engage with their niche.
Just like any social media platform, you need to nail down the basics to make it work. (Niche – Problem – Offer).
And to generate consistent results without making this a full-time job, you’ll need the right process you’ll be able to execute with as little effort/time as possible which we will be sharing in this post.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
Positioning Of Your LinkedIn Profile
Our LinkedIn profile can make or break your results. Whether we’re cold connecting with a lead, engaging in a DM convo with a prospect, or demonstrating authority with relevant content, here’s what will happen:
People will check out your profile.
They’ll qualify us and look for answers to 3 simple questions:
1. What does this guy do?
2. How can I help me?
3. Should I trust him?
If they feel we can add value, they may reach out directly, or not. Either way is fine (more on this below).
So back to the profile, you need to build it in a way that will get your market excited about what you do.
Here are a few pointers:
1. The Headline is key as it’s one of the first things our prospects see when checking us out. A simple (I help ____ fix ____ by ____) will do the trick here.
2. A background image is used to establish credibility. If you have done any sop
Pictures of you in front of a crowd or giving a workshop work well for that. If you don’t have it, create something in canvas with your picture and your headline.
3. About section only shows the first 2-3 lines so make sure those are punchy to have people click the “expand” button to read the rest. We suggest you to use this space to tell the story of your avatar. So they read about their own pain point and how life will look like once solved. When done right, prospects will reach out to tell you how much this resonated with them.
4. Featured section is perfect for video client testimonials to establish credibility. If you don’t have any yet, link to a LinkedIn article that walks them through who you are and why they should care.
5. The Experience section can be used to explain what you do, how you do it, who it’s for and the results they can expect. Then finish off with a CTA such as (Send me a message directly here on LinkedIn)
Once you have this part nailed down…the next part is the “Connections”. You can also build social proof to your LinkedIn profile with our LinkedIn Marketing services. You can get real LinkedIn Endorsements, followers, and recommendations which will help to make your profile stands out from the crowd.
Building Connections On LinkedIn
The best way to see LinkedIn is as a marketplace that you can siphon directly into a sales funnel.
On the top of the funnel, you’ll want to grow your audience, which are people from your niche who go from being a stranger to discovering (then trusting) you.
There are a few ways to do this which you can use to generate build real LinkedIn Connections.
P.S. Want a fast way to grow your connections fast? Check out our LinkedIn connections services here. You’d get connections from real users that you’re looking for.
1. Going in cold
You find your niche using filters then send them a connection request using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can also automate this process by leveraging either a VA or an external tool. If using a tool, take one that acts as a Smart Browser so you don’t get in trouble.
Keep in mind that when connecting in this way, if too many people click the link which states they don’t know you, LI will suspend your ability to connect with more people for a few hours to a few days (they’ll ask for that person’s email for you to connect with them). After 5-6 times, they’ll perma-restrict you (happened to me) which is when you need to appeal to their Customer Service (happy to show you what I used to get reinstated if this happens to you)
When starting on LinkedIn, it’s a good idea to use this method. As your audience grows on the platform, however, you will be able to solely connect with warm leads.
2. Leads who check out your LinkedIn profile
This is a big one. LinkedIn actually tells us who checked out our profile (and when). You can connect with people in your niche/industry who do so as this is a signal of them potentially being ready to progress in my funnel.
When connecting, you can do it with a personal note detailing the fact they checked me out.
Many of our clients came like this. They’d check us out, then we’d send a connection request and they’d then tell us they needed our help.
3. Leads that engaged with your content
These are your warmest leads and you’ve been using the same process as above. You send them a personalized connection request and make sure they remember that they liked/commented on your post.
4. Leads engaging with other people’s posts On LinkedIn
Your leads might follow other people on LinkedIn. You can start finding 5-10 people who share great content in your niche but solve a different problem.
You can pick people who have a larger audience than you (100-500 Likes on each of their posts) and add value to their posts (kinda like what you’d do in Facebook Group).
Then connect with leads who engage with your replies.
Further Reading: How To Get More Engagement on Your LinkedIn Posts
5. Show That You’re an Authority in Your Niche
As you probably know, the majority of people in your niche aren’t ready to buy today.
That doesn’t mean we should only look for the 3% who are shopping for a solution now.
That’s why you can start by warming up the other 97% through content until they give you a signal (usually checking out your profile or engaging with one of your posts).
You’ll want to write 1 post per day (We have found that multiple posts on the same day cannibalize the first post visibility).
Right now, the LinkedIn crowd engages best with personal stories that tie in what you do. For example, you could write about the day you were quit your job and decided to launch your social media marketing agency.
Images and videos do help with engagement (We suspect the algorithm favors posts that have them).
We’ve been using personal images (stay away from anything generic) and videos under 2 minutes work best (with subtitles as people there like to consume those without sound on).
As stated in point 2, you can also do this by engaging in posts from bigger players in your space, but who solve a different problem. As you do this, you’ll eventually capture their audience (which is your niche).
6. DM Chat On LinkedIn
You can aim to start 20 conversations per day, all warm.
This means that they either come from the following:
- Leads who checked out your profile
- Interact with your latest post, or with your replies to posts from people who share my audience.
If you don’t have enough, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to cold connect, making sure to be personalized with your outreach message. For example, you could congratulate them on launching their business less than 3 months ago.
The goal is to qualify those and see who’s a good fit for your offer.
You need to classify into 3 categories here:
1) Not in your niche -> just drop them (nicely)
2) In your niche, not ready -> You can enter them in your CRM
3) In your niche, ready -> Enter in CRM + book a quick chat
You can set yourself a daily goal is to make 3 offers to go on Quick Chat and have one person agree.
Over time, hitting those numbers become super easy as the funnel grows with prospects to follow-up on.
Your LinkedIn conversations are short and to the point, as people tend to be more in-and-out on that platform than on Facebook.
We suggest you use a casual tone and write as you would speak.
Here are some tips that you can follow:
- Don’t ask no more than 3 questions to decide if you want to advance them to a quick chat where you’d finish the qualification process.
- Stay away from open-ended questions such as “Tell me more about your business”. No one has time for that and they can sniff you from a mile away. Instead, you go straight for a question they can answer with a simple Yes/No to get them to “opt-in the conversation”.
- The only thing you sell at this point is 15 minutes with you to see if you can help them or not.
- You’ll reduce their resistance by making this clear using either a voice clip or a short video you send directly in Direct Message.
Quick Chats
When someone agrees to a quick chat, you ask if they are available right now. Most will say yes as they’re already DMing you.
If not, you can book for later today or tomorrow at the latest. Past that, you might experience a higher drop rate.
The quick chat is there for you to complete the qualifying process and build rapport.
By checking out their LinkedIn profile and pre-qualifying through DM, most are.
After those 10-15 mins, you’d know if you can help them or not and know if they are serious about solving the problem you have the solution to.
You can then ask them if they can continue the call where you’ll explain your offer orf if they want to schedule PART 2 of the sales call.
Most people will want to continue the call. If they can’t but are interested, we book for the next 24-48 hours.
At that point, the call becomes a traditional sales call where I recap their situation, where they want to go, and why they can’t get there by themselves and make sure I got it all straight. Then you dive into explaining how I’ll help them and how much the investment will be.
Challenges That Most People Face To Leverage On LinkedIn
We’ve seen people gone from massively outreaching and pitching their services back to focusing on creating content and attracting people when LinkedIn perma-restricted the ability to send connection requests.
These are the challenges that we’ve found most people face when leveraging on LinkedIn:
1. Getting people to reply to their DMs
The messages sent are too generic. People are busy and have other stuff to do than constantly explain to strangers “how their business is doing”.
2. Getting the right people to see their posts
LinkedIn isn’t like Facebook. Solution: You’d need to write content specifically for LinkedIn. You’d start to see a massive improvement in your post engagement if done correctly.
3. Converting DMs into quick chats
For the longest time, we’ve seen people were either pitching or chatting. Both are wrong.
Solution: we figured out what we need to ask and then found the line that works best for us: “Would you be open to seeing if I can help you with that?”
So here’s our years of LinkedIn experimenting right here for you.
We are hoping this will help accelerate things for you trying to leverage LinkedIn to grow your business.
He has years of experience in setting up social media presence for SME’s and have very successfully run campaigns for building social media presence for companies all around the world.
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