LinkedIn Lead Generation 2023: Limits, tools, and tips
LinkedIn continues to be an effective channel for outbound marketing, even in 2023. We receive quite a few questions about how to effectively use the platform and what pitfalls to avoid.
Below we’ve put together some information around key campaign topics that come up again and again. We highly recommend thinking through these different aspects of a campaign prior to working with a lead generation partner or running internal outreach campaigns.
CAMPAIGN GOALS
The most common goal that businesses have when starting a lead generation campaign is to “get more appointments.” At Lead Cookie, we firmly believe that not all appointments are created equal and focusing too much on metrics can lead to misaligned campaigns (as speaking with a marketing intern is far less likely to prove as beneficial as speaking with the Chief Marketing Officer).
Therefore, when approaching a new LinkedIn outreach campaign, we like to set our sight on two specific outcomes:
Put you front-and-center for sales activity with the right people, not just more people
Establish you as a trusted partner and someone who understands (or is working to understand) the needs and goals of your target market
Where most lead generation companies and tools go wrong is placing too strong an emphasis on metrics that don’t grow your business. The primary function of a strong initial outbound campaign is to drive sales activity while establishing a strong foundation for scaling future efforts.
In other words, determine your target market and what key goals they are looking to achieve and then find more and more folks just like them.
APPROACHES
One thing that our account strategy team at Lead Cookie likes to say is that each campaign is unique.
From specific target markets and market segments (getting as wild and narrow as “mustached men between 50-65 years old working in the oil and gas industry in Texas”) to extremely nuanced offers, campaigns need to be designed around a viable outcome.
The outcome is largely dependent on your offer, and understanding the most-likely outcomes for your specific offer and market is oftentimes the difference between a successful campaign that builds a solid foundation and one that leads to frustration.
99% of campaigns can be split into two product/service categories:
Transactional
Conversational
A transactional offer is when you can clearly lay out the potential benefits someone will receive by working alongside you. This is for offers that can generally be “bought off the shelf” in that they don’t require high-levels of customization or consultation to implement. SaaS is generally a good example of those, at least before the enterprise level. It also only really works when you’ve already clearly established product-market fit, and when you have clear social proof (customers/clients you can name drop, cases with concrete results/metrics, etc.).
Something like “spending $2,500 a year on our software leads to an average savings of $175,000 in electricity costs for {{BusinessType}}, outcomes we’ve already realized for companies like {{TestimonialCompany}}”. Having a clear and concrete input + output provides enough value that you can quickly separate yourself from folks that are selling solutions that address non-applicable problems/goals.
The most simple structure for this type of sales approach is . . .
Show someone you understand their existing situation
Show you also know where they would like to go
Show them how you’ve taken similar organizations on the same journey and the outcome that was achieved
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When offers are more custom and dependent on the existing situation of a prospect (as is often the case for agencies, custom software development, manufacturers, automation experts, consultants, etc.) the goal is instead to use LinkedIn as a platform to establish initial trust. Normally, we point to these campaigns as an effort to establish you as a “trusted partner” and not just another service provider.
The goal is simple: build trust and awareness while uncovering the existing situation. Then, you can customize your pitch and offer accordingly.
For companies providing custom solutions that address dozens of different situations, it’s important to actually get an inside glance into a company’s goals and priorities before offering them something that doesn’t match.
Content-first approaches can be an effective way to quickly get a lay of the land. Reaching out to your target market for their opinions on content pieces you are curating–
Something like . . . “I’m putting together a whitepaper on how financial firms are addressing new regulation {{ABC}}, could you share how {{Company}} is dealing with these changes?”
–can be a simple way to get in the door, get a grasp of a prospect’s existing situation, and also develop valuable content for future prospects to increase the speed in which you can establish credibility.
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Expertise-first approaches are also quite effective if you have a good deal of industry experience. Reaching out to others and asking them how they are dealing with specific industry challenges or unique changes (think of regulations, market swings, industry mental shifts, etc.) can be a good way to get some insight into where a specific company is prior to trying to sell them.
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Our account strategy team uses a variety of conversational/relationship-focused messages to establish clients as a trusted partner. Feel free to reach out to us if you’d like some ideas on what we would recommend for your specific product or service.
RESEARCH AND TOOLS
Take everything we say here with a grain of salt, as it simply reflects our experiences.
Software platforms that do automated outreach are hit and miss. LinkedIn is constantly looking to crack down on these tools, as these software platforms do not promote the “relationship-first” platform that LinkedIn is continuing to build. That being said, we know from peers in the industry that some of these platforms can fly under the radar while simultaneously providing a cheaper option to manual efforts. The big concern from our end with these platforms is that they are untargeted and let through a large amount of “noise” (poor fits). From our tests, we’ve seen that even a targeted Sales Navigator search (using advanced booleans) can result in 20-50% noise/poor-fits. This can lead to folks marking you as a “spammer,” which can limit the number of connections you can send and outreach you can do in the future.
The Lead Cookie research-focused approach has a team of dedicated researchers to manually check to ensure that prospects are good fits. We believe so strongly in the importance of research that we’ve started a sister company, Custom Data, to provide our quality-obsessed research to inside sales teams and small businesses looking to run their own outreach.
The biggest question to take into account when accessing any research tools (some websites that are commonly referenced: Crunchbase, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Bomborra) is what external indicators there are that would point towards a company needing your product or service.
Things such as: current hiring for XYZ role, different departments experiencing growth/shrinking, companies utilizing specific technologies, and industry-specific indicators (e.g. south-facing roofs for solar installers) require some thought but change a campaign from a “let’s hope this works” to one that will get you front-and-center with companies and people most likely to actually need your service.
We highly recommend using industry-specific sources and tools to build an account/company list that can then be verified and further qualified by hand. Next comes finding decision makers at these accounts. A targeted database/CRM is the foundation for relevant and effective outreach.
Some of our favorite tools for sourcing accounts + prospects:
-Conference lists
-Crunchbase
-B-corp
-LinkedIn Sales Navigator
-Reviews websites
-Job posting websites
LIMITS
In May of 2021, we started to notice that LinkedIn was heavily limiting some accounts with how many outgoing connection requests they could send per month. This number has been trending down for years. The original limit, set at 2,500 outgoing connections per month, had slowly been reduced to 1,000 outgoing connections per month.
From conversations with LinkedIn, we knew that to combat the “fishing with dynamite” approach that many software tools and agencies were employing, LinkedIn was planning to lower that limit to 100 outgoing connections per week. The end result was what we’ve seen for the past 1.5 years: 100 outgoing connections per week was the hard limit.
From the campaigns we’ve run in this time, we’ve seen our connection acceptance and engagement rates go up. Clearly having to sift through less noise benefits a highly-targeted outreach approach.
As of Q4, 2022, we began to notice that LinkedIn was loosening some of the numbers and allowing the sending of between 500-800 (on the high end) connection requests per month. These numbers still favor a targeted-outreach model, but give a bit more flexibility for LinkedIn power users.
We expect this number to eventually settle in the 500-800 outgoing connection requests per month rate, but for the time-being are keeping outgoing accounts in the 400-600 requests per month range to ensure account safety (as LinkedIn does still have heavy monitors and bot-prevention measures in place; with warnings and account suspensions being issues to people who seek loopholes or try to abuse the platform).
As our team at Lead Cookie does everything by hand, we’ve fortunately been able to avoid potential complications from software use (more on that below) and keep our clients’ accounts safe.
OUTREACH IN 2023
Early in 2023, we still recommend the following breakdown for building a successful campaign:
Determine approach (transactional or conversational)
Find the right prospects
Send messaging that is relevant
Continuously test and optimize for best results
Scale outbound efforts to drive more sales opportunities
These are some of the key topics that keep coming up again and again in our conversations with prospective and current clients at Lead Cookie. If you’re interested in discussing what a potential campaign could look like for your business, feel free to email us at hello@leadcookie.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we have a chance to review!
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P.S. - Advisory
Our team at Lead Cookie decided we’d like to offer an advisory service going into 2023.
This program is best for folks looking to run their own campaigns or get feedback and insights for existing outbound efforts. Accessing our expertise and insights from over 500 campaigns can help make informed decisions and simultaneously avoid pitfalls.
You can read more about the advisory program here:
