Predictions on the Future of LinkedIn
"So what is the future of LinkedIn?"
This question comes up a lot in conversations with friends, podcast hosts, prospects, and peers.
LinkedIn, as a platform, is becoming the epicenter of business communication. B2B marketers and sales teams are flocking to the platform, and in a post-GDPR world, it has become one of the most reliable and powerful sales channels.
But what is to come?
As the founder of one of the top LinkedIn lead generation companies, I am very close to the platform. Our team has seen the platform evolve and grow. I have spoken to individuals on LinkedIn's advisory board and I have heard many rumors of discussions from others in the industry.
What I am predicting here is not fact or am I 100% certain of this. But I have a decent level of confidence in these predictions and so I am sharing them in hopes they bring you value.
LinkedIn will continue to become the epicenter of B2B sales
At one point, I had the opportunity to speak with an individual who was on LinkedIn's Customer Advisory Board. He was very close to LinkedIn and the direction they were going and he shared this with me:
"LinkedIn is aiming to position itself as the center of B2B sales and recruiting. Keep doing what you are doing because LinkedIn, as a sales channel, will only increase in time. The tactics and platform may change, but using it as a sales tool is only going to become more effective with time."
This obviously gave me a lot of confidence to keep pushing forward with Lead Cookie, and it makes complete sense.
Over the past few years, we have seen the slow and gradual death of cold email.
First, GDPR hit Europe which stopped cold email overnight.
Second, we saw email deliverability drop heavily over the past 12-24 months. Platforms like Gmail and Outlook became far better at detecting cold email campaigns and more emails ended up in SPAM.
This has made the efficacy of cold email as a growth channel plummet rapidly. I know this because I am friends with countless outbound agencies and sales teams who have either abandoned cold email entirely, or re-prioritized it and, instead, put their efforts toward LinkedIn.
LinkedIn saw this coming. They knew cold email, as a prospecting tool, was on the way out, and they set themselves up perfectly to be the new alternative.
So the key point here is-
Prediction 1: LinkedIn will remain as the epicenter of B2B sales, but the tactics and the "how" will change.
LinkedIn bots & automation are dying
When I got started with LinkedIn prospecting a few years back, it was easy to do a lot of this on your own with automation tools and bots.
But quickly after I saw Hunter.io's LinkedIn integration get shut down, I realized the risks of relying on these tools.
All of these LinkedIn automation tools and Chrome Extension bots are against LinkedIn's terms of service. LinkedIn explicitly states not to use bots on your profile.
For a long time, no one listened. But over the past 6-12 months, we have seen LinkedIn put heavy efforts on detecting these bots and warn users to stop using them.
Tools that were once giants in the space like LinkedHelper, Leonard, and many others now trigger LinkedIn to send the user a message saying, "We know you are using Leonard. Don't keep using it or we will shut down your profile."
If the tool you are using isn't on the blacklist yet, it will be soon. LinkedIn is picking up even the smallest players in these automation tools.
This is why I chose to build Lead Cookie- where our team does everything 100% by hand. We don't use any of these bots and literally have humans send every single message. This is why you need to work with a B2B lead generation agency.
Prediction 2: LinkedIn automation bots will soon be dead and irrelevant.
LinkedIn will throttle back organic outreach
At Lead Cookie, we focus on done-for-you Linkedin lead generation. We do this through what has become an industry standard.
We send a connection request as part of a 4-message drip sequence. The goal of these messages is to get engagement from a prospect and start a sales conversation.
When I started Lead Cookie, I could find 1 legitimate competitor, along with 5-6 scrappy competitors in the space. Today, there is still only 1 legitimate competitor, but TONS of scrappy people in the market who are cluttering LinkedIn with noise and low-quality messages.
Many of these competitors are, no doubt, using automation bots that will soon be shut down as well. But for the ones that do remain, they are about to be heavily disrupted.
This leads me to one of the big key predictions for the future.
Prediction 3: LinkedIn will begin throttling back organic outreach.
When we started Lead Cookie, it was possible to send up to 175 connections per day on a consistent basis safely.
Then, after a while, we saw that number drop to 100 connections per day safely.
About 6 months ago, they dropped that number to 75 per day.
Update 2021: This number has now dropped to ~100 per week.
Slowly but surely... LinkedIn is throttling back the volume of organic outreach that they allow.
75 contacts per day is still a lot and you can produce massive results with those numbers.
It is possible to send over 75 connections in a single day. But if you try this day-after-day for weeks, it will eventually throttle you to a max of 75 per day.
The trend is certain.
Organic outreach is being throttled.
Over time, I anticipate this number to continue to drop to 50 per day, then probably bottom out around 25 per day.
Even at 25 contacts per day, we produce great results for some of our customers... BUT, we tend to get way more niche-targeted with customers who do 25 per day, and we hand qualify every lead to ensure every connection counts.
This is great for LinkedIn because it means less noise and more quality conversations which is what LinkedIn wants.
Read more in our articles about the two new error messages:
You've reached the weekly invitation limit - LinkedIn Limits
You’re out of invitations for now - LinkedIn Error Message
LinkedIn will begin to monetize prospecting
If LinkedIn throttles back organic outreach, then what? Well, it's simple, they will start to monetize and charge for outbound prospecting on LinkedIn.
Currently, they have InMail, but anyone who has used the product knows that it pretty much sucks.
LinkedIn invested all of this effort into these features of InMail- like clickable and trackable buttons and links- but as a result, the InMail messages don't look natural. They look like some blasted, spammy message with a giant button on it that says "Buy now".
Add on top of that, being that the cost of InMail is far higher than what it costs to do organic outreach, you will see that they have not picked up much traction on the platform so far.
I anticipate that this will change. As LinkedIn throttles back their organic outreach, I anticipate their paid messenger products to evolve and improve.
Prediction 4: LinkedIn will begin to charge for outbound prospecting on the platform by evolving their paid outreach products.
Sales Navigator Inbox will be built out into a CRM
One of the biggest complaints and questions I get from anyone trying to do LinkedIn on their own is this:
"How do you keep this all organized? The inbox is a horrible mess and it's hard to stay on top of conversations."
LinkedIn was originally built as a social media platform, but has now grown into an enterprise sales tool... but at the moment, their messenger product isn't much more advanced than a basic chat tool.
This leads to my fifth prediction.
Prediction 5: Sales Navigator Inbox will be built out into a CRM.
When I say CRM, I don't anticipate this to replace Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc. But I do expect them to build out a CRM-like functionality which makes it far easier to organize leads, set follow-up reminders, and improve the entire user experience.
One signal that they are moving in this direction is the recent emergence of the Sales Navigator inbox.
The Sales Navigator inbox has been around for multiple years, but for a long time, it was only for InMails.
Today, they have started funneling any connection requests sent through the Sales Navigator interface to the Sales Navigator inbox. This change started in early 2019 and is a signal of them moving in this direction.
Basic chat will remain in the standard LinkedIn inbox, but if you are using this professionally for outbound sales, then the Sales Navigator inbox is where your leads will live.
My belief is that they are doing this so they can build out and improve this product for everyone who is doing outbound prospecting on LinkedIn.
A good parallel for this is LinkedIn's recruiter product. The tool functions like a fully-fledged hiring pipeline that helps recruiters organize and tag candidates into different buckets. This is the direction I believe they will move with their Sales Navigator product.
Fact: LinkedIn is locking in sales teams for life
This section is not as much a prediction as it is a current fact that most people are unaware of.
In the previous section, I mentioned how LinkedIn is moving any activity done through the Sales Navigator platform to the Sales Navigator inbox, instead of your primary LinkedIn inbox.
One reason they may be doing this is to build out the CRM functionality that I described.
But there is another motive...
Fact: If you cancel LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you lose access to all of those leads and conversations.
Yep... If you start doing prospecting on LinkedIn, you have to keep your Sales Navigator subscription active if you want to have access to all of those prospecting conversations.
If you cancel, you lose access to your Sales Navigator inbox and all of those conversations. I'm not even sure if you would see a response from a prospect if it did come through once you had cancelled.
This means they are locking you into their Sales Navigator product for life. Or at least as long as you want to be doing outbound prospecting for your business, and then work the leads from your outbound prospecting after.
So get ready to include that Sales Navigator subscription as part of your annual expenses, as it won't be going away anytime soon.
The only way around this is to literally open up every single profile in the "View on LinkedIn" view and then send a connection request that way, instead of through the Sales Navigator interface. And even if you did that, I am sure they would throttle you at some point.
So go ahead and prepay for that Sales Navigator annual plan. You will be needing it.
LinkedIn will become an Adwords-style market for prospecting
This final prediction comes from some rumors that I heard from people working out in Silicon Valley near the headquarters. It seems kind of crazy but makes complete sense.
Prediction 6: LinkedIn's paid messenger products will begin to function like an Adwords-style bidding marketplace for decision-makers. The higher profile the person, the higher the cost to get a message in front of them.
From what I have heard, LinkedIn will start to sell "guaranteed placements at the top of someone's inbox." Your bid can get the top spot on top of anyone's inbox messages, but your bid will be determined by the competition for getting in front of that person.
Trying to get in front of the CMO of a Fortune 500? Expect to pay a lot.
Trying to get in front of solo practitioners with little competition? Clicks won't be as high.
It's a crazy concept, but it's basically a Google Adwords market for people...
This one I am probably least certain about in my predictions, but I anticipate some form or fashion of this type of model to emerge in the coming years as they evolve their paid messenger products.
LinkedIn will become a more expensive channel to use, so the bottom of the market will drop out
My final prediction ties all of this together.
When LinkedIn rolls out better-paid messenger products, it will be expensive.
We know that their advertising platform is already extremely expensive with an average click costing $7-10.
So I anticipate that any paid products they roll out will also be quite expensive.
My friend, AJ Wilcox at B2Linked, tells most people not to look into LinkedIn Ads unless they are willing to spend at least $3k-5k per month minimum. Otherwise, the chances of success and the ability to get any decent traffic through are just too low.
So, if LinkedIn throttles back organic outreach, and begins to charge high amounts for paid messengers... then what will happen?
Prediction 7: LinkedIn will become a more expensive channel to use, so the bottom of the market will drop out.
The bottom of the market will drop out. All of the LinkedIn providers charging $250 per month to run outreach campaigns will be wiped out. Their clients can't afford advertising budgets and management fees.
This means people will be left to do a small amount of organic outreach on LinkedIn, by hand, themselves. I anticipate that the daily throttle will eventually settle around 10-25 organic connections per day.
This will knock out a lot of the "noise" on LinkedIn, as many people who are hiring these cheap LinkedIn providers or using automation bots will no longer be relevant.
Effectiveness will improve for high-quality providers at the top of the market
Costs will rise and the bottom of the market will drop out.
This may seem scary at first, but it is actually a good thing.
Prediction 8: Effectiveness of LinkedIn, as a sales channel, will improve as costs rise.
For those who remain, and who can afford to pay LinkedIn's expensive costs, will find themselves in a LinkedIn world different than what we experience today.
There will be far less noise- Far less crappy spammers who write you a novel of a sales letter.
Instead, LinkedIn will become a place where you can go and trust, and you will receive a handful of pitches per week, but not countless, non-relevant pitches from spammy robots.
As the cost increases, so will the efficacy.
So LinkedIn, as a sales channel, will not die. It will, instead, evolve.
These are just predictions
There you have it. Those are the predictions of a LinkedIn expert who spends far too much time working in and talking to people about this platform.
As I mentioned, we have run over 250+ Linkedin outreach campaigns at Lead Cookie. While running these campaigns, we have seen the platform evolve, and I have had countless conversations with key individuals in the LinkedIn ecosystem.
These are not facts. And I may be wrong about some of these, but this is what I believe is coming to the best of my knowledge.
I don't anticipate many of these changes to come fast, but over the next few years, I do see these rolling out over time.
Have thoughts or feedback? Leave a comment below.
Want to utilize LinkedIn outreach as a sales channel before the costs go up? Reach out and contact us today.
