How to use LinkedIn for B2B customer acquisition

Are you also guilty of wasting LinkedIn's amazing customer acquisition potential?

LinkedIn is an amazing platform to acquire new B2B customers. Not only does it have over 850 million user and over 58 million companies are present on LinkedIn. It also makes cold messaging so readily available, giving you direct access even to people you have connected with via InMail, if you pay for premium memberships!

And this is where it's so easy to go wrong and waste the incredible potential to acquire new customers.

Clear benefits of InMail over Email

Compared to sending unsolicited cold emails, unsolicited InMails have significant advantages:

• No spam filter - you can be sure your InMail reaches your target if they are an active user

• Potential customers can get a personal impression of you (picture, profile text) and your experience

• Statistics show that InMail has 2.5x higher open rates than emails (same content).

• And for response rates, the factor is considered to be between 5-10x higher.

Therefore, compared with cold emails, InMail is such a tempting tool to send out the same old cold messages just with somewhat better results. No wonder so many sales people fall for it and waste the true potential of LinkedIn.

Show your value - to your direct contacts and their contacts

"A sale happens when you solve your customer's problem". This trusted old sales mantra is now more true than ever. Buyer and decision maker get bombarded with messages, while the number of decision maker involved in a purchase is increasing, especially in difficult financial times.

Therefore building trust and showing the ability to deliver value is becoming more and more important.

And hopefully you are already doing your best to show this ability in your cold messaging. If not, please read my blog post about cold messaging.

But cold messaging limits you severely in your ability to show value. After all you are intruding uninvited into your targets inbox, so you have to be short and to the point if you want to have a chance your message gets read and engaged with. Different studies indicate sweat spots for message length between 400 and 1'000 characters. You have read already over 1'700 characters in this post.

Therefore often underused strength of LinkedIn is its News Feed. I understand that many sales people still see content creation as something only influencer and 'wannabe' celebrities do. But if you truly understand your sales role as problem solver for your customers, then creating valuable content for them is part of it.

Like free samples or free testing periods it is part of showing your potential customers that you are capable to create value. But different from the afore mentioned tools you can deliver it earlier in the sales process - even before messaging your customer and thereby showing your customer that you bring value before you start actively selling to them.

If you do it very well, it will actually generate inbound sales requests, meaning customers contact you with requests. But even if you don't manage to achieve this level, your content still has two benefits:

• Contacts are more likely to already have a positive association with your name

• When someone engages with your content, their entire network can see your content

• When checking your profile customer can see your activity and see that you have provided content that shows your ability to deliver value

Direct messaging is significantly stronger

During different sales campaigns for my clients I have compare the effectiveness of reaching out to a contact via messaging vs. reaching out to a non-contact via InMail. The results were clear - my direct messages to contacts had 7x higher response rate than InMails.

I also found that through direct messaging I could actually reach buyer, who were either not on LinkedIn (yes, despite 850m members that's possible) or whom I didn't find in my search. Simply by connecting with their colleagues and sending them a direct message, outlining the benefit I want to bring to their company and asking them to refer me to the right person.

I have asked to be referred to the right person through many different media in the past - email, InMail, phone calls - but direct messaging easily beats even the direct phone call in that respect.

The only drawback is - it can take time. In some cases it took up to 1 month until I suddenly out of the blue got a nice response with a referral to the right contact. But it's was worth it.

Steadily grow your network

One of the reasons I hear from sales people why they believe these 'free' methods don't work for them is that their network is too small, that they can't connect with the right people and they don't know how to grow their network.

When I decided to use LinkedIn as a platform to acquire customers I had 150 contacts. Two years later I had over 8'000. I have an acceptance rate of contact requests of close to 50%.

What it takes is dedication and some 'easy-to-use' strategies. Just get started and feel free to reach out on LinkedIn to discuss how to use it to your advantage.