LinkedIn is one of the most powerful networks available to salespeople, with over 800 million members across 200 countries.

But unfortunately, most people still don’t know how to use it to its full potential and get the most out of it when it comes to prospecting.

LinkedIn is an excellent place to connect with customers but it takes more than liking or tagging to build a network.

Sales professionals can use LinkedIn for sales prospecting, building relationships, finding content for sales conversations, and even automating outreach. In this article we will cover some tips and tricks to make LinkedIn work harder for you and help you become a social selling beast in 2022.

These are the topics we will cover:

• Why LinkedIn should be part of your sales strategy
• The best email lookup tools for LinkedIn
• How to use AI to optimise your LinkedIn outreach 
• LinkedIn Connection Request Tips and Templates
• Who to follow on LinkedIn
• Building a personal brand on LinkedIn 

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Why you should be using LinkedIn for sales outreach

To kick things off, here are some compelling statistics about LinkedIn and why it should be a core part of your sales strategy:

• 800 million people use LinkedIn, from 57 million companies 
• 40% of monthly users use LinkedIn daily
• Over 10% of users are key influencers or decision-makers
• LinkedIn makes up more than 50% of all social traffic to B2B websites & blogs
• It’s the best social platform for lead generation according to Hubspot
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The best email lookup tools for LinkedIn

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Smartwriter

Smartwriter enables you to gather 1,000s of qualified leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free through their Google Chrome Extension.

As well as their email, you also get deeply enriched personal and company data such as their company address or posts that lead has recently engaged with, further helping you to personalise outreach.

Smartwriter also has paid plans starting at $59 per month, but this also includes their AI powered outreach and copywriting tools which help automate email and LinkedIn outreach. 

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Snovio

With Snovio’s Google Chrome extension, you can fill your sales funnel with targeted leads faster with automated lead generation, whilst bringing down the price-per-lead.

In addition, the quality of your new and existing contacts is easy to control with their 7-tier verification, meaning campaign deliverability can be as high as 98%!

Snovio also offers a bunch of other tools including email automation, email verification, pipeline management, marketing campaign management and much more, all starting at $39 per month with a free 14-day trial. Not bad at all.

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LeadLeaper

‍LeadLeaper is another Google Chrome extension and with their free tier, you get 100 credits per month, not too shabby! It’s not as reliable as other tools like Snovio, but it can’t hurt to have LeadLeaper alongside another more premium email searching tool for LinkedIn.

Paid plans start at $29 per month, but it has limited functionality compared to other tools.

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Lusha

There’s a reason why Lusha has over 800,000 customers.

You can instantly access contact details and B2B company information from within your LinkedIn, as well as your Gmail inbox or B2B websites. By installing Lusha’s web-browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, they claim to shorten your sales cycle and help you close more deals. It’s also GDPR compliant which is very important for all businesses across Europe.

They do offer a free plan, but it only includes 5 credits per month and the next plan up starts at $99 per month, so it’s definitely more premium than other tools on the market. However, Lusha claims their accuracy is the highest in the industry - with 81% accurate phone numbers & emails.

You can find our full list of email finding tools in our free list of sales tools and resources here.

LinkedIn Connection Request Tips

LinkedIn users can include a message with a LinkedIn connection request for free. But these messages are limited to 300 characters, so every letter counts! 

How do you get people to accept them?

• Keep it short and to the point
• Don’t try and sell here, save it for later 
• Mention a mutual connection as this can increase trust
• Take time to personalise beyond their name and company
• Be human with your tone of voice - keep it light and friendly
• Give them a reason to accept and reply - complimenting their recent LinkedIn post for example
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How to use AI to optimise your LinkedIn outreach

The rise of AI and automation has led to huge changes in the sales industry. You’re now able to increase and automate LinkedIn connection requests as explored in the previous section, as well as automating your outreach to those connections.

‍Smartwriter is one tool that can help you to automate your outreach with LinkedIn connections. It also uses its AI technology to help you generate copy for your messaging.

‍Dux-Soup is the most popular LinkedIn automation tool that combines lead generation with outreach. Dux-Soup automatically engages with the prospects you select on LinkedIn. It endorses their skills, sends them personalized connection requests and multiple, delayed, personalised direct messages.

It does this on your behalf, from your browser, providing you with full control and visibility of the activity in your LinkedIn account. You can get started for free, or go with their Pro Plan for just $12 per month, making it one of the cheapest LinkedIn tools out there.

‍Expandi claims to be the go-to, world’s safest LinkedIn automation tool and a direct Dux-Soup alternative.

It is a cloud-based tool that gives you a dedicated IP address and also mimics human behaviour. Meaning, with most LinkedIn tools (like Dux-Soup), your IP is different each time you log in and LinkedIn thinks you’re logging in from different places. This is not the case with Expandi, it makes sure that your outreach isn’t blasting out 100 messages in 5 minutes (which is how many accounts get suspended).

They offer a free 7-day trial before trying to upgrade you to a paid plan, which starts at $99 per month.

So which one should you go for? It will most likely come down to your budget and the integrations you need with your CRM. We’d suggest giving them each a try and seeing which works best for you. 

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Who to follow on LinkedIn

We recently wrote a blog post about The Best Sales Influencers to Follow in 2022 including the likes of Will Allred and Charlotte Johnson - you should check it out!

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Building a personal brand on LinkedIn 

This will take time, so don’t expect to become an overnight success on LinkedIn. To get started though, here are 10 tips to make your LinkedIn profile stand out.

Once you’ve jazzed up your profile, the next step is to become an engaged member of the LinkedIn community. But what does that look like?

Firstly, building your LinkedIn network simultaneously builds your personal brand. To do this, connect on LinkedIn with trusted friends, former colleagues, classmates, industry leaders, vendors, and other professionals. And don’t be shy about asking your contacts for introductions to people in their networks.

Then try posting content. Sounds scary but running polls, asking questions to your connections and sharing your opinion on relevant topics can create conversations and increase the reach of your profile - all whilst building your personal brand. Sharing posts that your company has posted is also something you can do, but try to avoid relying on this tactic too often.

If you're looking to work with an expert on this, then we recommend getting in touch with Joe at WOAW.‍

If you really want to stand out from the crowd, record a quick video rather than typing a long wordy post. They earn on average, three times the engagement of text posts, so being brave can really pay off.

Finally, meaningfully engage and interact with other people’s content such as influencers, close connections and even potential customers. Avoid hard-selling your company though, this rarely works.

Good comments will often lead to thought-provoking conversations that showcase your know-how and expertise. As salespeople, we should aim to educate on our domain where we can.