Generating leads is a key part of any sales and marketing strategy.
But not all leads are created equal.
That’s why it’s important to focus on generating high-quality leads for your business. In this blog post, we’re going to cover 10 proven strategies for generating massive amounts of quality B2B sales leads.
Optimize Your Profile
First impressions are even more important online than they are in person, and you need to make yours quick. That’s why dialing in your profile is so important. Think about what information each section of your profile conveys, and make sure those messages come through loud and clear.
The Headline
Too many people make the same mistake when they write their LinkedIn headlines. They waste several sentences listing facts about themselves, instead of getting right to the point.
Potential clients and partners don’t need to know what kinds of books you like. They don’t need to know your entire job history right off the bat. That’s not what they’re looking for.
Instead, use your headline to explain what you can do for them.
How do you do that? It’s easy.
When writing your headline, follow this simple formula:
I am a [EXPERTISE TITLE] and I help [CLIENTS] [SOLVE THESE PROBLEMS.]
Some examples:
I am a culinary consultant, and I help chefs innovate their stale menus.
We are restaurant marketing experts, and we find cost effective opportunities for small restaurants.
I am a personal branding guru, and I help entrepreneurs develop a striking presence.
The Bio
Your LinkedIn bio is your chance to go a little more in depth about yourself. This is where you should list the achievements, awards, certifications, or other wins that set you apart from your competition.
But just like your headline, you want to avoid a dry list of facts.
Why?
Because it’s boring.
Your bio should read like a captivating short story that will keep your reader interested until the very end. You can accomplish this by using a very simple story structure: The hero (you), has a problem, adapts, and overcomes.
The Business Profile
If you’re operating a business, it’s likely you have a separate profile on Linkedin for that business. Make sure your business profile is prominently featured on your LinkedIn profile so your potential clients will see it. This page is where you want to highlight everything that your business has to offer.
Website Links
Last but not least (and this may be the most important step of all), triple-check that every link and email address on your page works. All of this work will amount to nothing if your leads can’t move on to the next stage of your funnel. I’ve personally seen businesses lose hundreds of thousands of dollars because of broken website links.
And trust me, it stings. Once it happens, there is no getting that business back. So take the extra time to double check.
Collect Endorsements
Endorsements are a form of social proof that go a long way in instilling confidence in potential clients. But endorsements do more than just demonstrate you’re tangible skillsets.
When someone leaves you an endorsement, they are going out of their way to do so. LinkedIn endorsements demonstrate that your clients are so thrilled with your work that they’re willing to go the extra mile for you. People don’t do that after a poor, or even mediocre experience.
Endorsements say, “Look at how many people found me enjoyable and easy to work with.”
Peer Endorsements
The first thing you should do, if you haven’t already, is to ask friends and family for endorsements of your top skills. It’s important that you only ask for endorsements in skills that you actually have.
Now, your friends are going to be tempted to go all out. They might want to endorse you for every possible skill under the sun. As tempting as that might be, it’s a bad idea.
Building trust with potential clients is one of the most important things you can do. A bunch of fake endorsements is going to confuse people at best, and at worst, might make them suspicious.
Ask your network for referrals, but keep it real. If you don’t have many endorsements on your profile, this can be a fast and simple way to give yourself a big boost.
Client Endorsements
If you have a history of happy clients, don’t be afraid to connect with them on Linkedin and ask for an endorsement. After you’ve connected you can reciprocate by endorsing them for anything that they handled particularly well, too.
If you haven’t automated this already, you should. Create a process that triggers when you are closing out contracts. Send an email asking for feedback and endorsements. Automating this process by building it into your system will strengthen your profile over time without adding any extra work on your end.
Respond To Profile Views
One of the most powerful and underutilized LinkedIn features is the ability to see exactly who viewed your profile. Each one of those people could be a potential asset to your network. And just because they peeked without reaching out, that doesn’t mean the opportunity is lost.
When reviewing the list of people who have looked at your profile over the past week, ask yourself these three questions:
- Is this person useful to me?
- Are they person credible?
- Will interacting with this person be beneficial right now?
- How can I add value to them?
If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, then shoot them a message. You don’t have to be aggressive or salesy at this stage. Just let them know that you saw that they were looking at you, and that you wanted to introduce yourself. Chances are they will let you know what brought them to your profile without you even asking.
Optimize Your Sales Funnel
What do you want someone to do when they’ve looked at your profile? Should they message you on LinkedIn? Visit your website to learn more about the services? If you’re unsure about what step people should take after viewing your profile, then I can guarantee the people looking at your profile aren’t sure either. Uncertainty means lost sales and opportunity in almost every situation, so this is a critical problem to fix.
Call To Action
Once you know exactly what you want a prospective client to do after checking out your profile, tell them. A clear, concise call to action will ensure that people don’t get lost along the way. If you want them to visit your website, say that. If you want them to message you, invite them to do so. It’s okay to get a little creative with your CTA, as long as it’s crystal clear what you are asking them to do.
Strategically Grow Your Network
Linkedin is a great tool for growing and building your network, but a focused and strategic approach is going to yield much better results than trying to connect with every person you come across.
Your Customer Avatar
If you don’t have your customer avatar dialed in, how could you possibly know who you’re talking to? Know who your customer is, what challenges they face, and where they’re hanging out online. Even if you don’t connect directly with your customers on Linkedin, (but you should, if you can) this customer avatar will inform your networking decisions going forward.
Connect with Thought Leaders
The first people you want to connect with on Linkedin are the thought leaders who are actively engaged on the platform. They are a great resource, not just for keeping your pulse on the industry, but for ideas on maximizing your own Linkedin activity. These thought leaders can be competitors, industry leaders, niche marketers, or anyone in between. Your goal is to become recognized as one of these thought leaders, so pay close attention to which people you find credible, interesting, and noteworthy, and ask yourself what about them caught your attention.
Develop a Content Strategy
Creating and sharing relevant and thoughtful content is a powerful strategy that accomplishes several things at once. Cementing your place as a thought leader, providing value to your customers, creating engagement are all ways to strengthen your reputation and image.
Your content strategy should consist of a mix of content that promotes your business, your own thoughts and ideas, and articles and posts created and shared by other individuals and businesses in your industry. Avoid creating content that is completely focused on you and your business.
It’s also important to ensure that your content will appeal to your customer avatar. Focus on giving them information and insights that are valuable and interesting to them instead of selling them on your product or service.
If you need ideas on what kinds of content to create and share, you can look to the other thought leaders and marketers that you’ve connected with.
Don’t copy them outright, but it can inform your decision about which types of content and which sources are available. Additionally, free resources like answerthepublic.com can provide incredible insight into what questions are being asked about your industry.
Content on LinkedIn can also serve your SEO strategy well, so keep that in mind.
Inbound and Outbound Selling
Always focus on the buyer and personalize your touch points. No two clients or businesses are the same, and your interactions with them shouldn’t be the same either. With that said, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with each interaction. Categorizing your leads to make sure you’re sending the right kind of message to each person is a great way to save time and maintain efficiency.
Inbound Selling
When someone reaches out to you via Linkedin you should know exactly what is going to happen next, which means preparing for a variety of scenarios. A potential client reaching out because they are ready to purchase will be very different from a person who is reaching out because they are curious about what you offer and want to learn more. When it comes to dealing with inbound prospects, it’s important that you don’t automatically treat each one like it’s at the same stage of your funnel. If they’re ready to purchase, help them do so as quickly and easily as possible. And if they need more connection and education, be ready to offer that in different forms as well.
Outbound Selling
Reaching out to prospective clients and new connections is a very different beast than communicating with inbound leads. While it’s generally a good idea to at least reply to every message you get on Linkedin, you should pick and choose who you are targeting with cold outreach, and take the time to personalize each message. According to LinkedIn’s Buyer First report, 90% of C-Suite executives don’t respond to impersonal B2B messages.
Above is an actual graph from my profile. This traffic is just from organic outreach Merely by interacting you increase the natural activity around your profile.
Referral Schemes
Leveraging your existing network for referrals can be a cost efficient way to generate new leads. However, simply asking people in your network to pass along referrals probably won’t be enough. At the very least you need to make sure that it is as easy as possible for people to refer you to others. And if you want to invest even more in this lead generation strategy, you can set up commissions, affiliate sales, or even free bonuses for current customers.
Word of mouth is one of the most persuasive forms of marketing possible, so investing time and effort in developing a cohesive and referral strategy will often yield a great ROI.
Use a CRM
Building a CRM into your process early is crucial to tracking and analyzing your funnel. If you’re not tracking your conversions then you can’t optimize your funnel, which means you’re leaving money on the table. The CRM software you choose will depend on your individual needs. Systems like Salesforce and Filemaker are extremely robust and customizable, but could be overkill for your specific needs. At GT Culinary we use Pipedrive, which offers all of the features we need. But if you’re looking for a low cost solution, project management tools like Clickup.com, or collaboration services like Airtable might work for you.
Split Test & Optimize
Once you start getting leads and prospects, it’s time to start split testing.
As a general rule you should focus on split testing one thing at any given time, though you might test multiple variations. Testing multiple changes at once can skew your results and can make it difficult to discern exactly what is responsible for any change in results.
You can split test different headlines, follow up scripts, emails, and more. But you can also split test the content you are posting on Linkedin. Over time you’ll start to notice patterns.
Maybe posting articles and posing a question gets more responses than posting without it. You might find that your audience reacts more to content with videos and less to content with photos.
Trends and industry stats are a great place to start, but their results may be different than yours, so it’s important that you test ideas and experiment so you can find ways to innovate and improve.
Personalize Everything
The personal touch is something far too few people spend time and effort on. Personalizing your communication is more important in the virtual world than it is in the real world.
You don’t have tone, body language, or the many other factors that come into play when you get to sit down with someone face to face. That means you need to make a deliberate effort to let them know you are speaking directly TO them and not AT them.
Personalizing your message can be as simple as referencing something on their website, mentioning a recent social media post, or referencing an article that they recently commented on or interacted with.
Letting them know that you are familiar with their work and that you know what they do goes a long way towards forming a bond early on.
Obviously remembering personal details about every lead can be really difficult to track and remember, which is where your CRM can be useful again. Include those details in a NOTES section about each lead, so when you refer back to them you know what has been mentioned in the past, allowing you to keep the conversation going like old friends, even if you’ve only connected once or twice a few months ago.
Leverage LinkedIn’s Organic Reach
The last bit of advice I will give you is to understand the power that is LInkedIn. LinkedIn gives you great potential for organic reach.
How else could you possibly have access to such powerful data?
Right now, at your fingertips, is a directory of every company in your country, including direct access to dozens, and sometimes hundreds of their employees. You can leverage all of this information in organic ways, which means without doing cold outreach to the individuals at that organization. Organic content isn’t often thought of as hyper targeted, but it absolutely can be.
If I were targeting a specific organization with organic content here’s how I would do it.
First, I would produce content that speaks to the employees, about their executives. The headline would read something like, “Does Your CEO Know That (insert your value proposition.)”
I would create content for each value proposition, which would give me a half dozen or so pieces of organic content.
Your goal with this content is to target the decision maker at the organization by creating content that their employees will feel compelled to pass along.
Finally, I’ll leave you with the best bit of advice I can think of: Remember to always put the buyer first.
As you move through these steps to optimize your LinkedIn profile and sales funnel, remember that your focus should be on how you can best serve your customers. The conversion metrics you are tracking are there to tell you how well you are doing. When you work through this process and make decisions based on helping your customer get what they need faster and more effectively than everyone else, everybody wins.
I’ll see you on LinkedIn.
