How to Build a B2B Lead Generation Funnel using LinkedIn
(Transcript taken from Video)
Hey, everyone, just sitting here on a beautiful Saturday morning working on a LinkedIn outreach funnel for one of our clients and thought this might be really useful for you all out there. And so after I get done showing you this, if you want this, let me know, just shoot me a DM and I’ll fire over not just the processes, but I’ll fire over the whole funnel for you as well.
So you can take a look at that and implement this if you want. Obviously, we all know being on LinkedIn is a really, is, it’s a powerful platform. I mean, you’ve got decision-makers here. You’ve got, you know, all kinds of people that are interacting. You can see who they are, who they work for their titles.
You know what they’re interested in, where they’ve been in the past, it’s just a really powerful platform. And so if you plan your outreach correctly and you’re not pesky and annoying, then LinkedIn can be really, really powerful as a sales tool. So one of the things that we do for clients is we build out their sales processes and outreach funnels specifically in LinkedIn.
So I wanted to show you kind of one of those today, this specific funnel was built for one of our clients that’s actually trying to reach advertising and marketing agency owners. They have a unique development product that is stateside and can be used by agencies to kind of help streamline and make their development processes more efficient.
So that’s who we built this out for, but this will literally work for anyone. We use this same funnel, a lot for financial companies, brokers, sales reps, Business Development Reps, etc. So this can be really useful and beneficial for them as well, or pretty much anybody. So obviously when you’re looking at LinkedIn, you’ve gotta think about who you’re reaching.
Researching Your Audience
So the first thing you’re gonna wanna do is, is research your audience, who are you trying to reach? You know, in this case it was agency owners and it was a very specific set of agency owners. We were looking for executives, specifically agency owners, but we did dabble and move over into more of the high level executives at some agencies, but you’re really gonna wanna research your audience, get it tight.
I’ll do another video at some point on, on how to actually do the searches in LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get better at doing that. So you can target a little bit better. After you’ve done your research on your audience, you’re gonna want to craft your messaging. And so I’ll show you that just here in a minute and then of course, after you’re done craft, crafting your messages and deciding how to bring value to your client, then you’re gonna wanna build your sequences out.
And then you launch your launch campaign. So a lot of people will ask about software and want to know “what do you use to do this”? This can be done with any LinkedIn automation software pretty much, or it could be done manually if you have time to do that.
You can fire this manually if you’re trying to really reach a small group of people, or maybe you have more of an account-based marketing (ABM) approach, where you’re really going after four or five key clients, you could probably do this manually, but we do suggest automating this.
Setting Up Your Messaging Sequence
So the next couple days, week one, whatever you wanna call it, you’re gonna focus on your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What they look like. Second, you’re gonna focus on your messaging. What are the pain points that your audience deals with on a daily basis? Then you’re gonna try to figure out how do I, how can I bring value to these people?
And a lot of times people will think, well, my product brings value. I don’t need to bring value that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes. Your product might bring value, but how can you bring value to these people outside of your product? What content can you give them? What. Have you found useful that you can share with them anything to bring value so that you’re not just another salesperson out there, you know, trying to gain a, a foothold.
After that we’re gonna build out the sequence the sequence, and that’s what I’m gonna show you here in our funnel software. So obviously once we have our audience and in this case, it was a pretty large audience of 1500 people. The first thing we’re gonna do is send an invitation. To your main audience and that invitation really needs to consist of just an introduction.
Very simple. Mention their name… Hey, so, and so notice we’re both in the banking marketing space and wanted to reach out. Connect and that’s pretty much as simple as it gets. You just wanna make sure you mention their name and make sure that you, they understand, you know, what industry they’re in.
Anything more than that. And it’s, it’s not even gonna show up in their invites cuz LinkedIn cuts most of it off. And most people don’t even hit that more to find out what that message says. So keep it really short and simple. What we’re gonna do from there. As we’re gonna wait a day. Well we gotta wait for them to connect first.
So once they connect with us or once they accept that invite we typically wait a day and then once we’ve let that kind of sit for a day, we’ll send our first message. And that first message is going to be the introduction to who you are and a little bit about yourself and kind of really soft, not salesy.
This is where we see the most mistakes made. By most people that reach out on LinkedIn is they immediately go to the sale. And try to, you know, they’ve got them now they’ve accepted their invite. Now they just wanna pounce and that’s just that’s just not gonna work. We’ve had people come to us and say, LinkedIn messaging doesn’t work.
We take a look at their messages. They literally send one message and it’s basically dumping the product on them and trying to book a call. Or demo on that first message. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Would you actually do that? I think the answer to that is no, you really want to know a little bit more about this person, if they’re real, what the product is, not a lot of responses on the first attempt. We do get some because we’ve written it well, but most of the time people want to know… is this an automation?
Are they gonna continue to try to connect with me? That first message goes out. We wait three days. If they do not respond to that, then we will send a second message. If they do respond, then we basically have two different response templates set up here. Most of the time you’re going to get one of two responses.
Your first response is going to be. Yes to send me more product information. If you happen to be asking for that or you’re going to get tell me a little bit more about yourself or they might have a question. So it’s a very soft response to that. We have this “response one” template. And “response number two”.
Response number two is actually something a little bit more direct. So if someone says anything out of the box that is not something that we expect that’s gonna be response to in this case. And I can go a little bit more into that on another video what those responses are and how they come in.
We typically set up two responses if it’s completely outta the box and we don’t know how to answer it then we typically fire it back over to the client and let them handle it manually. But in this case, you’re probably doing this yourself. So you’ll know how to respond to those. So that second message is typically just a follow up that says.. “Hey, just following up on my last message, let me know if you have a time to meet or let me know if you know if you receive my first message something that just kind of follows up and asks them to look back at that first message. So this is where we get majority of our responses is this second message with just a simple follow up to make sure they receive the first message.
The reason for that is because of what I said earlier, most. Sales people try to go in for the sale on the first message. And so if they don’t get a response, most people aren’t expecting a second. A second message and I don’t exactly have the stats on this, but there is a graphic out there that basically states the percentage of responses that are made based on the amount of times you’ve reached out.
And by far on the fifth and sixth message is where the most responses happen. So as we move, we’re gonna see more and more of this. We tend to see most of our messages on that third/fourth message in LinkedIn, but traditionally they say five or six. So that second message is just a follow up, trying to get them to understand that you’re a real person and that you’re just following up to see if they received the first message.
So obviously with LinkedIn not being a platform that people are on every day especially busy entrepreneurs and executives, we’re gonna give them some time to respond. And so we allow four days for the response and move into that third message. If they don’t respond, we’re gonna move into that third message.
And the third message again, is another quick follow up that just says, Hey, reaching out one more time, you know, checking to see if you received my message as a reminder, and then you’re gonna put whatever was in that first message. Again, if they respond, we’re gonna move them out of the funnel. If they do not respond, we’re gonna give them a little bit more time, five days. Then we’re gonna send what we call the final content message. This final content message is basically a message that has a really valuable piece of content in it. This lets them know, Hey, look, I’m not just looking for a sale I’m really looking to bring value to you. So even if you don’t respond and you happen to be reading these, here’s a great piece of content that I think could help you out.
And that’s kind of the sign off. So that message typically starts with, Hey, I noticed you haven’t responded, you may or may not be getting these. I’m gonna go ahead and reach out via email and I’ll show you how that works here in a minute. In the meantime, here’s a piece of content that I think you might find valuable. Hopefully it helps in some way.
I’m not a copywriter. So , that’s not the best way to put it, but you get the point. We fire that message off and then what we do is we connect with another outreach software, Lemlist or something along those lines and we will actually pull that email from LinkedIn and into one of those softwares.
We will reach out if LinkedIn allows us to pull that email, which we find about 75% – 80% of the time, we can find that email through LinkedIn. We’ll pull that email, put that into our email software, fire out an email, and that email simply states, Hey, I’ve been trying to reach you on LinkedIn. Would still love to chat. I sent you a piece of content on there. Thought I’d throw it in here too. Hopefully it’s valuable for you. Let me know if you have time to connect and what that email does is let them know we’ve been trying to connect with him on linked. And if they go look at their LinkedIn, they’re gonna see that very, very few people take the time to send messages like this.
So anyone that doubted when you first sent this first message, if you were real, has no doubt now, after they got this email that you are a real person that’s trying to reach them in some way. As we move down the funnel, the obvious goal here is an appointment set.
We’re trying to get an appointment set on the calendar where we can talk to a decision maker and get in front of them with the product, the service, the demo, whatever that might be. And so what we do is, if they’ve hit this appointment page and they do not book a time on the calendar, Typically, what we’ll do is throw them into a retargeting funnel on Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads.
We don’t typically use linked in for retargeting, sometimes it’s beneficial depending on the budget, but not this particular client. It’s kind of expensive so we’ve gone this route because we wanna hit them everywhere. But LinkedIn, since we’re already hitting them on there to try to get them back to that calendar page, if we can get them back to that calendar page and get them, booked through that retargeting is very cheap, and so that’s a great, and effective way to get people back into the funnel and booked. And then obviously the goal at the end of this is how many people can we get to actually book a demo for the product service whatever and get something closed. For this particular client, we are reaching out to 1500 people each month and you can kind of see how it flows through here.
That would actually give us basically 45 booked appointments when you include retargeting in these efforts and at the end of the month, this client should have six new clients based on this and this is a very conservative funnel as well. So six new clients and that’s gonna bring them $30,000 in recurring revenue, just from those six clients.
So if they do this month over month, that’s gonna bring $30,000 in recurring revenue from this one simple funnel and so this is why LinkedIn outreach is so powerful, but it has to be done right. And it has to be done in a certain sequence, but it can be done. So anyway, once again, if you want this DM me, I’ll shoot it over to you.
And you’re free to use this however you want. If you have any questions about it, feel free to DM me as well. And I’ll chat later.
