The Best LinkedIn Lead Generation Techniques

In the past, we have had clients who were spending a fortune on other lead generation services but they weren’t getting the results that they needed to scale their businesses. 

Or they tried doing their own lead gen, but they didn’t have the time or expertise to really find quality prospects. 

Other clients have tried using inbound (like digital marketing, SEO, and content marketing), which does work but it takes time. 

So if you find yourself in a similar situation and are looking for leads RIGHT NOW, then you have to read this article.  

In it, we will share the exact Linkedin lead generation techniques we used to generate close to 5000 qualified leads for our clients last year. 

(Salesbread is a successful LinkedIn lead generation service with over 12 years of experience.

If you would like to skip the reading, hop on a free 15-minute strategy call with us, we would love to help you generate 1 qualified lead per day.)

Let’s dive in…

Important information to think about first

As a busy founder, you shouldn’t be focusing on finding new leads. 

This is a time-consuming process; Instead, you should rather be spending your time on closing high-value clients, improving revenue-generating assets, and setting company sales goals. 

But there are only two ways to really get this done. 

Either by:

• Creating your own in-house sales team 

Which can be expensive if you aren’t ready for the long-term commitment. Think about paying full-time salaries, training, and purchasing the right lead generation tools. This can cost 4 times as much as hiring a lead generation service. 

Or you could….

• Hire a professional Linkedin lead generation service like Salesbread. 

We don’t lock our clients into long-term contracts. You can choose how long you would like to partner up with us, and we cost less than hiring a full-time SDR. 

Here are the Linkedin lead gen techniques we use for 1 qualified lead per day:

Build a list of prospects who need what you’re selling – Here’s how we do it

The most important step in any Linkedin lead generation strategy is building a super targeted list of prospects. 

If your list isn’t perfect and you just target at random,  you aren’t going to have leads that convert. 

This is why a data-driven list is essential to our Linkedin lead generation service’s success. 

How do we do it?

Well first, we hop on an hour call with our clients and ask them which companies have purchased from them within the past 6 months. 

We look at this list intently and find patterns between paying customers.

For example, if you are selling to healthcare companies, we ask deeper in-depth questions to find your ideal target audience; 

Such as:

• Which healthcare companies have purchased from you? Is it insurance, clinics, hospitals?
• Were the healthcare companies that purchased from you in a specific location?
• What was the size of the company? Did they have 200 + hospital beds? Or more than 1000 employees?
• Did they have specific employees on their payroll? Such as marketers, social media experts, or specific experts like neurologists?

At Salesbread we use 34 different business attributes and signals that help us look for patterns. 

Here are some examples of categories and filters we use to narrow down your ideal prospects.

Once we find these patterns and know who to target, we then use different prospecting tools to help us find the correct data of either b2b companies or people that you should target. 

We use tools such as:

• Zoominfo
• Crunchbase 
• Bombora

Below is an example of how we would use Crunchbase to fund high-quality prospects:

Another tool that our Linkedin lead generation service can’t live without is Linkedin Sales Navigator. 

This is a very powerful tool, especially if you are looking to build a list of people at specific companies. 

So say now you have a list of health insurance companies that you would like to target, but you would like to reach out to CEOs or Senior-Level executives at these companies, we suggest using Sales Nav. 

We will plug each company into Linkedin Sales Navigator and filter by titles such as CEO and founder. 

See the example below:

We then take this step even further and filter this list by our client’s second-degree network and by recently posted (We will discuss this in greater detail further on in the article.)

So as you can see, if you want LinkedIn lead generation success you have to build a very detailed list of prospects. 

The problem with many companies out there is that they do very basic targeting and build lists of thousands of prospects, that aren’t refined; therefore they are hitting a target market that doesn’t need what you’re selling, or maybe even a market that can’t afford your service.

This just wastes your time and money. 

At Salesbread, we don’t do this. We would rather have a list of 50 super targeted prospects that say yes to a meeting than 1000 of prospects who are a bad fit. 

Our data-driven approach to list building is what get’s results. 

(If you would like to learn about how we build lists we also offer consulting services.)

Does this approach to list building work? 

It really does. We use this list-building approach for all our clients.

Have a look at our metrics below for a company called Connex Partners that we partnered up with:

This was what the CEO of Connex had to say:

Testimonial:

“As the CEO of a company that sells to Fortune 500 HR & healthcare executives, I knew my sales team needed the right lead gen partner to help hit our monthly targets.

We’ve worked with SalesBread for 14 months and they’ve been sending 7 of my employee’s hundreds of qualified leads. (1400+ leads total so far!) In short, their highly personalized outreach messages get replies. 

I would highly recommend them — especially if you’re targeting “busy, high net worth execs”.

Don’t send thousands of connection requests or prospecting messages

This is a big no-no. You might think that by sending messages every day to prospects or trying to connect with as many as possible might lead to success, but it doesn’t. 

Why?

Well firstly you don’t want to be known as a spammer and secondly, Linkedin could restrict or block your account. 

At Salesbread we only send 3 or 4 follow-up messages and wait 3 days between each follow-up.

We also only send a few messages per day, between 20 and 25 to be exact. 

NOT MORE than this. 

This ensures that Linkedin doesn’t block us and that prospects don’t get frustrated. 

Write well-researched personalized messages

The second most important step in any Linkedin lead generation process is to personalize outreach messages. 

This goes beyond adding a first name to your copywriting, but actually researching each prospect and writing something just for them.

Here’s an example:

If you have a look at this prospect’s Linkedin profile, there is quite a bit of personal information that you could use in your outreach message. 

As you can see he mentions his grandmother’s search for alternative medicines, and how he wanted to improve people’s health.

He even went as far as to study pharmacology and coding to build programs that people can use to educate themselves on alternative therapies. 

When it comes to writing your connection request, you could mention how his determination for helping people is extremely commendable.

Or you could share a commonality such as, how you are also an avid alternative healthcare advocate. You could even ask a question on how his program works exactly.

By using these personalized details in your outreach messages, you will surely capture the attention of your prospects. 

Why?

Because they can see that it’s not just some spammy sales message, but rather someone who has taken the time to show an actual interest. 

We call this a pattern interrupt. Prospects are so used to getting spam messages on Linkedin that they ignore most of them.

But if you use something personal about them, your message will stand out and they will reply. 

This video explains the CCQ method that Salesbread uses for our done-for-you lead generation copywriting. CCQ stands for compliment, commonality, and question. 

Personalization allows us to capture the reader’s attention and start conversations. This then brings us to our next technique…

Don’t be a sleazy salesperson

A few weeks ago I received a connection request from the person below. I accepted the request and immediately got this message in my Linkedin inbox. 

Yes, I do use Grammarly, especially for writing my articles…

But did I respond to this message? 

Nope…

The pitch was just too direct. I immediately noticed it was a sales message and just clicked out of it, without really reading what they were offering. 

Why? Because when I see a sales pitch my brain screams “ignore”. And guess what? Most people are exactly the same.

Notice there was no personalization, no pain point addressed, and no real value-added. 

Besides the cheap price. But this was also a red flag for me…

Why were they offering these tools for so cheap? How did they manage to do that? Was it a scam? 

So I ignored it. 

What we do at Salesbread is skip the sleazy sales pitch. In fact, we don’t sell at all in our outreach messages. 

Here are some examples of how we would connect with a prospect:

Notice, no sales pitch… Just a friendly message with personalization. It’s almost like starting a “friendship”.  People feel comfortable enough to reach out and engage and this opens up room for more conversations, which brings us to the next step…

Remember the 90/10 rule

In our messages, we only talk about ourselves 10% of the time, just for context. The other 90% of the message is just about the prospect. 

For example, you can say in your message: “For background, I’ve been helping health care insurance companies boost their marketing through video production services.”

And that’s all you need to say about what you do. The rest of the time complement the prospect, ask them questions and find out about their pain points. 

Follow up 3 times as a real person not as a bot

As mentioned before we only follow up 3 times and not more than that.

If someone hasn’t responded after you have messaged them 3 times, it probably means they aren’t interested in your service just yet. (This is especially true if you have also sent them emails.)   

Rather, take them off your list and focus on prospects who are showing an interest. You could also add the prospect who hasn’t responded at a later stage to a different campaign. 

We also reply to our prospects in real-time, as real people and not with automation tools. People are smart and they can quickly see when an automation tool has been used. 

Yes, sometimes automated messages can work, for example, if there is this option: 

The yes/no option makes it easy to respond. But most of the time, it’s better to respond in person. Linkedin is about building social connections and engagement.

We like to do this as real people and not robots. 

This is also a big reason for our success at Salesbread, we aren’t your usual run-of-the-mill Linkedin lead generation agency. 

We actually try to start real conversations with people, which will eventually lead to a booked sales meeting. 

Have a strong high commitment CTA – Always ask for a meeting

Finally, if you would like success in your outreach, never be afraid to ask for a meeting. Often people stall on being direct about setting up a meeting, but you shouldn’t. 

This helps the prospect know exactly what you want from them. 

 Here are some examples of high commitment calls to action that you should use in your LinkedIn lead generation campaigns: 

Ready to try these techniques out?

Linkedin is one of the best social media platforms for generating quality leads.

If you are tired of trying to find new business or just don’t have the time, we can help you for less than what you would pay to hire a full-time SDR.

Read some of these case studies if you are still not convinced that Salesbread is the go-to Linkedin lead generation service. 

All you need to do is get on a free 15-minute strategy call with us here and we will help you get 1 lead per day.