LinkedIn Lead Generation on Steroids – Vaibhav Sisinty, Klook, Ex-Uber
Vaibhav Sisinty is the Head of Marketing at Klook. He is an Ex-Uber growth hacker. Vaibhav is a growth hack coach, trainer, and a very influential speaker. He is the founder of sisity.com, which consultation firm for exponential growth for startups.
How do you go about generating leads on LinkedIn?
For LinkedIn, this is what most people do while trying to generate a lead. You send an invite. If you think the person is a prospect and you, most of the time, you don’t have any note. If you have, it will have something like “Hey, I found your profile interesting.” or some random note like that, which is spammy and which is cliched and repetitive.
The other person doesn’t care who you are; they probably accept you as well. And out of a hundred invites that you send, 30 will get approved. And the moment they recognize what you do is send a message, copy paste a high level,
3000-word essay. Then say in the memo, “if you’re interested, let me know. “
Every day I get on LinkedIn, I get bombarded by sales pitches. I have no problem with sales pitches as long as they are right. I get bombarded for sales pitches about random B2B tools. Random things which are not related to me, and this happens, right?
What you have to do is relationship building, so let me tell you one way of doing it, right. I’m going to keep it very straightforward. You send an invite back with a personalized note. How can you personalize a letter? You can talk about multiple things, things that are in commonality.
Let’s say you are a marketer. The person is a marketer as well. So what do people use in marketing? So you can talk about, Hey, I extensively use Google analytics or extensive use of Facebook ads. And I’ve just figured out the right way of campaign budget optimization. I would love to jam with you and see if there’s anything that we could figure out together.
Find common ground and that common ground. It cannot be broad. If not able to find common ground. Are the people you want to connect to creating content on LinkedIn? Have they shared anything on LinkedIn? All you have to do is find something that they wrote very recently.
Let’s say I talk about, I spoke about, you’re sending me a custom note. I spoke about Facebook acquiring 10% of the equity stake in Jio. You can talk about it.
“Hey Bill, I found an article on the Facebook acquisition of Jio, and I find it very interesting. We’d love to get in touch.“
Now I know for a fact someone who send me an invite has put in some effort.
8% of the total invites that go out have a personalized message. So the moment you put a message, your chances of getting accepted already goes up. Put a very personalized message; the chances go for triples or becomes four X of it.
The moment they connect, you don’t send them a sales pitch. My friends, if you send them a sales pitch, it’s the same story all over again, right?
What you do instead is send a thank you note is send a message in which introduces you to them. What has presented you to your leads? A very classic example that I usually use for my clients is that I ask them to share three things. Three things that they typically are, you have acquired or three interesting things about them.
For example, I love home automation, and if I’m connecting with a growth hacker or automation marketer, he might connect about it so you can say, “Hey, you know what? I love growth hacking. I love automation, and most of the things are automated. That is completely about my life.“
Number two, you know what? I talked about something personal.
“Hey, you know what? I suck at education. < something around that>.“
And number three, then you talk about work, but indirectly.
“You know what? I worked for this company plus, and last year I was the salesman of the year.“
You’re not pitching, you’re just talking about it, right? And then you ask a question. You want a response from them, right? You ask the matter saying, “I would love to know more about you.”
You’re not pitching again. You’re talking about yourself. Introducing yourself and the moment your prospects respond, you have a human conversation and try to get them on a call again, don’t copy-paste sales messages.
People are not on LinkedIn to get sold, okay? People are there to connect with people. And then if they don’t, 90% of the people who are doing LinkedIn outreach, never follow up. Please follow up.
Money is in the following. Funny is not in the messages. You follow up three or four times, and if you are, they’re not able to respond, then you end the sequence that is, it’s not working out.
Then it’s okay. There is this sequence, which will give you ten times better results in this. But many times, this will fail as well because you know why? Because you want to start evolving. We don’t want to be sold. We know for a fact that we are getting sold, so we need many touchpoints.
As they say, seven is a minimum touchpoint that you need for a person to
make a sale for you to make a sale. But your, your sales could be getting them on a call, right? Getting them impatient. But these days, the number of touchpoints would probably be 19, not nine or seven anymore.
Hence, you create more touchpoints. How do you generate more touchpoints? It is the Holy grail. Again, the process is the same. You send a person that is not the person who connects upon acceptance. Send your connection a thank you message. And if the person replies, you can again have a conversation. What happens to the person doesn’t respond. Don’t send them a followup message yet. Go to his LinkedIn, engage with his content, like his content post, drop up, drop a comment on his published post. Add some, add something valuable. So the person is noticing that you, as a person, exists in his network. You have to do that.
After you send, engage with this content, and then you post a followup message again. Let’s say the person is still not replying. He could be busy, or he could be ignoring. He doesn’t care about you.
If he replies, that’s okay. You can talk about him and convert him. But what if he doesn’t answer? Go and endorse his top three skills. Why recommend his top two skills? The moment you recommend his top three skills, you are going in as a notification on his LinkedIn notification bar. So one touchpoint is going up again.
This sequence has a very, very good chance that he must have already visited your profile if you are senior message or senior comment or high-level endorsement skills, which is a huge thing if you have optimized your profile as a funnel.
If you feel, your LinkedIn profile is acting as a website, and it says what he already knows about your business, about you, and then you send a followup message again.
Follow the sequence. If you do three follow up messages with engaging with your prospect and endorsing your skills and engaging with this content, that’s a total of nine touchpoints.
It converts like crazy. Now you might say this looks complicated. How would I do this? There’s another way if you want to push this on steroids, right? What you could do is create your content. The moment he visits your profile, the creative content that you create will be visible to him.
Before even sending him an invite, you can start engaging with this content before to increase the chances of heat increase. He accepted your invitation.
So think out of the box. Think about touchpoints. Think about how you can make the person feel that he knows you before you send him a message. That’s when he’s going to respond or is not going to see your face. And this my friends, how you get replies.
You can automate the shit out of things. For that, if you ask me how to do automation if you say that you could do something like that. You could use the LinkedIn helper, Ducksoup, or any Chrome extension like that, which are readily available on Google.
And you think you’re an automator.No, you’re wrong. You’ll get out of your account every dime, if not immediately. But definitely. So, when you do automation. Either you figure it out yourself by getting banned multiple times and eventually getting to the point where you understand how to do it too. The other way is to take up a course.
AMA with Vaibhav Sisinty
The following is excerpts from the AMA session with Vaibhav.
Do you leverage LinkedIn for outreach from the platform?
You can do that as well, but the whole point is when you’re trying to find people on LinkedIn, the most important thing is finding the right people. Many people think if you get an email, you can hit up with a cold email campaign. They fail to get high results. Build a process on LinkedIn. You’ll get better responses here as well.
That’s one more touchpoint to add. You could take it the next level by actually looking for the personal email address and build a custom audience on Facebook and start showing them an assessment if you have the size of the audience, which is decent sized and create lookalike audiences on top of it. Many people say B2B businesses are drawn out. Facebook ads say, who. As long as you find your target audience, you can.
Even with a personalized message, not everyone is responding. What do you think can be the problem?
Your messages are not customized. I mean, you’re messages, that is not good enough. That’s the reason why people are not responding.
As a platform buyer, do you think LinkedIn is still relevant?
For InMails again, it’s a classic cold mailing approach. They don’t know who you are.
You’re sending them a sales message. They’re not going to respond. How many InMails have you acknowledged? Answer this question to me. That’s the whole point unless and until you find something to bank on. Let’s say I’m looking for this water bottle, and when someone gives me a solution on how I can get a water bottle in five minutes, I’m not going to respond to either.
You have to be super target focused, which is challenging to do it on LinkedIn or not sure the customer, naturally your prospect, most of your people are B2B business owners. You don’t play the game of skill. You play the game of value. So, and that’s where the nurturing comes into the picture. Make them your fans before you start sending them.
What is the right amount of connection to build credibility?
Connections don’t build credibility. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t matter how many contacts you have. That is one way of looking at it. It is my content, the engagement on content, builds credibility. Yes. If you’re creating a piece of content and a hundred people like it, then definitely it’s building credibility, but you having 50,000 people who are following you and your content getting like five likes is not credible.
How do you build the right profile?
I have a five-step formula that I follow. Have a lovely Photograph today, understand who your target audiences and know how you can find them on LinkedIn. That’s also very important. You see, it’s navigator using that, search, and find your target audience. Once you find your TG, clean up your LinkedIn profile because you usually have many people who are not relevant to your audience, which hits up your engagement rate. Three is connected with the right people with the custom messages and follow the sequence that I’ve built out, right? Hit them up with multiple touchpoints once you have all these settings and create good content. Once you have all these four things in place, you are going to fly. If your profile is optimized, it will talk to the customer.
Is it advisable cold mailing while sending the invite?
Don’t send an invite without a personal note because only 8% of invites that go out have a private memo. So the moment you have a personal message, you are already better than other, other 90 other 92 invites that are going out. Now the person, not if the quality of the person knows where to go up, rather than being the generic one, the chances of them accepting you get better and better.
How important is it for salespeople to have a personal brand on LinkedIn?
Does it depend on how do you look at it as a personal brand? If you are a classic Customer Success Manager at Ampliz, you might want to know, like, whom you might want to represent. Would you put Ampliz more than your brand if you’re trying to sell? Because I probably wouldn’t buy buying from Ampliz because you’re not that big. But if you’re a reliable person and let’s say need not be Putin or some big guy like that, okay, then the personal brand is going to sell and more than your corporate brand.
Your top two techniques to sell on LinkedIn?
There’s only one technique. Good content. Like there’s 30,000 people you can, you can send invitations to people and get connections after 30,000 you’re locked. You cannot add more people. You can remove and add people, but 30,000 is the limit. After that, the only way to scale is by people following you. Why would people follow you? Either you’re a celebrity or you create great content that people would want to stay in touch with you. The way I scaled my profile to 135K followers is by creating useful content.
The popularity of online sessions and webinars have increased sharply. Do you think the demand and trend of organizing online meetings too often or for marketing and sales would remain high?
I mean it has become popular all of a sudden because people are at home now, they have Gmail, you’re not commuting, you’re not doing anything. You have a lot of extra time. So, it’s popular right now, but this could be the start of a change by the way because all of a sudden, people have realized how critical informative sessions like this could be. So that turn up rates of these sessions, I have a feeling that will go up because of the high-level information shared.
How do you get the most out of the sales navigator?
Since I feel it has limited functionality and not worth investing. LinkedIn sales navigator can change your business if you can use it right. It can change your business because no tool is comparative to something like this. On Facebook, when you’re trying to attract, let’s say my target audience is an entrepreneur sitting out at San Francisco who has a startup. Which is a small startup, and he’s a founder.
For me, simple four filters. If I want to find this audience on any other social network, it’s almost impossible. I have to spend a ton of ads to optimize my ads eventually to get there. But on LinkedIn, you can do it with four clicks only on sales navigator, the headcount of the company(one to 10) keywords(founder), location(San Francisco), and industry(internet). Done, you have your list. It is potent. It’s funny when people say it’s okay, it’s not worth the money. It’s what, four times the money.
How does Lempod work, and how do you game LinkedIn using Lempod?
Lempods don’t work. LinkedIn is detecting patterns. Lempod was working very well initially, and I gave them a testimonial as well, but it’s not working as excellently as it used to be. And I stopped using it as well because I feel there will be problems later on.