While cold email is a very effective outbound sales prospecting tool, it’s not the only channel you should use to engage with qualified leads.
Even with precise targeting and great messaging, it’s still a battle to win mindshare and stick out amongst the hundreds of outbound emails recipients likely get each day.
Combining LinkedIn social selling to your cold email campaign gives you an environment outside of the inbox to be unique, generate value, and build trust.
To increase your success with outbound sales, you should be multi-threaded by using social channels to influence buyers before using a direct sales channel.
LinkedIn Messaging Should Influence, Not Sell
Every channel has its own unique limitations, strengths, and rules of etiquette when properly using it for marketing or sales.
For LinkedIn, it’s about influence instead of direct sales.
Any positive interactions you can have with buyers outside of the inbox will help make you become more familiar, trustworthy, and authentic throughout their buying process.
Use LinkedIn to Nurture & Warm Up Leads
It’s becoming harder to use LinkedIn as a primary channel for direct sales outreach.
Since Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in June of 2016, they’ve made genuine engagement a major focus by decreasing automation, spam, or misuse in the ecosystem.
The best way to use LinkedIn for sales is to build context around your brand, add value, and create relationships while you leverage other outbound sales channels.
How do you do this? Introduce yourself, share content, and start relevant conversations. Be authentic, focus on generating value, and leave impressions buyers will remember.
By warming up leads on LinkedIn before you cold email, you gain the chance to leave an excellent first impression and position future conversations to your advantage.
Reference LinkedIn Messaging in Outbound Touches
By using LinkedIn for social selling, you gain additional events and data points you can reference in your cold emails to help bring context about your brand.
Taking this approach helps differentiate your LinkedIn outreach because it puts a name to a face and leverages real interactions to help start a sales conversation in the inbox.
For example, you could mention a recent conversation you both had in the comments section or highlight how many likes you’ve given their posts to help build rapport.
Conclusion
Cold messaging on LinkedIn is often used in the wrong way, causing LinkedIn outreach to quickly come off as unhelpful, repetitive, or spammy to buyers.
To counter this misuse, LinkedIn has begun rapidly evolving their algorithms, behavior tracking capabilities, and technology identification techniques to better remove abusers.
These changes are only the beginning. As time goes on, mass outreach with LinkedIn messaging will become harder to achieve and riskier to scale.
To differentiate yourself and create more meaningful interactions with buyers, you need to influence minds on social before transitioning leads to a direct sales channel.
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