The Ultimate Framework for Developing a LinkedIn Sales Strategy
The ultimate framework for developing a custom LinkedIn sales strategy from scratch — along with all the tips, tricks, and tools you’ll need to succeed.
75-90% of LinkedIn users don’t respond to the average InMail. Why? Because when it comes to lead generation, most salespeople stick to the tried-and-true best practices that have supposedly worked for others.
But here’s the thing about best practices — they’re generic, overused, and don’t consider your specific circumstances. To really outperform your competitors on LinkedIn, you need a LinkedIn sales strategy that’s truly personalized, based on your industry, audience, goals, and budget.
This framework isn’t just a collection of tips and tricks like every other search result you see on Google. Instead, we’re here to give you the tools you need to come up with your own LinkedIn sales strategy. Want to know how to create a proven framework for your entire sales team on LinkedIn? Then keep reading!
Step 1: Plan key strategy components
A good sales strategy should answer key questions like “What is my company mission?”, “Who is my target audience?”, and “How will I measure the success of my campaign?” It should also outline the exact steps to achieving your sales goals with LinkedIn — from creating valuable content to sending connection requests to making a sales pitch. These are the components you’ll want to supply with your LinkedIn social selling strategy.
Strategy components make it easier to keep your entire sales team aligned and onboard new sales professionals. By planning for them in advance, you’ll also have clear goals for what you want out of your strategy sessions.
Step 2: Consider budget and timeline
Once you’ve identified the deliverables for your sales strategy, it’s time to figure out the resources you’ll need for each of them. Compare what you need with what you have, both in terms of your overall budget and timeline.
How much of your budget should you allocate for your sales strategy? According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, you shouldn’t be spending more than 7-8% of your annual revenue on sales and marketing if your revenue is lower than $5 million a year. However, the ideal number can vary considerably depending on your industry competition and growth stage. High-growth tech companies spend as much as 25-45% of their revenue on sales.
As you’re allocating resources for your sales strategy, consider:
- Salaries
- Software stack
- Advertisement costs
- Industry competition
- Revenue goals
It’s also important to consider how much time you have before you need to get your LinkedIn sales strategy live. If you’re short on time, you may want to consider adopting a few short-term sales tactics to keep things going while you work on implementing a proper long-term sales campaign.
Tip: try to be realistic about your budget and timeline as you compare them with the resources available and potential return on investment.
Step 3: Identify your buyer personas
A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal customer. It’s a compilation of the individual characteristics and pain points that make up your customer base — put together using careful research and verifiable data. A company can have more than one buyer persona, depending on the types of customers it targets.
The purpose of buyer personas is to keep your sales reps grounded and focused, so that they don’t get lost in the metrics and remember the essence of what motivates their customers. There are lots of details you could include in a buyer persona, such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Occupation
- Job title
- Interests
- Challenges
- Spending behavior
LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you lots of options to research and find people based on the buyer personas you’ve created. Once you have identified your buyer personas, a strong LinkedIn Sales Navigator strategy will help you identify them and send targeted messages to them. For example, LinkedIn profiles can provide insight into your customers’ pain points and what they care about. You can also use advanced search to find relevant people using their occupation or job title.
Step 4: Create a communication framework
A proper communication framework can serve as a cheat sheet for your entire sales team and prevent discrepancies in external messaging. Here’s the four-pronged framework we recommend to all our clients at CoPilot AI:
- Find qualified leads
- Send a connection message
- Build rapport with prospects
- Make your sales pitch
The first step is to prepare a list of qualified leads worth pursuing. This is where LinkedIn Sales Navigator really comes into play by offering an advanced search function that makes it unbelievably easy to pinpoint relevant prospects based on professional interests, job title, and more.
After that, it’s a matter of using personalized introductions to establish common ground with your prospects and make them feel at home around you. You can attach a customized note to each connection request you send and speak directly to your prospect’s challenges and needs.
Once you’ve got their attention, it’s time to get your prospects to take action with a relevant and contextual sales pitch. The pitch should focus on how your product can help solve their challenges rather than being an advertisement for the product itself. When crafting your sales pitch, it's important to tailor it to match your prospects' preferred communication style. One of the main downfalls in a sales pitch is that the rep is not communicating effectively with the prospect. To help you tailor your sales pitch effectively, check out this article about the four main communication styles.
Of course, no two businesses are alike, and you’ll need to customize this communication framework to work for your organization. Remember to put the entire framework into writing so that you can use it as a resource for onboarding new sales hires.
Step 5: Decide key performance indicators
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the different metrics tracked by your business to gauge the overall success of your sales and marketing efforts. At the end of every quarter, KPIs are evaluated for insight into the ongoing performance of your sales team.
Because different organizations have different measures for success, they use different metrics to measure their ongoing performance. However, here are a few common KPIs you can use to measure success for your LinkedIn sales efforts:
Cost Per Lead: This measures the amount of money spent on acquiring new leads and helps determine the cost-effectiveness of your sales campaign.
Sales Qualified Leads: After a lead meets certain criteria determined by the sales team, they’re filed as SQLs. Qualified leads are much more likely to close than unqualified ones.
Customer Acquisition Cost: Unlike the cost per lead, CAC measures the amount of money spent on acquiring new sales leads and onboarding them as clients. Ideally, you want to keep this number as low as possible.
Customer Retention/Churn: For subscription-based services, it’s also essential to track the percentage of clients who stay with you versus those who leave you after a certain period.
Return On Investment: Sales ROI measures the total revenue generated by your sales campaign compared to the cost of running the campaign.
Sales Revenue: This is simply the gross revenue generated by your sales campaign during a quarter or a year.
Step 6: Measure, improve, and adapt
Creating a social selling strategy for LinkedIn isn’t a one-time process. It takes constant intervention to tweak and improve your sales campaign if you want to get the best results. Use the KPIs you determined previously to track the success of your efforts, then get feedback from your sales team on how to improve your performance.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers loads of different tools to help tweak your sales campaign to your advantage. Including a LinkedIn Sales Navigator strategy is important if you truly want to get the most out of LinkedIn and unlock its true revenue potential.
Conclusion
In conclusion, crafting a solid LinkedIn sales strategy is key to unlocking your sales potential and hitting those big goals. By zeroing in on your buyer personas, creating targeted messaging, and building genuine relationships, you’ll turn your LinkedIn efforts into a real powerhouse for growth. A strategic LinkedIn plan not only boosts your efficiency but also helps you stand out as a go-to expert in your field. It’s all about making smart, personalized connections and setting yourself up for long-term success. So, invest the time and effort into shaping your LinkedIn strategy—you’ll be amazed at the results!