Sales Prospecting Strategy Guide: Top 10 Unique Strategies for Sales Professionals

12 min readApr 29, 2022

When it comes to sales prospecting for B2B businesses, no other social media platform can beat LinkedIn.

However, you will only get desired results if you know what you are doing.

Linkedin is a vast platform, but if you learn to target your audience with the use of the right filters, you will open floodgates to business leads.

To ramp up your LinkedIn lead generation you just need three things.

A powerful strategy
Skill to extract prospects
Powerful LinkedIn automation tool

If you have all three, no force on earth can stop you from generating sales and leads.

If you are new to linked sales prospecting and you are not familiar with any strategy yet, you are in luck. We will help you know in detail about

Sales prospecting
Top 10 strategies for LinkedIn sales prospecting
Best LinkedIn automation tools for LinkedIn sales prospecting

If you are ready to start your professional journey in LinkedIn sales prospecting, let’s begin.

What Is Sales Prospecting?

By now, you might have seen so many people using the word “sales prospecting” already, but most people get confused between prospects and prospecting.

If you don’t know, let’s break it down for you.

Linkedin sales prospecting is a method used to extract the right prospects according to the ideal client for your business.

Linkedin cold prospecting is just like cold calling. Here you launch a LinkedIn outreach campaign by using the prospects list you have extracted using the LinkedIn sales navigator tool.

Why Is Sales Prospecting Important for Your Business?

We know that LinkedIn sales prospecting has a bad reputation attached to it because it mainly helps you target people for product selling. However, for sellers trying to maximize the sales, this is a goldmine.

LinkedIn is the only platform that can help your laser target your prospects based on sales interest.

However, hasty decisions and bad selling strategies can affect your sales even if you have a strong prospects list.

If you straight up send a sales message on LinkedIn, there is no way it will get converted into sales.

Let’s face it, no one likes an annoying salesperson sending them sales messages daily.

On the contrary, if you learn about your customer, build a relationship, and then offer your product as a solution to their pain points — there is a high chance you will close a sale.

To avoid committing the same mistake of sending sales messages only, here are some alternative practices to try.

Build An Ideal Buyer Persona

You know your product more than anyone. Who do you think will buy it?

Ask yourself these simple questions and then take some time to build an ideal buyer persona accordingly.

Match The Buyer Person to Seek Leads

Now that you know who your ideal buyer will be, you are ready to use the LinkedIn sales navigator for seeking leads.

Linkedin has 810 million users, to find your ideal customer you need a powerful tool with a lot of filters.

This is where the sales navigator will help. You can filter your prospects based on location, designation, interest, and more.

Get Ready to Launch Campaign

After sorting your prospects, the next step is to launch the campaign.

As a beginner launching your outreach sales campaign the process can be daunting because there is so much to decide. You need to set a goal, have a powerful message, and set a follow-up rate. This also requires in-depth knowledge, constant monitoring, and a lot of time.

This is why you need a LinkedIn automation tool as a beginner. If you buy a good cloud based LinkedIn automation tool like linked camp you just need to have your prospect list.

By using that prospect list, you can launch your successful outreach sales campaign that will bring you a good number of sales for your business.

Why Is Linkedin A Game-Changer?

We know LinkedIn is crowded with a salesperson. We also know that getting so many sales messages can annoy your customer.

This is the reason you need to learn how to walk the thin thread of overuse and underuse.

For LinkedIn, the first goal for every business is to generate sales by using LinkedIn prospecting campaigns. And there is no denying the fact that LinkedIn is the sales haven for B2B businesses.

Linkedin is the number one social media business portal among business owners and employees globally. It has 40% of monthly users. Linkedin also has 91% of the best marketers from around the globe.

According to 79% of the B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the best and most trusted lead-generating platform.

These states clearly explain that LinkedIn is a game-changer for B2B businesses.

If you have a premium account and you use a LinkedIn sales navigator, you can easily filter your prospects based on designation, location, active status, and more.

Once you have the prospects list, the outreach campaign will become easy.

Although this phase is easy, however as a beginner, there is a high chance that you will mess up this stage.

Just like searching for your best prospects, strategizing a good outreach campaign is also very tricky.

With the right tools and the right skills, you can master an outreach campaign in no time.

If you are a beginner, using a good LinkedIn automation tool can help you reap the benefits of these golden prospects that you have generated via the LinkedIn sales navigator.

Some of the benefits that you will be able to avail yourself with a good LinkedIn automation tool includes:

Impeccable, tried and tested outreach messages templates
Reach out to the influential people in your industry to build your authority in your niche
Build a strong social engagement with contacts
Improve your reach
Get warm, relevant leads

To sum it up, LinkedIn provides a better and more relevant audience as well as better visibility for your business.

To add a more powerful punch, you also need to focus on quality content regularly.

Now that we know about sales prospecting, let’s look at some of the most powerful strategies

Stay True to Your Business

If you want to generate leads, you need to stay true to your business by investing some time.

Using old templates for outreach campaigns will waste all your efforts and time.

Most of the templates available in the market sound very exciting, however right after the first message, most people will start selling you.

This can easily get annoying. Trust me, I get a lot of these in my inbox every day.

When you send a message to a prospect, you are competing against hundreds of unread messages in the inbox. To beat them, you need to stand out.

Most people start with a punchline, others try to incorporate jokes. There is no restriction if you add some fun.

To master this, here is what a good LinkedIn personalization might look like.

Make It Relative: before you send a message, know about your prospect. Just reading the same or designation is not enough, you need to show care.

Customize: your message needs to be customized which means you need to add some meaningful links or just try to relate to a post that they have engaged in.

Add Some Value: your prospect is sitting on a pile of messages because these messages are not offering any value. To add value, send them a free piece of content that might interest them. Just by adding some value, you will be able to increase the reply rate by ten folds.

Add Some Advanced Information

Most people use LinkedIn automation tools to send personalized messages. As a result, they just change the name of the prospect and use the same automated messages for request or follow-up that is already available.

This practice saves you a lot of time. On average you will save more than 2hrs if you use the LinkedIn automation tool for personalization purposes.

However, there is more to personalization than just the name, company name, and designation.

Some of the best LinkedIn automation tools available in the market like LinkedCamp offer dynamic placeholders that allow you to add more details. With these dynamic placeholders, you can personalize each message by adding more details.

If you are still confused about what else you can add, here are some of the details:

Give a reference to their location — this can be tricky if you add the city of the region right away so add a reference to the person who offers the same services in their region.

Send them something free but useful for them — you can send an e-book related to their profession or some recent research to help them keep up with trends.

Use a trending reference — you can also add details about some trends in their domain. If they are marketers add some stats about the B2B market or you can add some stats about any change.

Regular Content Will Save your Brand

If you want to stay true to your business while offering value and reaching your target audience organically, there is no better way than using regular and relevant content.

Your regular content will not only help you gain traffic, but it will also help you become an authority in your niche.

Two of the most important platforms to showcase your content include LinkedIn and a website blog page.

Here are some important tips to follow while creating content:

Your content should have a long format
The content should stay relevant to the industry
Use videos, webinars, infographics, and presentations
Post and comment directly on LinkedIn groups

Now try to step into the shoes of your prospect. What if you receive a connection request or message, what is the first thing that you want to do?

A simple answer is that you will look at his profile, try to know about his profession, and look at relevant signals.

What if the profile is boring, incomplete, or not interesting enough?

This brings us to our next point.

Complete Your Profile

Your LinkedIn profile is your only identification on LinkedIn. If it fails to impress, forget about your business, prospects, or anything else.

When your lead visits your profile, he needs to feel welcomed.

Your profile should have all the information that can help your prospect learn about your product, business, service, and you. When completing your profile, fill it up with only niche-related articles and information.

For more details about a rocking profile, you can also read tips for Building A Rocking Linkedin Profile.

Play It Safe

As a LinkedIn marketer, the idea of generating hundreds of leads is very intriguing indeed. This is the reason you will find LinkedIn marketers using various LinkedIn automation tools just to spam people.

Eventually, when these marketers get banned, they do not talk about their strategic mistake, instead, they blame the tool.

Let’s address the elephant in the room — your LinkedIn automation tool has nothing to do with your strategy.

When you use a LinkedIn automation tool, you have complete control over the campaign flow and campaign.

If you exploit and violate the LinkedIn guidelines by using your LinkedIn automation tool, the blame will be on you — not your LinkedIn automation tool.

Some of the main issues that can get you suspended on LinkedIn include:

Sending too many connections requests
Very low acceptance rate
Spammy content
Use of app-based LinkedIn automation tool
Using traceable google chrome extension Linkedin automation tool

To avoid all these issues, use a good campaign flow and a cloud-based Linkedin automation tool.

Learn To Search Your Target Audience

A strong prospect list can work as a spine for your outreach campaign. It can make or break your business.

To master the art of audience research you need to start by building your buyer’s persona.

You need to look at their interests, people they follow, a group they join, the content they share, the pain points they mention, and the goal they share.

Once you have these details, you can simply use the LinkedIn sales navigator to search for your ideal prospects.

Another simple but very effective tip is to join the group and follow the influencers in your niche. Now, engage with the people who can be your ideal prospects.

Eventually, you can use this engagement as a reference and interact with them directly.

This strategy will boost your interaction and connection acceptance rate as well.

Explore The Power of Linkedin Sales Navigator

If you are familiar with your customer persona, you need to consider using a LinkedIn sales navigator.

Linkedin sales navigator offers you better control over your outreach campaign by offering you a simple prospecting method.

You will have so many different features including

Search filters
Advanced Search section
Similar profile feature
Posted on a LinkedIn filter

All these features work as the game changer and offer you complete control over your prospects. For more details about the LinkedIn sales navigator tool, you can check out the guide to help you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Use Split Testing for Connection Requests

If you have used Facebook for marketing, you might be familiar with the term split testing or A/B testing.

However, this testing style is just limited to Facebook.

What if I tell you, you can have a split-testing on LinkedIn as well?

With the help of a good LinkedIn automation tool like LinkedCamp, you can perform A/B testing on outreach campaigns.

This will offer you an insight into the best split testing options. You can use this kind of testing for selecting the best templates, CTAs, and follow-up message templates as well.

Don’t Hoarder Your Connection Request

Most people send so many connection requests at a time that it gets very difficult for them to delete the pending requests later.

A simple trick is to either send very limited requests or keep track of the requests that you send.

After sending the requests, keep a simple threshold in mind and if by that threshold your request is still pending, delete it.

To withdraw your request, you need to go to my network > invitations > sent > people

Once you find the connection request you want to cancel, press withdraw.

If you want to save yourself from this hassle, you can simply check the withdraw request option on your LinkedIn automation tool and if within your decision time the request is still pending, the tool will automatically withdraw the request.

Warm-Up Your Account

This is a very simple strategy yet most people on LinkedIn forget about the warm-up.

Warming up your account manually can become quite a challenge which is the reason it is better to rely on a good cloud-based LinkedIn automation tool like LinkedCamp.

With the help of LinkedCamp, once you attach the account, it will automatically get into the warmup.

However, to offer you more control, your LinkedIn automation tool offers you to control the options through a scale.

However, do not get overwhelmed with this option because the excess will only land you in hot waters.

To avoid any backlash, here are some things to keep in mind:

Limit the connection requests per day
Find prospects with mutual connections to connect
Personalize your messages and engage with prospects
Clear up all the pending requests

Linkedin Sales Navigator

Linkedin sales navigator is the champion when it comes to extracting prospects. With advanced filters and a powerful search engine, LinkedIn sales navigator is so far the best way to extract the best prospects list.

Crystal

Crystal is a great option for people who want to look at the psychological analysis of the prospect. This will offer insight on the base of active status, the likelihood of reply, interest, and niche.

Cloud-based Linkedin Automation Tool — LinkedCamp

A good LinkedIn automation tool can help you automate the campaign by using the prospect list. Since you have the option of split testing, you will be able to maximize the response rate.

Wrap Up!

To sum it all up, LinkedIn is no doubt a gold mine for sales prospecting, lead generation, B2B sales, and outreach, only if you are using it right.

When you start your LinkedIn sales prospecting journey, take your time building a good sales prospecting list. After that, focus on the strategy. A powerful strategy can help you maximize your sales in no time.

Finally, use a good LinkedIn automation tool so you can save your time and efforts. A good cloud based LinkedIn automation tool can save you a lot of hassle throughout the sales strategy execution phase.