Outbound sales are tough to get right. Your efforts could be rejected or completely ignored.

The good news is that there’s one platform where outbound sales teams are seeing huge success: LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the ideal platform for outbound activities, as B2B sales made on this channel are 100% more likely to convert than on any other social media network.

Let’s look at some more numbers to understand why you should use LinkedIn for outbound sales:

👉 LinkedIn has over 830 members for you to target.

👉 Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions.

👉 The platform’s lead conversion rates are three times higher than other major platforms.

This article explains how you can overcome the challenges associated with outbound sales. We’ll also show you how to optimize your LinkedIn for outbound prospecting by using personalization, lead generation, and brand-building techniques.

What Are Outbound Sales?

Outbound sales are when a sales rep actively reaches out to potential customers to make a sale. Think door-to-door salespeople, telemarketers, and sales agents who pursue leads.

This sales strategy is often considered traditional because, before digital communication, it was the only way to approach sales.

However, the advance of digital marketing and readily available customer data gave rise to inbound sales. Inbound sales are when you use online marketing to get customers to come to your sales team.

Some common outbound sales techniques include:

📞 Cold calling

With cold calling, sales reps make outbound calls to potential customers who have not yet expressed interest in your products or services.

📧 Cold emailing

This involves sending personalized, targeted emails to potential customers to introduce them to your product or service and to initiate a conversation.

🧑 Sales prospecting

This is when businesses identify and research potential customers who may be interested in their offerings. It involves using tools like LinkedIn, industry databases, and other resources to build a list of prospects. Keep reading for more information about sales prospecting!

🤝 Networking

This involves business representatives attending industry events, trade shows, and conferences to connect with potential customers and generate leads.

📱 Social selling

Social selling means leveraging social media platforms to engage with potential customers by sharing valuable content. This helps to build relationships and may even lead to sales opportunities.

The Benefits of Outbound Sales

Outbound sales offer several benefits for businesses, contributing to growth and overall success. Here are some key advantages:

✅ Proactive lead generation

Outbound sales enable your business to actively seek out potential customers rather than waiting for them to find your company themselves. This proactive approach may result in a steady stream of new leads, helping you grow your business.

✅ Control over the sales process

With outbound sales, your business has greater control over the sales process. This includes who you target, how you engage, and when you’ll follow up. This allows for a more tailored and strategic approach to sales.

✅ Immediate feedback

Outbound sales activities such as cold calling and emailing often generate immediate responses. This quick feedback loop helps your sales teams adjust their strategies and messaging in real time.

✅ Market expansion

By reaching out to potential customers in new markets or regions, your business can expand its reach and enter new territories more effectively.

✅ Brand awareness

Consistent outbound sales efforts help increase your brand visibility and awareness. Even if initial contacts don’t convert into sales right away, they can create a lasting impression that can lead to future opportunities.

If people know about your business, you may be the first company they reach out to the next time they need certain products or services, even if they’re not ready to convert right now.

✅ Filling up your pipeline

Outbound sales activities help fill your sales pipeline, ensuring that there are always prospects in the various stages of the sales funnel.

This consistency is crucial to help your business maintain steady and sustainable revenue growth.

✅ Competitive advantage

A proactive outbound sales strategy can give your business a competitive edge by reaching prospects before your competitors do.

Early engagement with potential customers can help you establish strong relationships and brand loyalty.

✅ Scalability

With the right tools and resources, outbound sales efforts can be scaled to target a larger audience. This scalability makes it easier to increase your sales volume and revenue.

✅ Measurable results

Outbound sales are a highly measurable tactic, allowing you to track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as call volume, conversion rates, and revenue generated. This allows you to make data-driven decisions toward continuous improvement of your outbound sales strategy.

Outbound and Inbound Sales: Which Is Better?

Good sales involve outbound sales reps attracting customers by addressing their unique pain points and building lasting relationships that lead to the generation of revenue. It entails personalizing your approach and providing value.

With inbound sales, customers won’t engage with you if you don’t offer them personalization and value. Companies need to provide high-quality content that the prospect finds genuinely useful. They gradually gain their trust and subtly move them toward a purchase.

Outbound sales, on the other hand, skip the attracting part. Salespeople who use an outbound approach don’t wait for customers to come to them, but reach out to prospects instead. This makes it quicker for the company to get customers’ attention and achieve results.

The problem is some sellers take a volume-based approach where they try to contact as many leads as possible—whether they think the customer is interested in their offer or not. This has given outbound sales a bad reputation.

Inbound sales might seem like a more strategic approach that suits the digital age, but outbound sales are still highly effective—if done right.

In fact, 68% of marketers believe that outbound sales produce better quality leads. Companies that prioritize outbound sales are 100% more likely to generate new business.

You need to use the right techniques to make inbound sales successful and apply them to outbound sales.

Modern outbound sales professionals are smarter and more efficient—they qualify leads, personalize their messaging, and apply a more advanced approach to their outreach efforts.

Using LinkedIn for Outbound Sales Prospecting

LinkedIn—the largest professional network on the Internet—is perfect for:

• Making connections.
• Generating quality B2B leads.
• Reaching out to prospects.
• Building relationships.

It’s used by B2B marketers from all over the world to increase brand awareness and achieve organic traffic.

In fact, 97% of B2B marketers claim they use LinkedIn for social media marketing, especially organic marketing. More importantly, over 30% of B2B decision-makers are on LinkedIn. This makes it the ideal platform for outbound sales.

How to Get Outbound Sales Right with LinkedIn

Here are some ways to leverage LinkedIn and make the most out of your outbound sales:

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Reviewing your LinkedIn profile before you start outbound prospecting on LinkedIn is crucial.

Don’t start sending connection requests and outreach messages until your LinkedIn profile is complete and looks professional.

Here are some quick tips on what to do.

Profile and cover pictures

Your LinkedIn profile picture is the first thing your prospects will see, so make sure you look friendly, professional, and trustworthy. Your cover photo should help highlight the value you bring to customers.

Here’s my own profile picture. I’m smiling and wearing my Hyperise hoodie. The cover image shows someone creating a personalized image with our value proposition visible in the corner:

Headline

Too many people make the mistake of getting too technical with headlines and descriptions. Instead, you should use a headline that describes you honestly and is to the point.

Mine is “Helping B2B Sales and Marketing teams double outreach engagement, using Hyper-Personalization.”

Description

Here, it’s a good idea to tell a little success story of how you got where you are, what your area of expertise is, and the kind of projects you had the most success with.

Here’s a good example from one of LinkedIn’s most well-known members, Simon Sinek:

Recommendations

Nothing gives you credibility like satisfied clients. After you’ve completed a project, ask your client to give you a LinkedIn recommendation.

You can even write it yourself and ask their approval. These recommendations are prominently placed on your LinkedIn profile and serve as great social proof of success.

Here’s a good example from disability rights advocate, Tiffany Yu’s profile:

An example: Gijo Matthew

Gijo Matthew’s profile is a good example that takes all the tips provided above into account:

2. Build your personal brand

Once you have an optimized LinkedIn profile, it’s time to start getting traffic to your profile and building up your professional image in the industry.

You’ll have a much better chance of winning someone’s business if they already know your name from discussions, posts, and LinkedIn groups.

Focus on becoming a relevant voice that your target audience trusts. Two effective ways to do this are to post relevant content and join LinkedIn groups.

Posting relevant content

The content you post on LinkedIn is the best way to drive engagement and get more leads. To create relevant content, you need to do research to see what your audience wants to read or watch on LinkedIn.

Depending on your field, people will likely be interested in case studies, success stories, research results, or other new insights presented in interesting ways.

Joining LinkedIn groups

To find relevant groups, start typing whatever your industry is into the LinkedIn search bar, and select “Groups” as the criteria.

You’ll be presented with a list of groups to choose from. For example, check out what comes up when you search for “social selling”:

That’s close to 400 LinkedIn groups, all focused on professionals from within that industry.

Joining groups relevant to your industry enables you to engage in conversations, which is a great way to get yourself noticed and even gain some organic connections.

After a while, you might make enough connections to start your own group. Then you’ll have created a small community of people you can target with your outbound sales strategy.

3. Start generating leads

Generating high-quality leads is one of the most important parts of the outbound sales process. It should be your top priority when using LinkedIn for outbound prospecting.

Let’s go over some smart ways to collect relevant leads:

Search for clients’ connections

LinkedIn’s advanced search is a great place to start hunting for leads. It has useful search filters like job title, current employer, and previous employer.It also enables you to search each person’s connections on LinkedIn. Here’s how to get it right:

1. Choose an industry you want to target with LinkedIn sales. For this example, let’s say we want to get more clients in the digital marketing industry.

2. Take a look at your existing clients or connections on LinkedIn who work in digital marketing. Try to find one with a lot of followers.

3. Go to “My network” and click on “Connections”.

4. Choose “Search with filters”.

5. Click “All filters” below the search bar and choose “Connections of”.

6. Click on that and enter your client’s name.

7. You’ll be presented with a list of their connections. These are all good leads since they’re from the same industry and are likely to be interested in your services.

Scrape groups

Groups aren’t only good for building your personal brand. They are also a great source of potential customers. You can use an automation tool that can scrape the contacts of all members in just a few clicks.

This method can also be used for Facebook groups—simply scrape the contacts and contact them on LinkedIn.

Phantombuster is a great scraping tool because it can scrape contacts from LinkedIn and Facebook for you to reach out to during your sales process.

Use lead magnets

Another way to collect leads is by creating valuable content for free in exchange for someone’s email address. We call this type of content a lead magnet.

Lead magnets usually include eBooks, guides, or industry reports—anything your target audience is wants to get in exchange for their email address.

Whatever the format is, make sure your users understand exactly what it is you’re offering—you could damage your reputation if they feel they’ve been misled.

Here is a good example that features a prominent CTA, clear intention, and compelling copy:

4. Qualify your leads

Lead qualification is a critical step, but many sales professionals skip it. Getting this right can make a big difference in your outreach results.

Your business should already have identified customer personas for your outbound sales teams to reach out to.

These are descriptions of what your ideal customers look like—they’re the people and companies that need your service the most, are profitable, won’t churn, and are easy to serve.

If you don’t have a customer persona yet, then you need to do that before anything else. Your customer persona should include:

• Their age or age group.
• The industry they work in.
• Their job title.
• The size of the business they run or work for.
• The challenges or pain points they face.

These demographics help you understand how valuable a lead is. The closer they match this ideal persona, the more valuable they are.

It’s important to disregard leads that don’t match your customer persona. If they are not profitable or they don’t need your service, then you shouldn’t use your valuable resources on them. Focus your outbound sales efforts on winning business with best-fit clients instead.

5. Try personalized outreach

Now that you’ve compiled a qualified list of leads, you can craft messages and connection requests. Getting these right is crucial to outbound sales on LinkedIn.

Many outreach messages feel spammy because they aren’t personalized to the person being targeted. People can easily spot when a LinkedIn message is a generic sales pitch that isn’t aimed at them specifically.

Tailoring each message to your prospect will make sure that your connection requests don’t get ignored like spammy messages often are.

You could personalize your messages by manually writing each of your connection requests from scratch. This becomes much easier if you have an automation tool to help you.

With a tool like Hyperise, you can hyper-personalize your messages to not only get better results but also impress your prospects on LinkedIn.

What separates Hyperise from similar personalization tools is our image personalization features. Our intuitive software enables you to create highly personalized messages that contain an image specifically tailored to each of your prospects.

Best of all, you don’t need any coding knowledge to use our platform. Here’s what a personalized message on LinkedIn could look like when you use the Hyperise toolkit:

Notice how even the prospect who wasn’t that interested in our offer still had a strong reaction to our message. That’s what you get when you take a completely unique and personalized approach to outreach.

If you want to go even more advanced, you can use a personalized call to action (CTA) landing page, like in this example:

Here, when the user clicks on the link in the LinkedIn message, they are led to a personalized page where they can book a demo or perform various actions. If you use WordPress, all you need to do this is to use our simple plugin.

Boost Your LinkedIn Outbound Sales with the Right Tool

In today’s digital world, personalization and relationship-building are paramount to outbound sales success.

By optimizing your LinkedIn profile, building a personal brand, generating high-quality leads, and qualifying them, you’ll have a strong foundation for an effective outbound sales strategy.

However, the game-changer lies in the level of personalization you bring to your outreach efforts.

Incorporating tools like Hyperise to create personalized images and CTAs in your LinkedIn messages can be the key to standing out from the competition and fostering genuine connections with your prospects.

Remember that the ultimate goal of outbound sales on LinkedIn is to build lasting relationships with professionals in your target industry.

This means taking the time to research your leads, understand their pain points, and present your product or service in a way that adds value to their lives.

By combining the best aspects of inbound and outbound sales techniques, you can create a powerful approach to prospecting on LinkedIn that drives results and strengthens your professional network.

Visit our website to claim your free Hyperise trial and see for yourself how hyper-personalization can help you achieve outbound sales success.