Over 40% of salespeople find prospecting the hardest part of their jobs. When you’re juggling taking sales calls with researching and approaching new leads it’s easy for either quality or consistency to get dropped. Especially if you’re not using LinkedIn automation tools.
The result is often a pipeline with:
- Not enough leads;
- Bad-fit leads;
- Leads that aren’t really leads, and deals that aren’t really deals;
- Deals that are at risk due to unengaged prospects or a single point of contact;
- Deals that aren’t worth enough money to hit quota or company targets.
Want to improve your outreach messaging? Try our list of 100+ LinkedIn message templates that convert.
Sometimes, you might have a rarer, more subtle problem:
- A pipeline that’s full of good prospects, but no data on how to repeat this feat, no understanding of customer pain points, and no idea what messaging others will respond to in the future.
In other words, results that won’t scale.
Luckily, LinkedIn automation tools offer a way to systematically overcome both issues. In addition to helping you save up to 50 hours a week, they’re an essential piece of the puzzle to improve systems and strategies and ensure repeatable success.
Here are 7 ways LinkedIn automation software can improve your pipeline:
1. Reach more prospects
Often, there just aren’t enough leads in the pipeline to consistently meet targets: 57% of sales reps regularly miss quota.
LinkedIn automation tools can help you reach more prospects without sacrificing message quality. With the ability to create campaign templates and automate up to 2,000 personalized follow-up sequences per month, you can gain back admin time spent manually tracking responses and copy/pasting outreach messages and use it to engage more leads. Sales teams using Salesflow’s Linkedin automation software save an average of 6 minutes per prospect – or 4-8 hours per week for each rep. That’s time you can use to focus on selling to more leads to make your pipeline healthier.
2. Improve response rates
LinkedIn automation can help increase the likelihood that a prospect will reply to your outreach efforts, which in turn can increase your conversion rates. 60% of prospects say no to a sales rep four times before eventually agreeing to a call. However, nearly half of all salespeople don’t follow up even once. Sales automation software like Salesflow can make this follow-up process consistently run in the background, so you never miss a lead.
Using automation tooling means you can scale up outreach efforts while still personalizing messages with the prospect’s name, company, location, or other variables. Saving time on the bulk of your outreach also means you can afford to take the time to research and tailor your messages to your highest-value prospects (top sales reps spend 6 hours a week on average researching their prospects). Combine both approaches and you have higher-quality messages, with better hooks, tailored to the right individuals. The result? Engaged prospects, better response rates, and more booked meetings.
P.S., If you need help crafting messages that convert, try our free copywriting guide.
3. Increase deal size
LinkedIn automation tools like Salesflow let you mix outreach campaigns that scale with powerful prospect filters, helping you go after leads with the right business signals.
The process of increasing your deal size is twofold. The first requires picking the right prospects to begin with. LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help you search for lists of prospects using filters such as industry, job role, and location. But stopping there limits your outreach. To find deals with the biggest potential, you should also screen for companies that are hiring or have grown in revenue or employee number in the last year.
To get the most out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, check out our complete guide to the tool.
The second step to increasing your deal size is to use analytics and dashboard reports from your sales automation software to track which campaigns and targets generate the best response rates. Combine this data with your Sales Navigator search results to find the prospects with the greatest potential. Then, use a tool like Salesflow to reach these highest-value prospects at the scale and consistency needed for results.
4. Hone strategy
Without LinkedIn automation tools, cold email responses are often the only feedback that makes it into the CRM. And since cold email has a low response rate of 8.5%, insights into prospects are often limited. It’s hard to tell if you’re doing the right thing.
Since outreach using an automation tool has a higher response rate than cold email, using this software means you get enough responses back to accurately assess the effectiveness of your messaging. Salesflow’s Linkedin automation software can export these responses automatically to your CRM using Zapier or native CRM integrations for a central source of truth. This allows you to coordinate outreach efforts across teams and develop a data-driven messaging strategy that works.
5. Raise lead conversion rates
The ability to run multiple campaigns at once means you can A/B test your messages, use analytics to work out what prospects respond best to, or track the best open and response rates for different target personas. Over time, this can save you hours of prospecting, as you can start to target your best-fit prospects first.
By targeting the most responsive prospects with the highest relevance to your offering, you’ll naturally improve your lead to SQL conversion rate. You’ll get better results even if you approach fewer prospects and reduce the time you spend on prospect research.
Sales reps only spend ⅓ of their time selling. Sales automation software saves you time on prospecting and lets you focus on other important areas of the sales process, such as improving negotiations and contract terms to net you or your company the best MRR.
6. Enhance deal conversion rates
By removing risk factors that result in prematurely lost deals, LinkedIn automation tools increase the likelihood that any given deal will successfully move from SQL to closed won.
Sales automation software ensures your deals are in the strongest position possible from the beginning of the sales cycle. By automating the outreach process, you get time back to:
- Make sure there is more than one engaged contact at the company for each deal,
- Only add deals to the pipeline if they actually meet qualification criteria, including being in a good-fit industry with a contact who has budget- and decision-making abilities,
- Increase stakeholder engagement with your company through regular, personalized check-ins with leads.
It’s easy to coordinate more sophisticated outreach campaigns using LinkedIn automation tools. Without the manual time wasted copying and pasting responses between LinkedIn and your CRM, trying to keep track of multiple campaigns at once, and attempting to manage inboxes, you have the resources to follow the best practices above. More booked meetings turn into deals, more prospects turn into customers, and more customers turn into champions.
7. Learn the exact volume of activity needed to reach targets
Analytics data from LinkedIn automation tools give you a real-time overview of activity volume; open, click, and reply rates for each campaign; and a breakdown of the percentage of positive or negative replies.
Over time, as these reply and conversion rates get more accurate, you can take an average of your campaigns and easily see when you’re on track to meet targets or need to do more to ensure future pipeline. Since prospecting is future-focused and hard to predict, this removes doubt and gives you confidence in your LinkedIn outreach strategy.
If your sales automation software syncs with your CRM, leaders can track team progress and check what’s needed to reach targets. This functionality isn’t possible when using LinkedIn alone, as the platform offers no way to export data from LinkedIn to a spreadsheet or CSV.
47% of sales leaders track CRM usage as a productivity metric, and 54% agree it’s one of the most important productivity metrics to track. LinkedIn automation software lets you track outreach activity for the number one B2B social selling platform to streamline rep activity, invest in the right amount of outreach, and save time and money.
Improve your pipeline with sales automation software
If you’re struggling to meet targets or grow your pipeline consistently, LinkedIn automation tools can help you scale outreach, save time, reach more prospects, and improve your conversion rates. To see the difference automation can make to reaching your sales goals, try Salesflow for free with a 7-day trial. You’ll get access to automated LinkedIn campaigns, message templates, and more.