LinkedIn automation can improve the efficiency and bottom line of any agency or sales team. But if your business is small, it’s an essential addition to your toolbox.
In an economic slowdown – where prospect response rates are lower and the number of touchpoints necessary to reach a prospect higher – automation solutions are the only way to keep up with competitors with bigger budgets, more resources, and larger sales teams.
Here are 7 reasons why.
P.S., want to save even more time on your LinkedIn automation with awesome copy primed for conversions? Download our guide to 100+ LinkedIn outreach templates that convert.
The benefits of LinkedIn
If you’re selling to other businesses, the B2B networking platform is THE place to prospect. For starters, it’s where all the decision-makers are. It’s easy to find up-to-date information on stakeholders, job changes, and promotions. People update their LinkedIn profiles much quicker than companies update their email directories. Plus, all the information is public-facing.
Decision-makers don’t just have LinkedIn profiles: most are actively engaged on the platform. Whether it’s adding extra details about responsibilities to their profiles, posting regularly, or sharing common connections – all these pointers are great hooks that give you the ability to make much warmer outreach attempts. And that, in turn, equals better results and higher conversion rates.
The benefits of using automation
The only downside? Unlike cold calling or emailing, there aren’t easy ways to organize your outreach on the platform. Since it was designed as a social networking site, it has many different ways to connect with people, loads of features, and little to no standardization.
That’s where LinkedIn automation comes in. By combining the platform’s power as a B2B prospecting haven with the sophisticated outreach features of automation software, you can scale your outreach, improve consistency, maximize efficiency, and gain strategic insights.
With 76% of businesses now using automation to standardize or automate daily workflows, ignoring LinkedIn automation options puts you at risk of inefficiencies and falling behind the competition.
Does LinkedIn send automated messages?
Unfortunately, the platform itself doesn’t let you schedule messages or connection invites. However, using third-party software, you can automate LinkedIn messages while accessing a cloud-based automation tool with a lead management inbox, advanced analytics, and team management.
According to 88% of small business owners, automation enables them to compete with bigger companies and remain competitive. And with 2 out of 3 knowledge workers revealing automation increases their productivity on the job, it’s easy to see why it’s an essential part of running an efficient business.
Read on to learn exactly how LinkedIn automation software can improve your business.
The benefits of LinkedIn automation software for small businesses
Grow faster (& pivot as needed)
As you enter the growth phase, it’s tricky keeping up with everything that needs doing. In addition to serving your existing clients and working on your product, you have to somehow add new customers. This can be especially tricky when you don’t yet have your ideal user firmly tied down or don’t know where to find them.
To grow effectively, you need to refine your outreach processes and delegate tasks where possible – either to other employees or to automation solutions.
Using LinkedIn to grow your business makes sense at this stage. You can use advanced Sales Navigator filters to find and hone your target audience, learn from leads that are 5x more likely to respond to you on the platform than they would via cold email, and meet decision-makers in their preferred space.
The other benefit of using LinkedIn to grow your business is that automation tools can help you scale exponentially faster. And once you’re up and running with LinkedIn automation software, pivoting in response to market demands is easy.
Reach more leads
Using LinkedIn automation, you can reach more leads than you would otherwise be able to manually – especially with limited staff or resources. By sending up to 400 connection invites and 2K follow-up sequences a month, and using different campaign types such as groups and events, you can diversify your outreach strategy and grow your business by reaching more prospects.
Reaching a wider audience will help you discover your product-market fit faster – and is crucial to creating a profitable bottom line.
Save time
LinkedIn automation tools can save you an average of 4-6 minutes per lead (on data entry, manual copy and pasting, and inbox monitoring). The more sophisticated tools, like Salesflow, can also run in the background when you’re not at your computer or are busy doing other things.
For a busy small business owner wearing multiple hats, that’s a significant efficiency saving. When you factor in that you lose up to 40% productivity due to mental blocks created by task shifting, streamlining your LinkedIn outreach and reducing interruptions becomes a big business boon.
Here are the key ways you save time on processes:
- Automate LinkedIn connection requests
Create a lead list (either via CVS or using search filters), load up a template with personalization tokens, and leave it running in the background for automated LinkedIn connection requests at scale. Instead of manually finding, crafting, and sending connection requests, you get an efficient process that you can reuse again and again.
Of course, the cadence is flexible, so if you want to add extra personalization details for particular leads, you can.
- Automated LinkedIn messaging
It’s not just connection invites, either: automation can help with your follow-up cadence once a prospect has connected. When you load up your connection request templates and add a lead, you can set as many follow-up messages as you want in a workflow cadence. You don’t have to worry about scheduling reminders or manually remembering to message every new lead in your inbox: our software does it for you, at the right time.
The best part? You don’t have to sacrifice personalization, either – personalization tags can automatically tailor your outreach templates to speak compellingly to hundreds of prospects. If you’re busy, rushed, or stressed, automation can increase the quality and accuracy of your outreach messages. And more and better conversations = a better bottom line.
- Automate LinkedIn InMail
For leads that don’t connect, you can also create outreach cadences that include automated LinkedIn InMails. These give you a chance to land directly in the inbox of prospects you’re not yet connected with, with a longer message and punchy subject line.
LinkedIn InMail automation lets you spread these valuable resources across your cadences. So you can reuse messaging that works.
Save money
As a small business owner, cost margins are crucial. Due to the increased amount of prospects reached, high engagement rates, and time savings, companies using LinkedIn automation software typically see a 10-20x ROI from the tools.
Automation is the sensible choice if you want margins that make sense and a prospecting strategy that scales. And establishing processes that work early on is the key to a sustainable business model.
Learn what works with data and analytics
When you’re doing everything by yourself and without systems, it’s hard to see what’s working and why. But knowing what works and what you should do more of is essential to long-term success.
LinkedIn automation tools give you access to data and analytics for each campaign. So you can see how many steps it takes to engage a lead, which cadences are getting the best response rates, and whether more prospects are responding positively, negatively, or ignoring you altogether.
From there, it’s easy to A/B test campaigns to improve their sophistication and results. You can also track crucial health metrics, such as conversion rate, to develop a predictable revenue model that scales.
Import/export data
Although the B2B prospecting site is a great prospecting tool, it’s also unwieldy. As a small business owner, you’ve likely discovered the challenge of manually integrating systems. Data transfer can be a nightmare – but accurate data records are essential to smooth business operations and continued success.
LinkedIn automation lets you easily send data to and from other systems and the platform. For example, you can export data from LinkedIn to a spreadsheet using a CSV file or import a list of prospects using Excel.
Creating a business that scales starts with systems that work. Automation tools for LinkedIn give you these systems.
Increase alignment
Finally, as you grow your business and add new employees, you need a central source of truth and a contact database that automatically syncs new activity in real time. But manual use of the platform is an opaque way of prospecting. Other users can’t see the activity for an account, so you can’t tell what’s been said, how many prospects have been reached, and what’s working.
Automation tools like Salesflow let you natively integrate your CRM and LinkedIn activity. Whether you’re using Pipedrive, Hubspot, or Salesforce, you can automatically sync your data from the platform. Native CRM integrations give you a central source of truth and help you track sales team activity, improving your efficiency further.
How to automate LinkedIn outreach
Automating LinkedIn outreach gives you a strategic lift, saves time and money, and is crucial for a healthy, adaptable business.
If you’re just getting started, download our guide to 100 LinkedIn outreach templates that convert to start filling your pipeline with prospects today.
To see the difference automation makes to your outreach results, try Salesflow for free with a 7-day trial: