We get it: things are looking a little scary right now. 

When times are tough, prospects stop buying – making it hard to meet quota or grow your business. An economic slowdown is all but inevitable and will impact 2023 lead generation. 

To generate sales, you need LinkedIn lead generation strategies that cut through the noise and help you engage more leads more efficiently. Here are 7 strategies you can use to thrive despite the approaching economic slowdown.

1. Refine your target audience

With fewer businesses buying, refine your LinkedIn outreach strategy to focus on:

  • Prospects who see your solution as an essential need rather than a nice-to-have. (They’ll have enough pain to act). 
  • Companies that are still growing or are leaders in their space. (They’ll have the budget to buy). 

Once you’ve honed your ICP, you need a way to discover relevant companies that are growing and have the budget to buy. You can generate leads on LinkedIn using the basic or LinkedIn Sales Navigator search filters. 

If you have a basic account, search for companies and filter by ‘job listings on LinkedIn’. Companies hiring are generally growing and have money to spend on your solution. Focus on prospects at these companies first to increase your chances of getting that ‘yes’.

If you have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, you’ll be able to access more powerful and precise filters and save companies and leads into lists for at-scale campaigns. Consider setting filters for revenue or growth rate, and focus your efforts on the best companies first to generate sales.

2. Update your messaging

Nervous about an economic downturn? Your prospects are, too. Your 2023 lead generation strategy needs to make them feel that you understand their concerns and can help ease financial burdens with your offering. 

Update your messaging to address their current fears and concerns. Consider what impact a slowdown will have on their industry, company goals, and business challenges. What’s keeping them up at night? And how can your product uniquely solve that? 

Hard times are when, if you use the right LinkedIn outreach strategy, you can prove your offering is more necessary than ever.  

Lost for words? Here are our top tips for hard-hitting copy: 

3. Adopt automation

When times are uncertain, budgets get slashed and fewer companies are in the market to buy. You need to reach more prospects than before just to keep lead numbers the same and generate sales (and you might have fewer resources to do so).

Inefficient prospecting could be the difference between 2023 lead generation failure and success. Adopting automation software can add immediate capacity to sales teams. It’s easy to scale as outreach campaigns can run in the background without input. The result? Hours saved per employee per week.

4. Use LinkedIn Groups for precision targeting 

When times are hard, people look to communities for advice and support. On LinkedIn, they do this publicly through LinkedIn groups: a fantastic way to find best-fit prospects and use social selling to speak to what they care about. 

Successful social selling is about the connection and rapport you build with potential buyers. A quick way to replicate this connection is by automating campaigns based on shared group membership.

Here’s a quick guide to prospecting using these groups: 

1. Generate leads on LinkedIn by searching for keywords relevant to your product or target audience. For example, if targeting engineers, search for ‘Technology’.

2. Check ‘About this group’ to confirm its relevance. Then, click ‘Join’.

3. Once you’re accepted, join the conversation. Search for posts relevant to your offering and comment on them as part of your LinkedIn marketing efforts. This shouldn’t be a hard sell – just one or two thoughts in response to the original poster.  

4. Add anyone who’s liked or commented on the original post (or who reacts to your comment) into an outreach campaign using Salesflow. 

As these are people and communities your offering is tailored to, you should see an uptick in your conversion rates and an improvement in your LinkedIn outreach strategy, despite economic uncertainty. 

As these are people and communities your offering is tailored to, you should see an uptick in your conversion rates and an improvement in your LinkedIn outreach strategy, despite economic uncertainty.  

You can scale this strategy by joining other relevant groups, finding resonant posts, and creating connection campaigns for the users who engage with each. A little work upfront for hundreds of best-fit, engaged leads that will generate sales. 

Check out our guide to LinkedIn groups and events for more tips and tricks on LinkedIn lead generation.

5. Use thought leaders to spark conversation 

There’s an easy way to generate leads on LinkedIn right from the search menu. 

By selecting ‘People’ and then ‘Filters’, you can get a list of prospects who are ‘Followers of’ or ‘Connections of’ a particular account.

Find a thought leader relevant to your space and offering and you can instantly access a list of great leads by filtering for their followers or connections. 

Need an example? 

If your product helps Fintech companies scale, use a simple Google or LinkedIn search to find a thought leader who regularly posts about Fintech growth strategies. 

Then, do a LinkedIn search for people in the financial and technology industries who follow this individual. (It’s a good idea to include filters for things like job titles, too). You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator if you have it, but this tip will work even with a basic LinkedIn account.  

Create a simple connection message mentioning the thought leader’s content and your prospect’s interest in growth strategies. Then use a tool like Salesflow to create an automated connection campaign and enroll your filtered list. 

You’ll reach hundreds of prospects in your target market who need to solve the problem your product addresses. Even better, by referencing the thought leader, this Linkedin outreach strategy has built-in personalization that feels personal to each prospect, even though you’re using it at scale. 

6: Give prospects value

When times are hard, sales can feel a bit desperate. But if you start pushing too hard to close with your LinkedIn lead generation, you’ll see the opposite results to what you want. 

Instead, focus on building genuine relationships through social selling. Work out what you can offer prospects that they’ll find genuinely useful. What industry insights, guides, or tooling will tempt them to engage?  

Crack this aspect of LinkedIn marketing, and no matter the circumstances you’ll be able to engage relevant leads that convert.

7: Automate for consistency

All these tips will get you results. But only if you show up every day. 

When times get tough, businesses get leaner, and quotas get higher, it’s important to keep your LinkedIn lead generation consistent. But it can be hard to maintain motivation. And when motivation wanes, prospecting stops, and it’s not long until the pipeline is dry. 

Salesflow automates the process of LinkedIn lead generation with intuitive UX, automatic follow-ups, and AI messaging templates. So you can stop sweating the process and focus instead on the results: a healthy pipeline of leads just waiting to buy from your business.

Try it for yourself with a 7-day free trial:

Start free trial