Scalable LinkedIn Prospecting for Agencies: 5 Proven Tactics for 2022

Optimize your profile for prospecting

Picture the scene: You’ve just spent hours researching your prospect, you’ve crafted the perfect message, they’ve responded favorably, and it’s all going well… right up to the point they view your profile. Next thing you know, you’ve been ghosted. 

Think of your profile as the essential foundation that all of your prospecting efforts are built on. Put yourself in your prospect’s position. What’s the first thing they see after they click on your name? 

Usually, it will be the visual elements, such as your profile photo and background image. According to LinkedIn, profiles with photos receive a 40% higher InMail response rate. Rather than making do with that same holiday selfie you use on Facebook, use a profile photo that is professional, polished, and in line with your agency’s branding. And that background photo? It’s valuable real estate too. Instead of sticking with the default banner, use the image to highlight your agency’s value proposition. 

There are plenty of other elements that go into a strong LinkedIn profile. More than just a job title, your headline should spell out exactly how you can help prospects. Your highlights, your featured posts, and your activity all contribute to how prospective clients view you. Each recommendation and skill on your profile is an endorsement that reassures clients that you can deliver the goods. 

Remember, as an agency, both the company profile and the individual profiles for your team should all complement each other and be optimized for prospects.

Research and study your target market

Before you can scale your prospecting efforts, you need to know who your best prospects are. Instead of trying to reach every person on LinkedIn, focus your efforts on your win-win leads — those prospective customers who’ll get the most value from your agency’s services (and understand that value) and in return offer long-term value to your agency.

If you haven’t already done so, create the essentials: a detailed buyer persona and ideal customer profile. These allow you to target both the right company and the right individual(s) within that company. However, this involves far more than just coming up with a name for your dream customer, finding a stock photo, and arguing about their favorite pizza topping. 

Your buyer personas should be based on real data, not your imagination. According to the experts, one of the biggest mistakes people make when creating buyer personas is not spending enough time on research.

At a basic level, your ICP should include the firmographic information that will allow you to filter through the millions of profiles on LinkedIn and narrow it down to those who are able to benefit from your services. This would include details like:

• Industry
• Company size (and/or revenue)
• Location
• Job titles or departments
• Technographics (technologies they are using)

Don’t stop there though. Include your ideal client’s psychographics — the challenges they face, the goals they’re trying to achieve, their motivations and behaviors. They all enable you to make your messaging that much more relevant and effective.

Use Sales Navigator to supercharge your prospecting

When we asked experts for their top social selling tools, one of the most popular answers was LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Although it may not be the cheapest option, it’s a worthwhile investment for any agency that’s serious about prospecting for leads on LinkedIn. 

One of Sales Navigator’s key features is the ability to help you find the best possible leads in the least amount of time. Armed with those details on your target market that we talked about in the previous section, use Sales Navigator’s advanced filters to get super-specific about who you’re reaching out to. 

With more than 40 filters, you can narrow down your search to details such as leads that have been mentioned in the news, companies listed on Fortune 500, companies with recent leadership changes, and more — all with just a couple of clicks. Then, by saving your search, you can easily run it again to find new leads and stay updated on any changes. 

Sales Navigator is also useful for engaging directly with potential prospects, allowing you to use InMail to reach out to anyone on the platform, as well as tracking the effectiveness of your messaging with InMail analytics. You can also integrate Sales Navigator with most of the popular CRMs, saving you valuable time and ensuring you always have the latest information on clients at hand. 

For agencies wanting to maximize the effectiveness of their LinkedIn prospecting, Sales Navigator is essential. 

Make smart use of automation

Social selling on a platform like LinkedIn is a balancing act. A successful social selling strategy relies on creating genuine connections and engagement with prospective clients, something that takes time. On the other hand, spending all day aimlessly connecting with strangers and commenting on every post in your feed isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time.

It’s important to use your time wisely on LinkedIn, especially if you’re trying to scale your prospecting. However, this doesn’t mean you should just automate absolutely everything. The first step is to identify what activities you can safely and easily automate without negatively affecting your prospecting. 

For example, we’ve already touched on how you can use Sales Navigator to search for ideal prospects, rather than manually trawling through thousands of profiles. Likewise, Reply’s Chrome extension makes it easy to find email addresses connected with LinkedIn profiles, ready for use in your outreach campaigns. 

As far as connecting with your prospects, Reply can also help you automate your connection requests and other messages. However, these should still be carefully personalized, rather than just sending exactly the same message to everyone. Test these to ensure that they’re delivered correctly. I’ve seen messages sent to people using a job title for personalization, congratulating them for the “great work they’re doing at self-employed.” Not a great way to make a good first impression! 

To scale your outreach messaging while still keeping the personal touch, why not adopt the account-based prospecting approach? For your tier one prospects who are a perfect match for your ideal customer, create unique one-to-one messaging, 100% personalized to them and their current situation. For your other prospects, who still tick a lot of the right boxes, you can use automation to reach more people, personalizing key details so that it’s relevant to them.

Drive engagement with content

Although millions of people use LinkedIn, only 3% of users post more than once a week. This means there’s a huge opportunity for agencies to lead the conversation and stand out from the competition, simply by actively creating content on the platform. In turn, you can establish your authority as an industry thought leader, making your outbound prospecting more effective as well as bringing in more inbound leads.

Of course, there’s a reason why so few people post regularly. Creating original content takes time and effort. If you want to scale your approach, be strategic with your content creation. For example, rather than creating content from scratch, look for ways to reuse your existing content. This might look like breaking down a high-performing post or video from your website into smaller posts. 

Bear in mind that posting on LinkedIn doesn’t have to be all long-form content and professionally produced videos. Sometimes a simple tip, a question to your followers, or a relevant quote can be enough to resonate with your connections. 

If you find a LinkedIn post performs well, use it again! Virginia Bautista, a LinkedIn and personal brand strategist, regularly reposts her top-performing posts after 3-6 months. Not only can this help your content reach more people, but it also validates what type of content works best for your audience.