Orca - LinkedIn Automation Software

Orca Social Selling Platform enables B2B sales teams to efficiently and effectively engage prospects to drive more pipeline and close more deals through automated Linkedin engagements like profile visits, connects and messages.
More info at https://useorca.com

To get the best use out of LinkedIn and reach more customers, harnessing automation is essential. With the correct knowledge and tools, your sales team can become more productive than ever by taking sales beyond just cold email. More info at https://useorca.com

LinkedIn Automation: Taking sales beyond email
Email marketing has been the king of sales enablement for years. When people talk about great customer engagement and lead generation tools, email is always brought up.

That was the case until social selling became a thing. After years of dominating the sales automation industry, email is no longer the undisputed champion. Social selling is outperforming email in many ways. This is mainly because how social networks work.

People think of their social media accounts as their public online presence. The expect strangers to see them and they’re there to connect with other people. This is particularly true on LinkedIn.

Unlike the case with emails and cold phone calls, Linkedin users are more open to connecting with other users. People who don’t want to connect with new people/businesses won’t be on LinkedIn. And that’s what makes LinkedIn automation much more powerful than traditional email outreach methods.

LinkedIn is all about building relationships and acquiring new connections. While people there are open to being approached, you need to do this the right way. With the right LinkedIn automation tool, you’ll be able to target your leads with relevant content and messages.

Asides from being good for lead nurturing, LinkedIn autionation gives your sales reps more time to engage leads conversationally.

The following are the seven main reasons why you should join the movement to take sales beyond email with LinkedIn automation and social selling.

Reason 1: It’s a Warmer Approach
Do you like getting calls and emails from total strangers trying to sell you stuff? You probably don’t. And Nobody does, including your customers. They HATE cold calling and spammy email from people they don’t know.

The reason for that is quite simple, which is the psychology behind how emails and LinkedIn invites are perceived. . While invites are considered “requests”, unsolicited emails are considered a privacy breach. That’s why an invite on LinkedIn is a better way to introduce your brand than cold emails. .

Approaching your target audience on LinkedIn is much better because they are open to connecting with strangers there. They want to make connections and connect with new people and businesses. After all, that’s what a LinkedIn account is all about.

Your customers’ LinkedIn profiles are public and you’re welcome to approach them there. They’re expecting it. A nice LinkedIn message is better than one of those creepy emails.

Reason 2: LinkedIn Notifications Get Attention
People receive tons of emails every day. Most of them are deleted without being opened. Adding to the daily email mayhem of your potential customers won’t do your business any good. They’ll probably ignore you or even hate you for it. That’s if they notice who you are in the first place!

On the other hand, LinkedIn users don’t get that many notifications and when they do, there is a chance it’s a good opportunity. They can expand their LinkedIn network with a valuable contact or even find a better job. That’s why they pay attention to these notifications.

The notification system itself is different. People get push notifications on their phones and an email notification if they’re subscribed. This increases the chance of them noticing your invitation and triggers social lookbacks, which makes your LinkedIn profile function in a way that’s similar to a landing page.

Even if someone doesn’t accept your connection request, they’ll pay enough attention to notice who you are, which is always a good thing.

Reason 3: Better Business-Customer Interactions
Whether you have a B2B or B2C business model, LinkedIn allows you to interact with your customers in more effective ways. Once you’re connected with someone, you can use LinkedIn messaging to send them follow-up messages.

In addition to sending people customized messages, you can also create content that they can interact with. Since content is -and will always be- king, email is no where close to LinkedIn when it comes to business-customer interactions.

Instead of putting a bunch of stuff in an email, send it, and hope for the best, you get a two-way communications channel with your target audience.

Reason 4: People Spend More Active Time on LinkedIn
Whenever you read any email-related stats, you find pretty impressive numbers. People appear to be spending lots of hours there, which is a good thing. Right?

WRONG!
While it’s true that people check their inboxes frequently, they spend most of their time their deleting cold, unsolicited sales emails, responding to work emails and trying to keep things organized. It’s not like they open their inbox and start reading every email. That never happens.

What will most likely happen is that your lead generation email will end up swiped away with 76% of the emails that are never opened. That’s why the time people spend there isn’t that relevant.

On a network like LinkedIn, people spend their time networking. They scroll through their news feed to find interesting posts to read and check out what everyone else is doing. There is a good chance you’ll have a meaningful interaction with them there, not when they’re trying to sort out the flooded inbox.

Reason 5: Better Customer Insights
Spending time with your target audience on a network like LinkedIn will help you know a lot about them. Unlike email, the insights go way beyond open and response rates. Being able to post different types of content there allows you to better understand your potential customers

What type of posts do they read, who do they follow, what kind of feedback do they leave on your posts is just the tip of the insights iceberg.

Using this information will allow you to improve your business. When you’re using a LinkedIn automation tool, this information can be used to make your LinkedIn marketing efforts more effective. You can also target the right audience with the right content and personalized invitations.

Reason 6: Powerful Networking Effect
On social networks in general and on LinkedIn in particular, people tend to connect with similar people. If you’re targeting people from a specific industry, each new LinkedIn connection will give you access to tens or even hundreds of similar people.

When you’re using an automation software, you can turn LinkedIn into a lead generation machine that’s working 24/7. Email doesn't work this way. You don’t access people’s contact lists when you send them an email.

This effect is hard to replicate with traditional email marketing, which makes LinkedIn automation more powerful.

Reason 7: It’s Future-Proof
Cold emails and unsolicited calls are on the way out. As email spam laws keep getting tougher and people become more resistant to cold outreach, the effectiveness of these tactics will just keep dropping.

That’s not the case in LinkedIn, and it’ll never be. As LinkedIn is about networking and making new connections, engaging with other people is an integral part of how it works. This is what LinkedIn was made for. As the world becomes more connected through social media, the way we interact also changes.

For example, discovery calls no longer have to be phone calls. We are living in the the era of instant messaging. Sales organizations need to take advantage of Linkedin by interacting with users through chat. Messaging is the new discovery call.

Sales organizations that want to future-proof their business model need to adapt their sales process to find and engage customers on and across different social channels.

Cold emailing is no longer “the” go-to tactic for lead generation. If you want to engage users in a meaningful way to grow your business, social selling in general -and LinkedIn automation in particular- is worth investing in.

Source https://useorca.com/blog/linkedin-automation-is-crushing-cold-emailing-7-reasons-and-why-it-matters

LinkedIn has grown exponentially, today renowned as one of the most powerful and impressive marketing tools available to B2B professionals.

With over 560 million users on the platform, approximately 40 million of which are senior business decision makers, it is easy to see why LinkedIn is becoming the social selling platform of choice for marketing, sales navigators and lead generation.

But why is LinkedIn so effective?

Well, simply put, we see social media as an extension of our own personalities. Our pages are full of our own pictures, our job history and our proudest work. They're pages built to reflect our own agendas and achievements, shared with our own friends and colleagues.

In this sense, the majority of people are more receptive to Linkedin than to their work email. Approaches are considered to be much more personable, and as millions of business executives pay great attention to their LinkedIn accounts, the social platform has become a powerful tool that is free and ready to tap in to.

LinkedIn Automation
The problem is that undetaking effective LinkedIn marketing manually can be time consuming to say the least. Finding different profiles and writing out each and every message is not simply not efficient.

This is where LinkedIn automation comes in.

By using automation tools, time from your busy work day is no longer wasted on manual marketing techniques. Instead, concise and detailed reports are compiled, helping to generate countless new leads with a minimized proportion of the leg work.

These techniques are not used to random effect.

Automation tools allow possible new connections to be filtered by job, location and other factors that you might be looking for, all in the aim of ensuring that you're getting in touch with the right people.

Linkedin users are nothing less than a target audience, and reaching the right audience is imperative.

After all, nobody wants to waste talented employees on menial tasks. The dramatic advancements of technology are benefiting almost every progressive business these days, so why not you?

Building a brand
Such methods will quickly help you to expand any LinkedIn network and ramp up your prospects. However, often packaged as an end-to-end marketing solution, LinkedIn automation doesn't stop here.

The technology is equally adept at helping to build your brand, ensuring that your connections don't forget about you. By sharing relevant information with them, these tools are able to position you as an expert within your field among hundreds and even thousands of business decision makers.

Ultimately, this will put you and your business on the required platform that you need to continue to reach new heights.

The B2B world is becoming increasingly competitive. It only takes a glance at the Linkedin profiles of successful companies to realise this, so building your brand is imperative to achieving sustainable growth.

Organisation is key

Building your network can require significant amounts of organisation, planning and preparation, and even then traditional methods can still prove to be a logistical nightmare.

Again, LinkedIn automation tools can soothe any headache on this front.

Connecting with tens of new potential clients each day, these tools are able to effectively monitor and catalog your LinkedIn marketing methods, better maintaining your business processes.

Will I get banned for using an automation tool?

Naturally, this sounds all too good to be true, and there is often skepticism surrounding the use of automation tools.

However, rest assured, automation software providers have thought this through. With proper usage in line with the given guidelines, there is no chance of becoming listed as spam, and the desired results will likely be achieved.

Why should I used LinkedIn tools?
LinkedIn's own mission statement is: “To connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.”

And while the social platform itself provides the means for this, automation tools have allowed this to become an accelerated reality.

Sure, there are some negatives to it if misused, such as spamming Linkedin connections to multiple linkedIn accounts. However, the pure benefits of using such platforms alone are endless.

Not only are you able to increase your connection requests at efficient rates, but the search criteria for these can become optimised, tailored, and vastly more organised than any manual method would allow.

It is undoubted that automation tools empower sales navigators, and while countless other companies are using this to great success, there isn't much time to lose in the face of growing competition and marketing saturation.

Source https://useorca.com/blog/a-simple-guide-to-linkedin-automation

If you’re a B2B salesperson, you’ve got to be using social selling on LinkedIn to engage with your audience. With over 400 million users, there’s a ton of opportunity to generate new leads.

But with the amount of noise on LinkedIn, how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you use LinkedIn as an alternative to cold email and other channels?

In this definitive guide, you’ll learn how to use LinkedIn to build a social selling machine. Once you’ve followed these steps, you’ll have an efficient and effective lead generating machine that builds real sales opportunities.

Contents
Foreword: What is Social Selling?
Chapter 1: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Ultimate Positioning
Chapter 2: Creating Content & Building Your Personal Brand
Chapter 3: How to Find Red-Hot Prospects on LinkedIn
Chapter 4: How to Engage & Build Trust with Your LinkedIn Leads
Chapter 5: Getting Key Insights on Leads, Competitors & Influencers
Chapter 6: 4 LinkedIn Tools for Automation & Efficiency
Foreword: What is Social Selling?
Let’s kick things off with a simple definition:

“Social selling is the art of connecting, engaging with, and nurturing leads through social media channels. Whether that’s on Twitter or LinkedIn, the primary goal is to create real-world sales opportunities by being active through these channels.”
So, why should you even bother paying attention to social selling? This next stat is a pretty good reason: according to LinkedIn, 78% of sales professionals who use social media outperform their peers who don’t.

If you’re still not convinced, here are three more reasons why social selling is advantageous:

Your leads are there: LinkedIn has exploded in recent years. Users are more engaged than ever. Which includes your ideal clients. According to a study conducted by IDC, 75% of B2B executives use social media as part of the buying process.

So are your competitors: That’s right, if 78% of salespeople are already utilizing social selling, you can bet that includes your competitors. These statistics from eMarketer drive this point home:

Your competitors are already eating up the attention. Luckily, the rest of this guide will show you how to outperform them.

It leads to lifelong relationships: Relationships are the foundation of successful selling in 2018. By engaging with your leads on LinkedIn, you can add more value and build stronger relationships while boosting your sales teams’ credibility at the same time.
You know why social selling is important, and the benefits it will bring to you and your sales teams. Let’s dig into the seven-step process to becoming a social selling rockstar on LinkedIn.

Chapter 1: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Ultimate Positioning
Your LinkedIn profile is the first thing your prospects will see.

Which is why you’ve got to optimize it.
Why? Here are a few reasons:

It’s what your connections will judge you on
It will boost your credibility as an expert
It will convince your leads they are in safe hands
It’s the perfect vessel to boost social proof
Let’s break down each element of your profile and what they must include for ultimate optimization:

The Perfect Profile Picture
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

As humans, however, we do it all the time. Which is why your profile picture must be high-quality and professional looking.

But what does this actually mean? Let’s break it down:

Use the right expression: You want to appear warm and friendly to your prospects. The best way to do this is to “smile with your eyes.” Don’t put on a Cheshire-cat grin, but don’t come across too seriously either.

Dress the part: Wear the clothes you’d usually wear in a work setting. Depending on your personality and target market, that might be a traditional shirt (or even suit), or perhaps something more casual. Allow your personality to shine through.

Take up 60% of the frame: Your profile picture is all about you. This means no landscape photos where you’re somewhere in the background.

Use a simple background: You don’t want the background setting to be too distracting. Make sure that you are the focal point.

Credibility Boosters for Killer First Impressions
Once you have a polished profile picture, it’s time to show your audience why they should pay attention to you.

To do this, you must quickly demonstrate that you’re a credible figure in your industry or subject matter.

Do this using these two LinkedIn profile elements:

Your header image
Your headline
For example, Matthew Howells-Barby, Director of Acquisition at HubSpot, uses a simple header image to illustrate his public speaking ability in front of a large crowd:

Karola Karlson, Marketing Manager at Taxify, uses this space to showcase the publications she has contributed to:

Then there’s your headline. You can use this to show off your work experience, accomplishments, and, most importantly, how you help people.

This is exactly what SaaS marketing consultant Siddharth Bharath does. Instead of simply telling his prospects what he does, he shows how he helps them:

Write A Clear and Compelling Bio
The bio section is where you can truly sell yourself.

Use this to expand upon your accomplishments, add more credibility boosters, and talk about how you help your clients.

Josh Fechter, founder of BAMF Media, is a great example of this:

He lists out the services he offers, as well as the companies he’s worked with.

What about an example from the SaaS world? Here’s how David Cancel, founder of Drift, positions his company’s value proposition:

Include this value proposition in both your bio and company description. It’s more likely to get read if a prospect scrolls past your header section.

Recommendations & Endorsements
Receiving recommendations from your peers are like testimonials for your LinkedIn profile. It shows that people vouch for you:

In the example above, people talk about the value they received from working with Oli Gardner, founder of Unbounce. These people not only vouch for his expertise as a marketer, but his ability as a leader - something that will appeal to potential candidates.

To receive recommendations, you’ve got to give them first. People are more likely to write a glowing testimonial if you write one for them.

Start with those closest to you. These include colleagues, existing clients and friends within your industry. You should also endorse them for relevant skills:

You should now have a LinkedIn profile that boosts your credibility and shows why you’re an expert in your space.

The next step is to add value to your audience.

Chapter 2: Creating Content & Building Your Personal Brand
These days, there’s only one way to build lifelong business relationships:

Deliver an insane amount of value upfront.

The best way to do this is through content. Content that goes above and beyond the call of duty. Content that helps people solve their specific problems.

Here’s how you do it on LinkedIn:

Create Killer Owned Content
In 2018, I recommend that all salespeople start building their personal brand with owned content.

This is content that you publish on your own blog or website. You can either do this on your company blog or your personal website.

For example, Tito Bohrt, CEO of AltiSales, created an in-depth guide on sales development for the Sales Hacker blog:

By doing this, he boosted his own authority within his industry, while creating content for his ideal prospects at the same time.

The first challenge to doing this is coming up with topic ideas. As a salesperson, you’re in the best position to uncover content ideas.

You’re talking to prospects and clients on a daily basis. Keep an ear out for common complaints, questions, and challenges. What hurdles are your prospects trying to overcome?

Keep track of these challenges in a spreadsheet like so:

Next, you need to create the content itself. There are several formats you can use to frame your content, including:

How-to guides: Create an instructional guide on how to solve a problem step-by-step.
Case studies: Show how a client or someone from within your industry solved a problem.
Opinion pieces: Write about your thoughts on a certain area of expertise.
Proprietary research: Use owned data or research to create a unique piece of content.
Struggling to write this yourself? Interview subject matter experts from within your organization. These include senior decision makers, marketers, and product designers.

Interviewing these experts will help you fill in the gaps and create content that serves your prospects.

Publish Content on LinkedIn
Did you know LinkedIn has its own publishing platform?

It allows anyone to post content and share it directly with their connections.

Now you know how to create killer “owned” content, you can re-publish it on LinkedIn.

To do this, click the “Write an article” button under the status text box at the top of the page:

Then, you’ll need to create a header image. My favorite method of finding a relevant image is to head to Unsplash and search for relevant keyword:

The optimal size for header images is 1200 x 644 pixels. You can use a tool like Canva to upload your photo from Unsplash and resize it to perfection.

Once you’ve uploaded your header image, simply copy and paste your existing content into the article:

You now have owned content published on LinkedIn to share with new connections.

Writing Engaging LinkedIn Posts
As well as LinkedIn articles, it’s also important to write posts that appear directly in the news feed.

Publishing native posts on a regular basis is the perfect way to nurture leads over time. Here’s an example from Aaron Orendorff, Editor in Chief at Shopify:

The results? Over 250 likes and 90 comments (so far):

So, how do you create engaging posts like this? There are several formats you can adopt:

Stories where you’ve overcome tough hurdles
Stories of mistakes you made and how you fixed them
Stories from people you’ve met or interviewed
Short, instructional guides on new strategies, tricks and hacks
Stories are very popular on LinkedIn. They generate the most attention as it allows your audience to connect with you.

Let’s take a look at another example from Gaetano Di Nardi, VP Marketing at Sales Hacker:

He hooks readers in with an attention-grabbing question. One that speaks to the pains of his main audience.

He then leads into a polarizing opinion on the nature of cold calling.

Instead of talking about what’s wrong, he then gets into the crux of the post: actionable advice on what to do instead.

He then wraps it up with a question to spark engagement with his audience.
This short post has generated over a hundred likes and dozens of comments. This engagement gets him extra exposure, as the connections of those who comment will also see the post.

You can also create engaging video content. For example, Quentin Allums uses LinkedIn video to spread his message and educate his audience on the power of storytelling:

Creating content in this manner is simple. Simply stand in front of a camera (or iPhone), hit record, and talk about a topic that matters to your ideal clients.

Add subtitles to your video to capture mobile browsers. This engages users who can’t watch with the sound on, and has been proven to generate a higher engagement.

Chapter 3: How to Find Red-Hot Prospects on LinkedIn
You now have an optimized profile and killer content that delivers value to your leads.

It’s time to go and find them.

Prospecting for the ideal customer on LinkedIn doesn’t have to be difficult. Luckily, LinkedIn provides tools that make it even easier.

Finding the Best Leads with Advanced Search
The first and most obvious tool is LinkedIn’s advanced search. With it, you can run searches on criteria like location, keywords and industry.

To access advanced search, click the search button followed by the magnifying glass icon:

Click “All filters” along the top bar to access the advanced search:

You’ll see a list of advanced filters to refine your search, like so:

For example, if you wanted to find prospects with a job title of “VP Marketing” who work for IT companies in the San Francisco area, your search would look something like this:

You can also use Boolean logic to construct better search queries. By using Boolean search, you’ll generate more refined results.

Here are five variables you can use in your Boolean search strings:

Quoted searches: You can use quotation marks if you want to find someone with a multi-word title or exact phrases. For example: “senior product manager.”

NOT searches: If you want to exclude a particular term, you can use an uppercase NOT immediately before the term. For example: programmer NOT manager.

OR searches: To see results that include one or more terms, separate the terms with an uppercase OR. For example: ceo OR “chief executive officer” OR founder OR cofounder.

AND searches: To get results that include two or more terms in a list, you can use the uppercase word AND as a separator. For example: manager AND director.

Parenthetical searches: To do a complex search, you can combine terms using parentheses. For example, if you want to find people who have “VP” in their profiles, but you want to exclude “assistant to VP” or SVPs, you can type: VP NOT(assistant OR SVP).
Boolean search must be constructed in this order:

Quotes [“”]
Parentheses [()]
NOT
AND
OR
A few other things to note when running Boolean searches:

LinkedIn search only supports standard quotation marks. Stop words such as “by”, “in”, “with” etc. are not used or recognized in a search.

The + and — operators are not officially supported by LinkedIn. Using AND in place of a + and NOT in place of a — makes a query much easier to read and guarantees that LinkedIn will handle the search correctly.

When using NOT, AND or OR operators, you must type them in uppercase letters.

LinkedIn does not support wildcard searches.

Boolean search will only work in the keyword word field.
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Sophisticated Prospecting with Sales Navigator
If you have the budget, Sales Navigator is well worth investing in.

With it, you can run advanced searches, get invaluable insights on your leads, and save your searches for later use.

Use these techniques to get the most out of sales navigator and supercharge your lead generation efforts:

Integrate with your CRM: You can bring your CRM data into Sales Navigator (and the other way around) thanks to LinkedIn’s various partnerships. Below is an example of how this looks in Salesforce:

No more tab-switching when looking for insights on your leads!

Advanced Filters: Sales Navigator ramps up the power of advanced search with more sophisticated filters. These filters include:

Years at current company
Years in current role
Years of experience
Company type
Seniority level
Keywords found in posted content

TeamLink: Using the TeamLink filter, you can find prospects that share an acquaintance with you. This includes both first- and second-degree connections.

Save your InMails: Some users have marked themselves as “Open Profiles.” These are people who want to be approached, meaning you don’t need to be connected with them (or use InMail’s) to send them a message.

Tag Prospects: Keep track of your leads by tagging them with their current status. This will help you keep track of several contacts within the same target account:

Use “Shared Experiences:” This filter allows you to find leads who have something in common with you. This could be a place you lived, a company you both worked for, or a group you’ve both engaged with.
Once you’ve found the perfect criteria, click the “Create search alert” to save your search. You can then decide if you want to be alerted to new leads on a daily or weekly basis:

4 LinkedIn Prospecting Tricks
LinkedIn contains several features that can aid with prospecting. These are peppered around the platform and can help uncover new opportunities:

Look at competitor networks: Competitor customers often make the best prospect. These leads already see the value in the problem you solve. You just need to convince them why your solution is better.

Unless they’ve opted to make it private, you can browse through other people’s connections. Look for the salespeople within your competitor’s organization and search through their network for potential prospects.

See who comments: People interacting with your leads posts are likely to be within your target market. Use Sales Navigator to monitor prospect content and identify those who engage with them.

The “People Also Viewed” sidebar: Head over to an existing prospect’s profile and look in the “People Also Viewed” sidebar. This contains similar profiles that may be worth reaching out to.

Send Free InMails: Did you know that you can message 2nd degree connections if you’re in the same group together? When you find a prospect, check out which groups they’re in and join one.

Then, browse the list of members in that group and find the prospect you wish to reach out to. Click the “Message” button and you’ll be able to message them without using InMails:

Chapter 4: How to Engage & Build Trust with Your LinkedIn Leads
Once you’ve identified your ideal leads, you need to begin a relationship.

Due to LinkedIn’s explosive growth, people are constantly bombarded with sales messages on a daily basis.

If you want to stand out, you need to approach your engagement differently. As you’ve already started creating content that positions yourself as an expert, half the work is already done.

The next step is to execute intelligent outreach. Here’s how:

Step 1: Create Conversation Starters
Your connection request is the first point of contact you have with prospects.

Use these conversation starter scripts as a guide for reaching out to new connections. For example, in your connection request, you can reference a LinkedIn post or a piece of content they’ve shared:

“Hi [NAME], I loved your post on [TOPIC]. I agreed with your point about [THING]. I’d love to connect to stay up-to-date with your future posts.”

Here, we’re personalizing the connection request by referencing a post they’ve recently made. We’re then going the extra mile by stating exactly what we found useful about the post. Finally, it’s wrapped up by stating why we want to connect with them.

There are dozens of ways you can personalize your connection request, including:

A company you’ve both worked for/with
A group or skill you have in common
A mutual connection
Engagement on other channels (e.g. Twitter)
An upcoming event you’re both attending
It’s key you include a viable reason to connect that’s personalized to them. Here’s an example of what not to do:

“Hi [NAME], I’m looking to connect with other marketers and found your profile interesting.”

This includes no personalization and is far too generic. While it can work, your acceptance rate will drop significantly. Use a personalized approach to ensure your connection requests get accepted.

Sound like too much work? Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to automate this process in chapter six.

Step 2: The First Message
Once a connection accepts your request, it’s time to begin a conversation.

Remember all that content you created in chapter two? This is where it becomes fuel to light your lead generation on fire.

Wait a day or two after your connection request has been accepted. Then, send them a message including a piece of content you (or someone in your organization) has created. This can be an article or LinkedIn post.

When choosing content, pick a topic that matters to them. For example, if you’re messaging a CMO, you should send something strategic in nature. Tactical and how-to guides may not resonate as well.

Here’s an example message you can send:

“Hi [NAME], thanks for connecting!

Just wanted to send this over, as I think it would be of interest. It’s an article on [TOPIC] that shows how CMOs in SaaS companies overcame [CHALLENGE].

[LINK TO ARTICLE]

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Thanks,

[YOUR NAME]”

It’s simple, to the point, and most importantly, it’s specific to their needs.

Step 3: Move Them to The Pipeline
Once you’ve added value, it’s time to turn your prospects into sales leads.

To do this, it’s key you take the conversation away from LinkedIn. Whether that’s by driving them to a call, email thread, or landing page.

Create sales-driven scripts to help you guide prospects into the sales pipeline. Use these as frameworks to send to your prospects. Don’t copy-and-paste the same thing to each and every lead.

This is the perfect opportunity to send content lower down the funnel. This includes whitepapers, case studies, and eBooks. Here’s an example script you can adapt for your own use:

“Hi [NAME],

As [JOB TITLE] at [COMPANY], I thought you might find this new [CASE STUDY] of interest:

In it, we show how [CLIENT] overcame [CHALLENGE]. As [CLIENT] is in a similar industry to you, I thought it would be well worth reading.

I’d love to send it to you. Is [EMAIL] the best address?

Regards,

[YOUR NAME]”

From here, it’s important to follow up. Once you’ve sent this piece of content, it’s time to move into a sales conversation.

Here’s an example script:

“Hi [NAME],

I hope you found [CASE STUDY] useful.

At Orca, we help B2B companies like yours automate their social selling using omni-channel sales tools. I’d love to chat with you to see how we may be a good fit to work together.

Would this be of interest?

Thanks,

[YOUR NAME]”

This moves the conversation into a sales context. From here, follow your usual sales process to nurture each lead.

Voila! You’ve turned an unknown LinkedIn connection into a real business opportunity.

Chapter 5: Getting Key Insights on Leads, Competitors & Influencers
LinkedIn isn’t just a great lead generation tool.

It can also provide valuable insights on contacts at target accounts, thought leaders, and your competitors.

This approach is also useful for account-based marketing (ABM) efforts. LinkedIn provides a host of insights on contacts and companies you can use in all aspects of social selling. Here’s how.

1. Keeping Tabs on Your Leads Nurturing leads is a long-game. LinkedIn can provide you with insights to help with your follow-up processes.

Use Sales Navigator to set up alerts on specific leads and target accounts. First, save the leads and accounts you want to monitor.

This will display updates from these leads and accounts within your Sales Navigator news feed. You can then keep tabs without the clutter of the regular LinkedIn news feed.

Use this real-time insight to fuel your follow-up outreach.

Have they just been featured in a publication? Share the content.

Did they just secure a fresh round of funding? Email them and congratulate them.

1. Spy on Your Competitors Company profiles provide several points of insight. This includes your competitors.

This is publicly available information, so don’t worry - this form of “spying” is 100% white hat.

Here are the specific ways you can do it:

See who they interact with: It’s likely you’re connected with someone who works for a competitor. Set your viewing setting to “anonymous,” check out their profile and see who they’re interacting with.

Analyze company pages: Companies advertising on LinkedIn must tie their account to a company page. You can use this to determine if a company is spending on LinkedIn ads.

For example, if a page has thousands of followers but a scattered posting schedule, it’s likely this audience was built from ads. Similarly, if some posts have significantly more comments and likes than others, it’s likely these posts were amplified using sponsored posts.

Be the audience: Want to see what ads your competitors are running? Amend parts of your profile to look like your competitor’s target audience. This can include job title (at a fictional company) and bio.

You’ll start to see competitor ads over time. When making these changes to your profile, make sure to check the “Share with network” setting to “Off:”

1. Research Target Influencers Looking to make friends with thought leaders in your industry?

LinkedIn is the perfect place to find target influencers and research them. Finding influencers is simple. Search for a relevant keyword and then click on the “Content” tab:

On the results page, make sure the “Sort by” filter is sorted by “Relevance.” LinkedIn usually organizes results by how popular they are. And more engagement means more popularity:

Have a list of influencers you want to engage with?

Great!

Now you can use their profile to understand the topics that matter most to them and where they hang out online.

Look at the following profile areas to generate influencer insight:

Articles & Activity: Look at the articles they publish and posts they engage with. What do they write about? What kind of content do they comment on the most?

Experience: Where do they currently work? This is useful, as it’s likely they’re publishing their own content on their company blog.

Skills & Endorsements: What areas of expertise do they focus on? These skills can fuel your outreach efforts.

Accomplishments: This often includes third-party content they’ve published in other publications. Sharing and commenting on this content will help you get their attention.

Groups: If they’re active in certain groups, join them and contribute to the conversation. Find content and questions they share post to get on their radar.
This insight is invaluable when driving your influencer marketing efforts. It can fuel your outreach and show you which publications and communities they’re active in.

Get on these channels and contribute to their conversations. Comment on their content and share it to your own audience. This is how you warm up strategic influencer relationships.

Chapter 6: 4 LinkedIn Tools for Automation & Efficiency
You now have a complete system for generating, nurturing, and understanding your leads.

The question is, how can you make this process more efficient?

To wrap-up this guide, here are four social selling tools to help you automate your LinkedIn processes.

1. Orca I’ll take this moment as an opportunity to introduce our own tool, Orca. With Orca, you can automate LinkedIn engagement and email outreach using granular search criteria and Boolean search queries.

For example, you can connect with users with specific job titles in a certain location and industry using a mixture of Boolean searches and criteria. Orca will then autodiscover 1000 new leads for you every month.

You can then create advanced sequencing. View your prospects profile, connect, and send initial messages (see chapter four). Insert snippets to your messages to add personalization to every message:

Want to try it yourself? Get started with 200 free leads today.

1. Crystal If you want more contextual insights on your prospects, check out Crystal. This platform uses several data-points to show you how a contact prefers to communicate:

It also integrates with Gmail, helping you write more effective emails based on a prospect’s personality type. This helps you create messaging that resonates with each contact on an individual level.

1. FullContact Turn your Gmail account into a prospect analysis machine. With the FullContact Chrome extension, you can pool in data on your customers right from your inbox.

The extension shows snapshot information on your target contact and the company they work for, as well as insights from other social networks they engage on.

This includes updates and tweets, providing contextual information without having to leave your inbox.

1. Datanyze If you sell software, then you should check out Datanyze. It lets you know when a target account stops using a competitor’s product or solution. Meaning you can reach out to them and strike while the iron is hot.

Your turn
Building an effective social selling system is all about adding value up front. Create excellent content and position yourself on LinkedIn as an expert. This makes outreach far more effective.

Unlike cold email, prospects on LinkedIn want to be engaged with. Do this in a contextual manner using the tools and techniques we’ve shared here.

Source https://useorca.com/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-social-selling-on-linkedin

How to Build a Better Social Selling System on LinkedIn
More info at https://useorca.com

How to use LinkedIn for sales prospecting
More info at https://useorca.com

What is the importance of Building Positive B2B Relationships
More info at https://useorca.com