It’s hard not to feel uncomfortable when you’re approaching a stranger on the Internet. There’s always the fear of getting perceived as spam when the content of your solicitations is business-related.
Nevertheless, there is one form of cold calling that has actually been proven to generate higher returns on investment than running ads, that is LinkedIn direct messaging. It is no surprise that many companies are relying more and more on LinkedIn’s professional platform as a direct sales funnel.
Let’s be realistic: targeting one of LinkedIn’s 660 million members, spread out across 200 countries, is sure to yield favorable sales results.
That being said, why should your startup invest in LinkedIn’s direct messaging?
To Reach Key Businesses Decision Makers Directly
Have you ever pitched your ideas or products to a potential client, only to have them email you back that they’ll need to confirm with their managers before making a decision? In such cases, what actually happens is that your ideas are not pitched correctly, and many of the key information of your pitch are not transmitted effectively.
LinkedIn’s direct messaging platform is the perfect solution to this challenge. In fact, more than 60 million LinkedIn profiles belong to senior executives who head or stand at the directing board of Fortune’s top 500 companies. Moreover, at least 40 million LinkedIn users make crucial decisions in their respective companies. That mentioned, LinkedIn’s direct-messaging platform will grant you access to the who’s who of the business world.
To Find The Perfect Balance Between Leading Casual Conversations and Building Trust
According to Matt Young, founder of Realply, a leading digital marketing enterprise, LinkedIn’s direct messaging is effective because of its capacity to facilitate casual conversations. Decision-makers are quick to trust people who can instantly transform any business correspondence into a casual and light conversation rather than keeping the tone uptight and formal.
Furthermore, the fact that your recipient can view your business profile, background, and qualifications as displayed on LinkedIn helps build trust and therefore maintain the perfect balance between credible and casual.
It’s Faster than Offline Sales Tools and Easier to Manage
LinkedIn’s direct messaging is easier to manage than other offline sales tools like cold emails. Decision-makers might not have time to respond to all of their emails, but they can easily answer their LinkedIn messages during their commute to work, or while waiting in-line at a coffee shop, because these conversations often assume casual tones and appear in chat-like formats.
Another perk of LinkedIn’s direct messaging is the reduced response time, especially when the recipient or decision-maker, in this case, is a frequent LinkedIn user and therefore they’re online for a longer time. Recent reports estimate that most users spend up to 20 minutes online daily on LinkedIn, giving your target audience enough time to read your message and respond in two to five sentences if not more if they’re curious.
It Makes It Easier For Businesses To Scale
For most startups, having enough time to scale the business is a make-it or break-it kind of effort.
Fortunately, the time taken to personalize LinkedIn messages is far less than what other cold outreach strategies require. This gives your marketing team enough time to implement these outreach strategies while still promoting the services you offer directly to the consumer through other channels.
Additionally, LinkedIn’s Direct Messaging portal makes it easier for users to reach out to multiple decision-makers at once and to switch between conversations more easily. Similarly, this increases your chances of scaling your business at a quicker pace.
Here are other tools and applications that can help your sales team maximize their productivity:
There are numerous applications that have been designed and implemented by LinkedIn or for LinkedIn specifically to help your sales team. These include:
LinkedIn Plugins: This application extends Linkedin’s functionalities to your company website and helps you automate crucial marketing tasks. LinkedIn plugins serve as ideal sales tools for startups as they can help your startup share its profile, vacancies, social media accounts and more with decision-makers in real-time.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This tool is designed for sales professionals to help them increase sales, build awareness and find leads in their target market. The tool’s algorithm is uniquely designed to help your startup reach the right target audience. It also allows you to track the performance of your account and get real-time insights, allowing you to focus your sales efforts on the relevant revenue funnels.
LinkedIn Small Business: The software is guided by three philosophies that aim to help businesses build trust and increase sales: establish brand awareness, link to target market, and boost engagement through content marketing. By sharing important content online, startups gain relevance with target audiences and convert potential consumers into brand backers. Sponsored content and text ads are some of the techniques that will help you realize your startup’s sales goals.
Crystal: This is a brilliant application that informs you about anyone’s personality you come across online. It helps marketers instantly access personality profiles online and informs them about how to communicate with each. It extends LinkedIn’s functionality by reviewing user-profiles and granting marketers access to insights about their target audience’s personality and how to approach them.
LeadFuze: This is a tool that helps you find instant leads from the millions of LinkedIn users around the world. For startups, it can get hard to sift through the vast amounts of data for insights, that’s why this tool collects contact data, cleans and verifies leads for startups and develops catalogs of their target accounts.
Final Thoughts..
Even though the likes of Facebook and Instagram are renowned social media applications, LinkedIn’s direct messaging platform is the perfect sales tool for startups because it provides top-notch business to business networking opportunities.
From linking your startup directly to other decision-makers to facilitating casual communication without compromising your credibility in addition to the ability to scale, LinkedIn direct messaging is a gift that keeps on giving.
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