LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

written by Houston Golden
Founder & CEO, BAMF Media
March 3rd, 2021
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Hot leads are the best type of leads.

And, what’s critical is that you don’t leave them in your LinkedIn inbox for too long.

The goal is to get them in front of a real person as fast possible so that you convert.

If you wait too long, they can cool down and you can waste the opportunity.

You don’t want that to happen.

In this quick guide, I want to show you how you can transition leads quickly from LinkedIn lead generation to quick meetings, and create an automatic email sequence to nurture the leads.

Transitioning Sales from LinkedIn Lead Generation to Calendly

The best way to move the conversation to another platform is by direct calendar-booking using an app like Calendly.

Check out the other tools and extensions that growth hackers need to grow this 2021.

All the prospect has to do is to click on your link, pick their most convenient time and date for a meeting, and it will automatically bock off your schedule.

We use direct calendar bookings because it helps minimize confusion, especially if you’re using the same link while running a massive outreach campaign.

You don’t have to worry about blocking off your calendar yourself or having meetings clash with each other.

Create a Custom Landing Page for Your Calendly

Now don’t just rush out and send your Calendly links to everyone, there’s a better way to go about it.

What I do is I create a custom page on the website where I have the Calendly link embedded.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

This is critical for two major reasons:

  • It allows you to customize the landing page for your client. This way you can add in branding and have complete control over how the landing page looks like. For prospects coming off of LinkedIn, I’ll even add a LinkedIn badge to let them know that the page was made especially for them.

Remember, personalization is key to winning people over. However, just because they’re hot leads doesn’t mean that you skip out on a little detail here and there.

  • Designated links per campaign. We always say that “you can’t growth hack if can’t track” and it applies in this scenario as well. Having a designated link for traffic coming in from LinkedIn (or from each campaign) allows you to check if you’re doing a good job at transitioning leads.

But, the benefits don’t just end there.

You can even create custom metadata, so this means the link that shows up on a LinkedIn message can be tweaked to have its own featured image.

And, you can also add retargeting pixels for platforms such as Facebook. This way they can be subtly retargeted when they’re on a different medium allowing you to nurture the lead as you continue walking them through your pipeline.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Creating an Email Sequence to Follow-Up

So, what happens if they don’t book a meeting with you via Calendly when you’ve already messaged them on LinkedIn?

Then, it’s time to start using an email drip sequence.

Now, I’d wait for three or four days before throwing their email into the sequence, but the way you time this is completely up to you.

Prospects can be busy and you don’t want to seem too eager to make a sale, at the same time you also don’t want to wait for too long, or else the lead might get cold.

Getting Emails

If you want to get the email addresses of your prospects on LinkedIn, there are a couple of ways to do this.

I personally, Houston Golden, and our company, BAMF Media, DO NOT officially endorse the use of third-party tools to automate LinkedIn. This is because doing so violates their terms of service and could lead to having your account suspended or even permanently removed. The following information is for educational purposes only.

Here’s one method where you can use a Phantom from the guys over at Phantombuster.

However, this method requires that you already have a list of your contacts on a spreadsheet. Phantombuster also has ways of pulling this information.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

This particular automation will allow you to get the personal emails of your LinkedIn friends.

Al you have to do is create an account on Phantombuster and install their Chrome extension which gives them access to your LinkedIn cookie.

Now navigate to their list of Phantoms and look for the “LinkedIn Personal Emails Extractor”. Make sure you click on “Connect to LinkedIn”.

You’ll be given a list of inputs that you can alter.

There will be options to pull out an entire profile, too, if you want the background of your prospect.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Most of the time, it’s advisable to send messages to professional email accounts, so click on this option.

There are a couple of options to choose from, they even have an option to use both Hunter.io and Dropcontact.io.

Once you’re done here, make sure you hit “Save” and that will take you to the next pane.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

There’s another batch of settings for you to mess with here, you can just leave them as is and click on “Save”.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

After clicking on “Save” it will take you to a window where you can “Launch” the Phantom. Give it some time to work its magic and boom, you’ve got a list of emails.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Verifying Emails

Now you can’t just start sending emails right away.

If emails start bouncing your reputation with ISPs is going to drop and you’re going to hurt your deliverability rates.

Find out how you can improve your email hygiene with this extensive guide!

This doesn’t just affect the campaign that you’re on right now, but all your email campaigns moving forward.

Now there are a lot of email verification services that you can use, and for this example, we’re going to use Clearout.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Once you have an account ready, all you have to do is click on “Add list”.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Upload the email list that you have and click on “Verify.”

And, after a couple of moments, you’ll have your results ready so that you can start sending our emails to people.

Creating a Follow Up Message

Now, there are several ways to create a follow-up message.

“Hey [insert their name], Houston here from BAMF Media. I sent you a Calendly link over on LinkedIn the other day, but it might have been buried in your inbox.

Anyhow, I’m offering free consultation sessions. It would be a great opportunity for us to discuss any growth challenges you might have at [insert their company name].

If you’re interested, book a time here [and that’s hyperlinked to my Calendly page that is embedded on our website], but don’t wait. There are limited spots and I’m sure they’ll go fast.

Cheers,

And then they’ll see my signature after that.]”

Now, you don’t have to follow this exact template and you can always change it up.

Sometimes a good template is just you saying hi and asking them if they still want to touch base at some other time.

It really depends on how far they are in the campaign or funnel.

Using MixMax to Manage Your Drip Campaign

You’ll need a drip-email campaign manager to help you create lead nurturing emails that can be sent via a schedule with great mail merge functionality.

At BAMF we use MixMax to manage our campaigns because it integrates easily with Gmail and it offers a lot of bada** features.

All you have to do is download the app and get it installed in your Gmail, and click on “Activate”.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

It will ask you for your usual permissions.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Once you’re done with that, it will take you to this loading screen.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Once it’s loaded you’ll see the icon of Mixmax appear on the upper right-hand side of Gmail net to to the Google apps icon.

Now, go ahead and click on that.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

This will take you to a new tab on your browser. If you’re rolling with a new account, it will come with a welcome screen.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!
linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

You will want to click on “Sequences” on the left-hand side, followed by “New sequence” once the “All sequences pane” appears.

Now give your email sequence a new name.

You now have the option to upload the list of emails that you have and click on “Next”.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Alternatively, you can integrate Mixmax with Salesforce – if you’re using that CRM – and upload a list from there.

Click on “Next: Edit Stages” and this will take you to the next pane.

Copy the message – or template – that you have over to the email editor, and remove any formatting. You’ll be surprised at the amount of formatting that comes with anything being lifted from any other program except Notepad on Windows. The worst thing that could happen is you have inconsistent formatting in your email.

Now, you want to add as much personalization as you can, click on the “Insert Variable” button to select the variables that you want to use.

Remember.

Personalization is what sets you apart from the rest.

After adding your own tags to your emails, you can now tweak when your messages will be sent out.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Click “Next: Confirm and activate”.

This will give you the final settings before you can “Activate Recipients”.

Here, you’ll have growth hacking options to track opens and clicks and connect your CRM.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

They also have options to prevent the delivery of the email to people who have already received the same sequence or are in your other sequences.

Here’s what

One thing that can turn people off is repetitive messaging, not only is it annoying but it looks unprofessional. By having options like this you get a last line of defense.

Other options here include the ability to remove recipients from the sequence once they have emailed you back or a meeting is booked.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

Additional Lead Nurturing Steps

Lead nurturing doesn’t really stop when you’re in lead generation, and there are still a lot of things that one can do to guide prospects through a pipeline.

Add Another Stage on Mixmax

Now, what we love the most about Mixmax is the ability to add another stage to the drip campaign.

linkedin lead generation, LinkedIn Lead Generation: Go from Messages to Meetings!

You can even tweak this to email people who have not read the first email or just send them out regardless if they didn’t reply or didn’t view.

The reason we send email reminders is that people might not respond to the first meeting link that you send them over LinkedIn.

They might pick a date that’s a couple of days (or weeks) away so make sure that you still continue to nurture them through their journey.

Keep Posting

Another way of nurturing your leads is to simply just keep posting updates on LinkedIn at least three times a week.

This way, if they visit their profile at least once a week, they can still see you and be reminded of what you have to offer.

We find this to help us the most when we’re running inbound lead generation campaigns for our clients.

On the plus side, it feels really organic, and people like that.

These subtle reminders won’t oversaturate them but serve as gentle brand reminders to keep their interest piqued.

Retarget on Facebook

Another medium that you can use is Facebook.

Facebook is great because it’s a more casual platform than LinkedIn and you don’t have to do much to reach your intended audience.

All you have to do is gran the list of personal emails that you have, throw them into a custom audience on the platform, and create a nice ad that will promote your brand.

It doesn’t take a lot of time, and it’s pretty easy to get the campaign started.

Takeaways

At BAMF, we make sure that everyone rolls with a multidimensional campaign.

Regardless if it started on LinkedIn and you’re just waiting to get into a meeting with a prospect, that still isn’t any excuse for you to slack off.

You need to be able to guide a prospect into a meeting with you, and continue to nurture them even after a sale is done.

It’s going this extra mile that’s critical for growth hackers to succeed, given the challenges that we’re facing today.

So, the next time you transition a sale off of LinkedIn.

Don’t just wait for them to get on a meeting with you.

Guide them, show them, and more importantly, nurture them.

That’s how you stay Golden. ?

About the Author

The name's Houston Golden. I'm the Founder & CEO of BAMF — a company I've grown from $0 (yes, really) to well over $5M+ in revenue over a span of 5 years.

How did I do it? Well, it's quite simple, really. I've helped hundreds of business owners and executives get major traction (because when they win, we win), I tell all on this blog.

Growth hacking is a state of mind. Follow along as I explore and expose the unknown growth strategies and tactics that will change the way you think about marketing.
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