The B2B Growth Secret Only Selective, Forward-Thinking Companies Can Use

The B2B Outreach Spectrum: Volume vs Value

B2B businesses have a spectrum of platform choices for cold outreach. At the two ends of the spectrum, Email can hit high volume daily, while LinkedIn allows for more personal 1:1 engagement. The lower the outreach volume, typically, the higher the engagement rates as well as the higher the value of the product being sold.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each end of the spectrum. Email can reach a lot of people, but most recipients will see outreach emails as spam.

And yet whilst 1:1 conversations via LinkedIn are much more personal and engaging for recipients, it is not humanly possible to engage with a high volume of prospects in this way.

Until now, businesses had to choose: reach many with no engagement, or few with high engagement.

Enter LinkedIn Message Automation. The solution that enables you to reach a higher volume of people on LinkedIn with the same curated, personal 1:1 messages you would have written manually.

Combining automation on LinkedIn with personalised messages rooted in deep research and generated with the help of AI, suddenly creates the possibility of reaching a high volume of people on a personal 1:1 basis. Zero spam.

So if it is now possible to reach thousands with personal messages, why wouldn't every smart business do this?

Personalised LinkedIn outreach automation only lends itself to businesses with certain types of Deal Economics, Audience and Sales Motion.

Let's walk through each one.

1. Deal Economics - what is the expected ROI?

LinkedIn is notoriously expensive. Does LinkedIn outreach automation actually work, financially?

The mad fact: Businesses that are profitable with $150 Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) can use LinkedIn automation as a lucrative Go To Market (GTM) channel.

Response Rate and Customer Acquisition Cost

• The more personal the message, and the more 1:1 the channel, the higher the response rate. But if the personalisation is done by a human, costs skyrocket.
• Automation and AI make it possible to personalise at scale, but without the cost. Using technology rather than humans to achieve personalisation at scale reduces the CAC from $1430 to $150, on average.
• Businesses who can be profitable with a $150 CAC are able to take advantage of LinkedIn outreach automation. Winning teams are already doing this — quietly, efficiently, and at scale.

2. Audience - what boxes need to be ticked with the target customer?

LinkedIn automation isn't for everyone — but here's who it's perfect for.

It works best for businesses with 5,000+ prospects, senior buyers, and a product that needs more than a one-liner to explain.

Market Size

• Market Size matters because LinkedIn automation must be used within sending limits that are set to protect the nature of the platform (essentially to avoid spam). That limit is around 200 connection requests per week, and message volumes follow on from that, as messages are sent to new connections.
• The average deal close timeline for most B2B businesses is somewhere between 3-6 months, and with a 200/week velocity for 6 months, the market size needs to be 5000+.

Lead Profile

• Personalisation of messages has the greatest impact on engagement rate with senior buyers who otherwise do not have spare attention to grant to cold outreach.
• Businesses targeting senior executives have a better chance of starting conversations with this audience if they can reach more people in a personal way.

Recipient Mindshare

• Complex products get more attention on LinkedIn, where fewer messages = more focus. Especially if the message is curated in a way that positions the product within the context of the recipient's business language.

3. Sales Motion - what kind of existing sales playbook works for this?

It's not just who you target. It's how you sell. Here's the kind of motion that thrives with this approach.

Products that can be customised per customer are well suited to LinkedIn automation, especially if the seller's LinkedIn profile is highly credible.

Sender Credibility

• Senders with a strong LinkedIn profile have a greater chance of engaging an audience with DMs because of the credibility and context their profile provides. Email senders can only convey limited information in their email signature.
• Using automation to reach out to higher volumes of people means taking full advantage of the opportunity created by having strong sender profiles.

Product Customisation

• Products that can be tailored to customers are well suited to tailored 1:1 conversations in the new business / pitch context for that product. Doing this at scale creates competitive advantage, because it's not something most are doing yet.

Text Writing

• The best teams know that automatically personalised messages at scale beat hand-crafted perfection that never gets sent. Using automated personalised isn't for everyone, but if your business is familiar with technology and AI, then it's likely you're a great fit.

Key Takeaways

Here's a summary checklist outlining the kind of business that achieves real ROI with LinkedIn automation.

Businesses with the following attributes are most able to achieve the best returns:

• Profitability above $150 CAC
• 5000+ market size
• Targeting senior executives and senior management buyers
• A degree of complexity in the product
• Credible LinkedIn profiles to send messages from
• Product is customisable during sales process
• Willingness to use automated personalisation

Email used to win on volume. Manual LinkedIn used to win on quality. Today, automated LinkedIn outreach wins on both, but only if your business is built for it.

Unlike email, LinkedIn automation is still a secret weapon - used by only the smartest B2B teams. And those teams enjoy an early-mover advantage…for now.

An intro to us: Upscale Outreach

Upscale Outreach helps businesses turn LinkedIn outreach into a reliable client acquisition engine. We build and run automated LinkedIn messaging campaigns from your LinkedIn inbox to generate a pipeline of sales conversations with qualified leads — without spam, without complexity, and without you lifting a finger. Find out more on upscaleoutreach.com, where you can also book a Q&A call or sign up to the service online.