How to Jumpstart Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy Despite The Weekly Limitation

LinkedIn has recently put a new limit on connection requests, which went from more than 200 a day to only 100 per week. That has significantly slowed down the lead generation process for many businesses and put them in trouble.

If that’s something you’re struggling with at the moment, you have to stop playing the numbers game and instead work on taking your prospecting to a whole new level.

With a few simple tricks, you can optimize your LinkedIn lead generation strategy to fill up your pipeline with highly-targeted prospects. And despite the new limits, you can actually maintain your results and go beyond.

Here are three clever ways to do that:

1. Focus On Decision Makers

Account-based marketing is a highly effective strategy that focuses on individual customer accounts instead of broader markets. It’s the practice of offering personalized interactions and 1-1 experiences to leave a bold impression on each prospect. 

LinkedIn is one of the best platforms to find success with this approach. 

Here’s why:

ABM allows you to mainly focus on high-quality prospects that are most fit to work with your brand. It’s a great fit for LinkedIn because it helps you go from sending thousands of connection requests a week to only a few hundred. 

While doing that, your acceptance rate will go through the roof, and you’ll develop long-lasting relationships with your target clients.

To maximize your success with ABM:

You must always hone in on decision-makers instead of low-level managers to accelerate the process. Also, be sure to do your research and learn more about each prospect to maintain a personalized experience throughout the interaction.

Most importantly, your connection request has to answer these three questions:

• Why do you want to connect with this person?
• How is this connection mutually beneficial?
• What should they do after receiving your request?

2. “Follow” Before You “Connect”

The thing about sending personalized messages is that they have to be authentic. You can’t tailor your requests with only the name and job position and expect prospects to be excited about your connection request.

So:

Before connecting with any potential client, use the “Follow” button to stay updated with their latest posts and articles. Engage with their content and leave relevant comments to make a lasting impression. That’s how you’ll l be able to strike up a meaningful conversation later on.

Many times, when these prospects notice that you’re following them, they’ll follow you back, which you can then use to your advantage and send them a connection request on the spot.

Better yet…

A prospective client may sometimes initiate a connection request when they sense the honest engagement on your part. Although they’ll not always be the decision-maker, this is still a good way to build rapport and relevancy with the company.

3. Target Warm Leads With Spotlights

The Spotlight approach is basically the use of Sales Navigator to generate a list of prospects who match your ideal customer profile — and who also have the highest chance of connecting with you.

Since your end goal here is to increase connections, here are four spotlights you must focus on:

“Posted on LinkedIn in past 30 days” — This one is crucial because it helps you find the prospects who are most likely to see your request since they’re actively posting on LinkedIn.

“Mentioned in the news in past 30 days” — Using this as a spotlight is a great way to highlight that you’ve invested time to learn more about the client. It gives you something very specific to talk about and congratulate them on in your initial conversation.

“Share experiences with you” — Shared experiences have always been the ideal common ground between business leaders. Did you attend the same seminar or conference? Do you have any LinkedIn groups in common? Did you go to the same university? Use any of that in your connection request to start the conversation.

“Changed jobs in the past 90 days” — This is a special conversation starter for two simple reasons. First, it’s an easy way to get your foot in the door and talk to the prospect. Second, such clients are usually on the look for new solutions to overcome their problems and improve on their predecessors.

You may also spend a few extra minutes to find users who are both active and have recently been mentioned in the news. This is an excellent way to maximize your request acceptance rate and boost conversions.
Read more: How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy to Overcome The Weekly Limitation