In 2014, LinkedIn cracked down on spammy recruiters using their InMail service. At the time, the social media company stated “Most recruiters know that personalized InMails garner higher response rates. But a handful of Recruiter users (less than 2%) still send thousands of generic InMails per month. 94% are bulk InMails (one InMail to two or more members) that aren’t personalized to each recipient. Since these InMails are impersonal, they garner low response rates, create a bad member experience, and cause some members to be less responsive to other recruiters’ InMails, which can decrease overall InMail response rates. Long story short, everyone loses.” The company put into place safeguards that made InMail a far better and safer way to communicate and curtailed this pernicious 2%.
This, however, left the door wide open for the service’s secondary model of outreach: LinkedIn Connection invitations.
Up until very recently, the number of LinkedIn invites you could send (or automate) was maxed out using an algorithm that detected your invite acceptance rate in combination with random variables associated with your current connection list. Depending on company size, this could generate the previous maximum of 3,000 invites per month.
This landscape encouraged more spam invites from these services than almost anything of substance, clogging the junk mailboxes of anyone spending money on them and guaranteeing wasted time and wasted money across the board.
As social media has evolved over the last decade and a half, LinkedIn has settled in as an integral part of the business community. It’s the platform “for professionals” and facilitates marketing, hiring, and a whole range of other businesses. It’s amazingly convenient. But there are perils associated with that convenience and there is no junk filter in LinkedIn.
LinkedIn knows that spam invites are ultimately the death knell for the service. Too much lessens the effectiveness of the platform and, as the rules in place stayed as they were, the bandits could charge those without much choice to flood the space with empty noise.
Well, gang, there’s a new sheriff in town and it is exemplified by refreshed LinkedIn protocols: companies can only send out 100 invites per week. According to LinkedIn, this is to ensure quality invites over quantity and effectively cuts the legs out from under the current crop of ineffective, risky, and unethical low-tier "lead generation" services like Dux Soup, LinkedHelper, and Cleverly. They never really solved the sales problem to begin with, and it's about time people stop wasting time, money, and otherwise good prospects on the marginal-at-best results of these types of organizations
The warning looks like this:
“You’ve reached the weekly invitation limit.
Connections benefit you more when you know them personally, so we have weekly limits to encourage better networks.
For people you don’t know, you can follow them to see their posts or send an InMail instead. If you’d still like to send an invitation, please try again next week.”
This is simply LinkedIn making platform changes to try to reduce issues stemming from high volumes of poorly targeted, spammy outreach which is often sent by budget software widgets (that you’re not supposed to use, and that could get you banned).
This will be a platform-wide change in the coming weeks. The wheels are coming off of that wagon.
Don’t panic.
There is a solution to this and it's set and ready to go.
It’s called The CLOSER System and is offered by LeadRev.ai.
Tyler Kemp, the CEO of LeadRev.ai, anticipated this move years ago and has created a scientific, math-based process that eliminates chance and increases the odds of outbound sales success in every possible way.
It has the power to re-define the potential of your business from the prospect up. If you execute this process, your business will never be the same, and you will never slink back to scammers and spammers (like low-tier LinkedIn automation agencies) ever again.
If you truly knew what we could do for you in terms of intent data, it would blow your mind.
We know the precise identities of your in-market prospects.
We know who's looking online for your type of service or product.
We know who's looking at your competitors.
We know who's looking for both B2B and B2C solutions.
We know just about everything about them—their tax return—if they pulled credit recently—what they're looking up on search engines—what social media groups they're a part of. Everything.
More importantly, this isn't data you can just go and buy. We have exclusive access.
Firmographic searches (i.e. by title, employee count, industry, etc.) are inherently not good enough. This means that your lift from a service like LinkedIn Sales Navigator is still going to be marginal. Those are not in-market prospects.
We target by capitalizing on three fronts:
(1) Your firmographic qualification,
(2) By search intent and competitor research.
(3) By resolving the personal identity of 30%-70% of your website visitors.
This is your key to insane profits.
Your messaging is stale and cookie-cutter and you know it. Don’t be embarrassed. Everyone else’s is, too. The key to utilizing outbound sales is personalization.
No one responds well to canned messages. Like the kid in eighth grade who asks every girl to the Spring dance, none of the requests seem sincere and none of the date prospects feels special. That kid sits in the corner and watches everyone else dance.
We hyper-personalize your message. Our messages are specific and focused.
If you are just copy-pasting your messages and mass sending them to your prospects, your results are going to be abysmal at best. Especially if you can only send 100 per week.
We have employees research our leads all day and write them personalized first lines in their messages, every day. Each prospect receives attention and they feel it.
That’s how crucial this step is.
If you don’t personalize your messages, you’ll burn bridges with your prospects, receive little-to-no responses, and the ones you do receive will not be well received. You’ll sit in the corner watching everyone else dance.
This is the most commonly missed step in outbound, and it’s also a huge reason why most businesses fail at it.
Do your research.
Craft your messages as carefully and thoughtfully as you can.
Your prospects are the lifeblood of your business, and you want to make them feel like they are respected.
For high-ticket sales, this is the only way to truly capitalize on the rest of the hard work you’ve done up to this point, but once you do this, you’ll be able to cold sell to anybody.
LeadRev.ai invests in an omnichannel foundation.
The scalability of using a single platform for your campaign is incredibly limiting. Anyone can have an average business. You want yours to be record-breaking.
We suggest using LinkedIn Sponsored Messages but they are tough to control, and MUST be coupled with other channels and website visitor identity resolution (learn more about that at https://LeadRev.ai/resource).
With the new restrictions on max invites, if you go cheap and attempt to automate WITHOUT human personalization, you'll eventually be burned.
As a rule of thumb, for the best results and lowest spam rate, you'll want to have at least 50% of your daily invites as conversations that are being opened and replied to.
If you are sending out 50 cold invites a day, you also need to be sending 50 invites to other profiles, ones that are getting opened and actively responded to.
If you're extremely lucky, you could just hope and pray that 50% or more of your messages are actually performing like this, but the odds of that happening are slim-to-none, especially for a cold outbound campaign.
You’ve been flipping a coin with every message sent out and the spambots took the coin after every toss.
As you can imagine, finding a way around this hurdle is no easy task.
You could send messages to people you know, actively engaging in real conversations, hoping they respond consistently, but if you plan to scale this process to 100 or more invites a week, upholding that many conversations with that many people is going to become increasingly more difficult to maintain.
Here at LeadRev.ai, we've actually provisioned a fleet of outbound emails, from every email provider under the sun, and we use them to artificially create conversations back and forth and mark messages as "not spam". This builds the reputation, and is an infrastructure you want on your side.
Using this method, our client campaigns typically get spam rates <0.05%, down from the industry standard 60%.
You read that right. We achieve an average 99.95% delivery rate, and our clients are the beneficiary.
The CLOSER System is a six-step process for succeeding in outbound sales.
It was created to explain what outbound is and how it works at a fundamental level.
If you are a high-ticket business and can correctly follow each of these steps, this system will work for you.
Here at LeadRev.ai, we use the CLOSER system as the basis for everything we do.
We help our clients improve their outbound by doing it for them—following the CLOSER system step by step.
Using this method, we’ve achieved consistent, high-quality results, time and time again.
We’ve helped one company increase its monthly revenue from $20,000 per month to $60,000 per month.
We’ve helped another increase their efficiency and productivity by 100%, and we helped another generate $1,000,000 in sales revenue in just under three months.
Check out our many case studies.
The allegory of Plato’s Cave describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall.
The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality but are not accurate representations of the real world.
You were the prisoner looking at the shadows of sales potential. Automated models like Dux Soup convinced you they could see past the shadows but they can’t and LinkedIn has pulled the rug out from under that lie.
The CLOSER System brings you into the light, and brings your revenue goals from pipedream to cash-in-hand reality.
Transform your team into CLOSERs.
Calculate the Potential
Lead List Development
Omnichannel Foundation
Scripts and Personalization
Execution and Process Mapping
Reporting and Optimization
No one does it better than we do. We were ready for this LinkedIn crackdown.
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It’s the next step you need to skyrocket your team to the next level. If not now, then when?
