The Best LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategy for 2025

how can you possibly book meetings on LinkedIn when the average buy inbox looks like this and the average sales DM looks like this I mean is it even worth trying to book meetings on LinkedIn anymore it definitely is the problem isn't that the LinkedIn channel is broke it's the fact that most people's approaches suck they do a horrible job choosing who they should be reaching out to their profile is a big red walking flag that says hey I'm going to pitch you so no one wants to connect with them and their DMS are literally copied

and pasted repurposed code emails that are way too long and way too self-serving and even when they do get connected with someone their DMS and their follow-ups are so bad that they end up getting ignored or Worse blocked so in this video we're going to be talking about how you can use LinkedIn to find the right people to reach out to give yourself the best chances of getting connected with them and then walk through a DM framework and a followup kids that you can used actually book meetings with your ideal customers on LinkedIn and if

you don't know who I am my name is Will Aken I'm a sales trainer who's generated over $5 million in pipeline from LinkedIn and this year alone I've worked with 30 different B2B sales teams to help them refine the out messaging including their LinkedIn DMS and followup so let's talk about how to use LinkedIn for lead generation and booking meetings but before we jump in I want to tell you a little bit what it's like to be a buyer on LinkedIn for the past year or so my title on LinkedIn has been the chief vice

president director of managing things at will.com and what that means is I get a lot of people targeting me who think I'm like the actual chief of something orever and they send me tons and tons of messages to give you an idea of what this is like imagine walking through Time Square you're just trying to get from point A to point B but you have to walk through time SC the way there are Billboards flashing ads telling you to buy Coca-Cola products or whatever it may be there are people walking up to you trying to

get you to buy their mix tape sell you a fake iPad or some dude dressed as Spider-Man trying to take a photo of you so he can ask for $10 $20 or whatever it is but the thing is you didn't come to Time Square to buy anything you're just trying to get from point A to point B and all these people are getting in the way so you have to just say no ignore brush off goodbye it's not what you're there for you are just trying to get to where you want to go and you

don't feel like you want to have any conversations or buy anything along the way however let's say you're in a rush and you're falling behind and at that point a taxi pulls up and says hey need a ride then you might actually take interest in grabbing a taxi and talking to that person because it aligns with your goals of trying to get to that place on time you might be thinking well well what has this got to do with prospecting and reaching out to people on LinkedIn well the same kind of thing happens most people

are on LinkedIn not to be sold to not to receive pictures that they for other reasons they might be consuming some incredible thought leaders posts or they might be posting their own stuff they might be trying to sell their own product on LinkedIn they might be applying for jobs or they might be trying to hire the next candidate for an open position on their team almost no one is logging on to LinkedIn thinking gee whiz I hope someone pitches me something today so if we want to get their attention it's not about being the loudest

most persistent or most creative person in their inbox it's about figuring out how we align with what their goals and their problems might be and then talking to them about that similar to that taxi dri who's just going to help them get where they're already trying to go now with that little analogy out of the way let's assume that you already know who you're trying to reach out to on LinkedIn you have a good idea of who your ICP your ideal client profile is you know what their title is you know what type of company

they work with you might have even done some segmentation on your list to layer on triggers and different changes at that company and you might have already done some research on them to figure out why they might be a potential good fit for whatever it is you sell if you do need help with that part then we've done a ton of videos on how you can build lead lists using LinkedIn sales Navigator and Linkedin core go check them out on our Channel and be sure to subscribe while you're over there so now you might have

this list of potential buyers that you want to connect with and try and sell to reach out to on LinkedIn this is where people make two big mistakes the first mistake is using inmails although LinkedIn pushes these because they get people to pay their inails inmails are horribly ineffective the problem with inmails is the only people who use them are salespeople so the moment someone sees an inmail appear in their inbox they can ignore it and not really worry about it and most emails are actually pretty bad and limited by the number of which you

can send because they charge different levels of money depending on what plan on LinkedIn you have to use inmails and then finally a lot of people are sending inmails to people who aren't even active on LinkedIn which is a total waste so don't waste your time using those inmails because frankly they have horrible response rates and most of the time they don't work and you don't even know if the person you're sending them to is active on LinkedIn so what you want to do instead of using inmails is connect directly with your buyers because this

will allow you to directly message them in multiple different formats and follow up as much as you want but the problem is most people don't just accept every single connection request they get and that's mainly because a lot of people who are trying to connect with them are salespeople and as I mentioned before people aren't on LinkedIn to try and get sold to to in fact no one ever really wants to be sold to even if what you sell might be helpful to them because they're busy it's the same reason that people stick these types

of signs on their house no soliciting people don't want to be sold to or even stick one of these to their office door most people feel like they've got everything covered and they do not have time because they are too busy to consider every single sales pitch they get so when we hold up a big red flashing sign saying we're a salesperson they immediately ignore it regardless of what we're selling they just assume that they don't need whatever you have they hundreds of people trying to get their attention they cannot consider every single product pitch

that people are sending them and most of the time they assume that if they needed what you're selling they would already be looking for it so when we're connecting with our buyers we need to be careful not to alert them that we are potentially going to try and sell them something if they accept our connection request and when we connect with someone there's only really two factors that people have to go on on whether or not we're going to try and sell them something or be a worthwhile connection those two factors are number one our

connection request and if it has a note and the second one is our LinkedIn profile most importantly our picture our name and our headline because these are the things they're going to see in a connection request if they don't click onto your profile to learn more about who you are and why you might be trying to connect with them so for that first piece the connection note a lot of people say that you should include a note with your connection requests but there is so much data data data if you're Australian out there that says

a blank connection request is actually more effective than one that includes a note and this kind of makes sense as someone who's got 60,000 follows on LinkedIn a lot of people are constantly trying to connect with me and I've noticed that only people who include notes are generally salespeople trying to sell me something something especially given that the note is normally quite generic like I'd like to add you to my network or you have an interesting background or we swim in similar circles because that is just something generic that sales people tend to write when

they're trying to connect with someone so unless you're going to write a highly personalized and I mean really highly personalized note I'd skip it all together save yourself some time and let your profile do the talking and that's where we get onto your LinkedIn profile like I mentioned before people are looking out for the warning signs that you're going to try and Pitch them something the biggest mistake I see people make here is that their headline literally is their job title sales at soand so or sales business development at this company sales Business Development agency

owner at company all of those immediately tell them that you're a salesperson and most of the time when a salesperson is trying to connect with you they're trying to sell you something so instead what I recommend to do with your headline is instead of talking about your job title or what you offer I would literally just talk about how you tend to help people or the type of networking that you tend to do so instead of writing sales at company you might write helping X do this or you might just write hey social media managers

or hey business owners or making sure you don't get ignored online be creative with it be fun with it maybe even include a little bit about yourself your hobbies your passions or why you do what you do just make sure that you don't immediately tip people off that you're about to pitch them something with your headline the other really important thing is your photo you want to make sure that one you 100% do have a photo and number two it's a professionally done photo of you smiling Smiles make people happy when someone's smiling we're more

likely to want to connect with them be friends with them whatever it may be so get a high quality photo in there of you looking professional and smiling just having a nice photo of you smiling and an optimized headline is going to mean that more people accept your connection requests either take a selfie use a tripod or have a friend take a photo of you with a nice plain background with a big old smile and that'll do the trick now some people are still going to want to click on your profile to understand what it

is you do and if they should connect with you this is where you going to want to make sure you have a nice buildout profile you might be slightly active on the platform either creating post yourself or res sharing other people's post or just commenting on people's posts you're also going to want to have a nice Banner something nice and colorful that's eye-catching that tells them more about what you do or more about what you're interested in as a person I'm going to show you just a handful of profiles from salespeople that you can use

as inspiration for your own profile so this first profile is Gabby Sidle she's an ex- colleague of mine we worked on a sales team together a little while ago she sales to social media managers her profile picture is smiling it's happy it's professional and her headline doesn't say I'm a salesperson it says Hey social media managers which is her target audience on her profile itself we have a banner image which tells people what her company slate does and then she's filled out all the different sections on her profile well her about section her work history

and we can see that Gabby is actually someone who's semi-active on the LinkedIn platform creating her own posts engaging with other people's posts it's important that you look like an active member of the LinkedIn platform and if you're looking to get started or look for some good content that's actually worth engaging with on LinkedIn that isn't cringe give me a follow or connect with me I'm happy to give you feedback on your profile my name again is Will Atkin here's another good profile from a seller called Hunter Thompson he's got his headline it doesn't say

he's a sales person it actually talks about how he helps people drive more Revenue by by converting your happy customers into Advocates gives me an idea of what he's offering without putting my guard up because he didn't just say sales at dto his profile picture has some color in the background so it's striking and stands out and then his Banner image again shares a little bit more details about what his company offers once again he's someone who's active on the platform he's posting he's engaging he's liking he's got some featured images and links and whatnot

on there as well so well worth doing this just to make sure your profile is optimized so you get connected with more people than otherwise all right so that's three things do not use inmails connect directly with your buyers without a connection request note and make sure your profile isn't just a massive red flag that says you're about to pitch them something now it's time to actually reach out to the buyer before we get into the DM Frameworks LinkedIn obviously isn't the only way to connect with Buyers you also want to be using Code emails

code calls maybe even referrals and once you've got them in your pipeline you need to know how to close them and if you're looking for more ways to do that then good news sales feed sends out a weekly sales newsletter with tactical tips Frameworks and templates that you can use to directly reach out to your buyers head on over to sales feed media . And subscribe for actual weekly selling tips okay so now you're connected with the person that's good news because it also means that you know that person is active on LinkedIn and they're

a frequent user of the platform so now you're going to be spending your time reaching out to people who are actually using the platform whereas if you using inmails you might be reaching out to people who only log into LinkedIn once every 6 months and don't look at their messages now it's time to slide into those DMS the problem is the LinkedIn inbox is not like an email inbox the mistake a lot of people make at this stage is just copying and pasting their code emails or whatever they might say in a code email and

send it to someone on LinkedIn but LinkedIn is not the same as an email inbox it's much more like all the other social media and DM platforms like WhatsApp text messages Instagram Facebook messenger and because of that you have much less space to work with and you're going to want to try and make sure that your message is formatted like a text message to a friend or acquaintance or someone like that unforgivably sure and the goal of that message isn't to get them to try and book a meeting with you it's just to start a

nice conversation because as I mentioned before the linked toin inbox is made more conversations than things that the people can get back to a few days later any longer than 50 words or two paragraphs and you have to scroll to see the entire message which makes that message so much easier for any potential buyer to ignore so what you're going to want to do instead is use my one sentence message framework it starts with something about them I saw this about you it looks like this is the case of your company sounds like this is

a new priority for you seems like you might be thinking about this right now notice this post that you made and then it moves on to a question that is designed to prompt a conversation have you ever thought about this have you ever tried out this have you considered doing things this way have you seen this be a problem is that causing this challenge to happen so to give you some examples if you selling website design Services you might say hey looks like your website is hosted on Shopify are you happy with the conversions over

there are you happy with its conversion rate or if you're a recruiter you might say looks like you're hiring for a senior business development manager are you finding the applicants for that role are qualified if you're a video editor you might say hey it looks like you're doing a lot of text post right now have you ever considered doing videos if you sell some kind of employee benefits or Insurance solution to HR people you might say hey it looks like your company's almost doubled in size in the past year with all that growth have you

taken a look at if your employee benefits provider is still the best bit for your size of company it's literally just an observation about them I saw this thing about you saw this thing about your website your product launches your team your post and then a super short question that's designed to really just get them replying to you because once they start replying to you you can ask a few more questions and figure out if it is really a problem that they might want to take a look at how you can solve it the goal

here is not to book a meeting with that very first message the goal here is to get response because once you got a response you can determine if that meeting is actually helpful to them the entire thing should feel more like a conversation on a dating app than a full-on corporate back and forth VI email now let's say you do that you say something you've seen about them and then you ask them a question that's going to start a conversation related to what you help them with but they don't respond and you don't manage to

start a conversation well at this point you're going to want to try and follow up and I found the best way to do this is add more context to why you ask the question in the first place however you don't want to be a massive pain in the answer with your follow-ups cuz that's where you're going to get blocked or reported or remove the other inbox so you're going to want to follow up in a new medium by sharing a PDF an image LinkedIn even has built-in gifts that you can use to add more like

flavor to your full up message my personal favorite way to do this is either by sending a voice note or a video and the reason for this is that it's really hard to automate videos and voice notes on LinkedIn and people do not receive anywhere near as many videos and voice notes as they do normal messages so you're immediately going to stand out through all the other follow-ups they're getting in their inbox and because it's a video or voice note they're going to know it's not automated and give them the ability to get to know

you a littleit a little bit now worth noting that you can only send videos and voice notes on the LinkedIn mobile app so I like to do these when I'm out walking the dog or when I have a spare minute or during my lunch break and I like to try and keep this as casual as possible be sure to smile while you're recording same applies for a voice note because you can hear Smiles coming through in the tone of someone's voice and aim for around 30 seconds I like to record these when I'm out walking

my dog because being outside and walking is another visual pattern interrupt that makes someone more Curious to watch your video so for example if I want to reach out to Salmon muhin I'm hope I'm saying that right he's a sales trainer who post a lot LinkedIn and I've seen he's posted a few videos recently however the videos aren't very well edited so after a sent sound man a message saying hey looks like you're posting a lot on LinkedIn to attract clients have you tried using video yet is there a reason you're not doing more videos

I might send a video or a voice note that sounds or looks a bit like this go to attachments tap there and then take a vot and then click take a photo or video I'm going to say something a little bit like this I'm going to write the framework on here so you can adapt it to whatever is you sell hey sound man just some context on that last message the reason I want to have a chat with you about that was because I spotted you've been doing some posting on LinkedIn looks like you're a

sales trainer so I imagine you're doing that to try to attract new clients businesses students and that type of thing I've been chatting to a lot of creators lately and they tell me that video is blowing up and can be a great way for their potential clients to connect them or get to know them on a deeper level I did spot you've done some videos recently but one thing I'm hearing from people is that can be really uncomfortable just hitting the record button uh recording a video and then actually getting the thing edited in a

polished format that you can actually send out I've been working with a handful of creators to interview them and then edit their videos for them so they can post high quality videos that are going to get their attent their Buy's attention on LinkedIn let me know if this is worth chatting about keep it real now I'm going to send that video to S man I'm going to write a little message below that saying video for some more context and although recording that video was a little bit more timeconsuming than just copying and pasting a message

in that it's probably one of the only videos that soundman's going to receive on LinkedIn all month potentially so it's going to get his attention definitely get a watch and he's probably going to do me the decency of responding because you can see that I put my effort into it that tactic alone has gotten me more responses on LinkedIn than any anything else if you don't feel comfortable in video then practice makes perfect you are not aiming for Perfection here I started and messed up a little bit in that message but doing it over and

over again you get better at it and then it's just as easy as going out walking your dog and recording 30 messages in 30 minutes if you really don't feel comfortable in video then that's where you can make use of a voice note because again not many people are making use of voice notes on LinkedIn so it's a great way to stand out especially in your follow-up now if salmon doesn't respond to that I'm probably not going to send any more full up via LinkedIn because I don't want to get blocked and I don't want

to be annoying and I want keep that channel open so I can reach out to Salmon again in the future maybe a little bit further down the line in 3 months when there might be new changes new things I can observe about him or different problems that I could talk to him about in that time I can engage with his content comment on it like it when he posts and I'm going to be a much more familiar Name by the time I reach out again further down the line that's as much Outreach as I do

on LinkedIn obviously I'm going to pair that with code emails and code calls so I have my best chance of getting in front of salmon and getting noticed or response from him so that's how you can go about connecting people on LinkedIn reaching out in a meaningful way that's going to start start a conversation and then following up in a really unique way that's going to increase the chance of them getting back to you of course we don't want to just depend on LinkedIn as our only Outreach channel so we can combine that with cold

emails cold cools and all those types of things now luckily for you we've done a ton of different videos on how to cold cool how to cold email right here on this channel so I'm going to put up some videos just over here that you can watch after this if you want to sharpen up your skills on how to find leads and reach out to them on all the different channels that you have available to you keep it real be sure to subscribe thanks for watching I'll see you next time