Nothing special (not even professional really), but I look friendly, approachable, and not like I just rolled out of bed.

Your profile picture plays a massive role in getting your prospects to click the ‘Accept’ button on your connection request.

Is this you?

Yes?

Then you might want to consider making some changes.

Other examples of bad headlines are:

•  President of..

•  VP / Vice President of..

•  Director of..

•  Head of..

The truth is, no one cares about you or your company. Your headline needs to be customer-centric. 

It needs to answer the question ‘what’s in it for me?’

What your prospect cares about is how you can help them, that’s it.

There are plenty of other areas in your profile where you can put your actual job title..

..but if your goal is to generate leads organically from you profile, save your headline for your prospect.

Here’s a couple simple frameworks to turn your headline into a powerful elevator pitch:

If there’s enough room at the end of it, then you can add your title and company.

You know the primary target market I serve (B2B SaaS), what problem I solve (generating leads and customers), and how I solve it (LinkedIn + cold email).

Your connection acceptance rate will be based solely on if your prospect looks at your profile and thinks “this person can help me.”

Most people treat their summary as a resume, or talk about themselves in the 3rd person (yuck).

Your profile summary should read like a ‘soft-pitch’ for you and what you do, while remaining focused on your ICP and ideal prospects.

It should address the following:

•  Who you serve

•  What problems you solve

•  How you solve them

•  Your authority

•  Next steps / Call-to-action

Resist the urge to give a laundry list of your accomplishments and experience here. All that’ll do is scare people off or bore them to death.

Here’s my profile summary, I modeled the framework from a badass colleague of mine Joey Gilkey:

Here’s where the fun starts.

You’ll begin to see just how powerful LinkedIn is in finding virtually any decision maker at any company that you want to reach out to.

Quick warning though - if you aren’t technical, this tactic may frustrate you. Just follow the step-by-step instructions and you’ll be fine.

Once you have your profile optimized for your ICP, it’s time to build a list of your perfect prospects.

To do this tactic you’ll need 2 tools that cost less than $100/mo.

•  Sales Navigator ($79.95/mo)

•  Phantombuster (free or paid plan depending on daily volume)

Here’s the steps to building a list of 1000s of laser-targeted ‘perfect prospects’ every month..

•  Go into Sales Navigator

•  Click ‘Advanced’ in the top right, then click ‘Search For Leads’

•  Use your ICP and Sales Navigator filters to create a list of 500-1000 targeted prospects. Sales Navigator only loads pages for 1000 results with each search, so keep filtering until you get to that

•  If you trust LinkedIn’s ability to find your exact prospects (note: it’s not 100% accurate), you can copy the Sales Navigator prospect search URL and proceed to the next step.

•  If you do not trust LinkedIn to generate the perfect prospect list, you can go through manually and tag the correct prospects and/or ‘save as lead’. From there, you copy the Sales Navigator prospect search URL and proceed to the next step

Here’s an example targeting B2B SaaS Founders in CA, WA, NV, OR, 11-50 employee size, and 2nd degree connections.

Now that you have your list of perfect prospects we’re going to load them up into an automation tool to connect with 50-75 of them everyday on autopilot.

There are many tool options out there for LinkedIn automation, but here are 2 we use:

•  Dux Soup or LinkedHelper ($15/mo, but LinkedIn is starting to crack down on chrome extensions)

•  Orca ($69/mo, but safer than Dux Soup as it’s not an extension)

Just make sure it has the ability to upload a list of LinkedIn URLs to connect with and to view profiles automatically.

Before we get started, there’s a disclaimer I need to put out there.

PLAY NICE when using automation on LinkedIn! If you have too much activity (profile visits, connection requests, connection rejections, pending connections, messages, etc.), your account can be suspended or permanently banned in some cases.

Bottom line: don’t be stupid, don’t push it to the limit, and don’t be a spammer! 

My basic rules of thumb are do not exceed 75 connection requests in a 24-hour period, do not exceed 1000 pending connection requests at any given time (you can withdraw them), and do not visit more than 200 profiles in a day.

I am NOT a LinkedIn moderator or administrator, these are just my conservative estimates. I am NOT responsible if you lose your account trying anything mentioned in this guide.

If you’re not comfortable with automation, do this tactic manually.

You’ve been warned. Be smart.

Cool?

Alright… let’s dive in.

For this guide, we’ll use Orca in the examples.

•  Go to Orca and “Create Campaign” (label it according to your ICP, ex: “B2B SaaS Founders | 11-50 | WA, OR, CA, NV”)

•  Click “Upload a CSV of LinkedIn Profiles”

•  Find your perfect prospect list and upload it

•  We like to do profile visit as the first step, connection message as the 2nd step, and follow-up message when they accept for the 3rd step

•  Your connection message should be specific to the ICP and/or their job title, and the follow-up message is to thank them, NOT to pitch them

Ex. connection: “Hey [name], I’m looking to connect with [job title] in the [their market] industry. Would love the opportunity to connect and share insights if you’re open to it?

Ex. follow-up: “Thanks for connecting [name], appreciate it. Looking forward to learning more about you and your [company/business]”

•  Once you have your sequence setup, select the days you want it to run and turn it on

Boom!

You now have a way to connect with 50-75 of your perfect prospects everyday on autopilot.

But... what do you do once they’re a part of your network?

Let’s get into that in the next tactic..

Having a large network of connections is pointless unless you have a way to turn them into interested leads.

One of the best ways to do this is through content marketing and curation.

By building a content machine, you’ll have a way to generate demand, thought leadership, and inbound leads on autopilot.

You’ll build credibility and trust, gain new connections, and beat your competitors by staying top of mind with your audience.

There are endless amounts of content types you can post, but keeping it simple with a mix of these 3 has been effective:

1 .Curated content (relevant to your ICP)

2. Short-form status updates

3. Long-form status updates

Let’s take a look at each of these now..

Curated content can be in the form of images, videos, articles, etc created by other companies that target your audience but are not direct competitors.

•  Feedly (automate sourcing of new articles)

•  Hootsuite (automate posting of articles)

•  Make a list of 5-10 of the top influencers, blogs, websites, etc that your audience follows

•  Sign up for a free Feedly account and search for the sources in your list. This will give you a feed of all the new content coming from those sources everyday

•  Pick a day once a week that you’ll spend 1-2 hours finding the best content from those feed sources, and loading it up into Hootsuite for automatic posting

•  With each post, add a short blurb with your thoughts or a question to engage your audience.

D. Long-form status updates 

This is essentially the same thing as short-form status updates, just longer and expanded upon.

Personal stories and experiences that tie in to your target market do well here.

Here’s an example of one that did well regarding SaaS demos: