With over 756 million professionals and 56 million listed companies, LinkedIn is a goldmine for B2B marketers. Combine that with the right strategies to leverage the impact of social selling and brand building, LinkedIn is a phenomenal lead generation platform.
Businesses love it. Marketers love it. Because cold selling has never been easier. LinkedIn offered a cap of sending almost 1000 connection requests per week to key decision-makers of the biggest companies. So, you could amp up your chances to get more conversions. And who doesn’t love 10 new clients in a week?
All sounds perfect. But, but… surprise, surprise!
Recently, LinkedIn came out with a new policy and has restricted the number of connection requests you can send every week from an account. From 150 per day for top profiles to just 100 new connection requests per week, the game has changed.
Here’s everything you need to know about:
LinkedIn’s Old Policy v/s New Restrictions
Impact on Lead Generation Process and How TSL Tackled That
A Multichannel Approach For Getting More Leads! 🤩
LinkedIn: Old Policy
Until 2020, LinkedIn had a comfortable cap on the number of connection requests one could send from an account — 150 per day for top profiles, and 60-100 for normal profiles. Send out a couple a week or even hundreds. Basically, everything was about the…
Q U A N T I T Y
This meant — the more connection requests you sent, the higher were your chances to reach out to your prospects and convert them. Or at least, that's what most companies and businesses were doing.
They were playing the numbers game. Instead of reaching out to quality profiles only, they were sending out mass requests in the hopes of getting a few leads. And yeah, this approach worked fine for a long time (but it increasingly annoyed LinkedIn users). So…
LinkedIn thought: “[our] members have conveyed that they don’t like receiving invitations from people they don’t know, and that they will often ignore or mark those invitations as spam.”
So, the tables flipped, and LinkedIn did this…
LinkedIn: New Connection Restrictions
LinkedIn rolled out new guidelines to improve its user experience. One of them was to limit the number of connection requests that you could send out per week from a single account.
As LinkedIn said: “We have invitation limits in place to protect our overall member experience and to ensure that our members only receive relevant requests.”
So, instead of “quantity” connection requests that were permitted before, now, one can send 100 requests every week only.
The focus, thus, shifted from quantity to…
Q U A L I T Y
What Changes?
This simple change in policy put a spanner in the lead generation strategies of several businesses. Those companies were heavily dependent on the bulk requests formula and were habituated to working with quantity as opposed to quality. They had an abysmally low conversion rate to start with. And with just 100 requests in their pocket now, their lead generation pipelines have run completely dry.
Does this mean LinkedIn is no longer as useful as it was before? Not at all!
This just means that — your lead generation strategies have to be tweaked to incorporate the new guidelines. So, instead of playing the number game, it's time to refocus your lead generation strategy to rope in deeply targeted, quality leads.
And with only 100 requests in your bag, it's crucial to make each one of them count.
How The Scalelab Responded To This?
While other companies dealing in numbers are reeling in their bulk strategies and completely overhauling their lead generation funnels, we have managed to hold our ground. At The Scalelab, we have always stood for quality (as opposed to quantity).
So, we were already focusing on generating targeted, high-quality leads even before the rules changed — by leveraging the right information, strategies, and automation for our clients. The new LinkedIn connection restrictions have helped prove our point: a more data-driven, focused, HUMAN approach in lead generation (as opposed to robotic, volume approach).
Solution? A Multichannel Approach For Lead Generation
How can you continue to generate quality leads (that convert!) without having to worry about the LinkedIn restrictions? Read on…
1. Chase Quality, Not Quantity
Before sending a connection request to a prospect on LinkedIn, we recommend to pre-qualify them based on certain data points.
For this: analyze their profile on LinkedIn, look up their activity, and make sure that the prospect is part of your target audience i.e. comes under your ideal persona.
This data-driven process ensures that every connection request is sent to the right person – who cares about your product or solution.
2. A Multi-Channel Approach (Emails are the best!)
Relying on just 1 channel to communicate with your prospects or even find leads is a critical error. Businesses who relied only on LinkedIn for their leads have seen their growth restrained due to the new rules.
Instead, opt for an omnichannel approach and target your prospects on at least 2 or more mediums. Like: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Quora, Emails, among others.
We recommend adopting email as your primary lead generation method. Why? With your outreach program on LinkedIn restricted, emails can be optimally utilized as a part of a cold outreach campaign and lead generation for 2 primary reasons:
A. There are no restrictions on the number of emails you can send. (Though we recommend sending no more than 200 emails every week or you would be flagged 🚨)
B. If done well, emails can be more personalized and better suited to reach out to your prospects for a more effective lead generation.
3. Use LinkedIn as a “Lead Warming” Platform Now
With new connection restrictions, we recommend moving LinkedIn from a primary lead generation channel to a secondary touchpoint in your lead generation strategy.
So, instead of approaching prospects directly on LinkedIn as a cold connection, reach out to them on emails. Employ LinkedIn strategically as a re-target channel to connect further with your potential client as a:
A. Prospect follow-up, or
B. Lead Warming Platform.
This increases your chances of further connecting with your prospect because you’ve already reached out to them on the email. Now, based on your email deliverability or open rate metrics, send them a connection request on LinkedIn as a secondary touchpoint and create a genuine link with them.
Wrapping Up…
Don't let the new LinkedIn policy disparage you.
LinkedIn is still an amazing platform to build relationships with professionals and executives globally. All you need to do is combine a sound LinkedIn strategy (one that prioritizes quality over quantity) with an effective email campaign to ensure that your lead generation pipeline is always flowing.
And remember: Make Every Connection Request Count!
What do you think about the latest connection restrictions by LinkedIn? We’d love to know your thoughts. Write to us at hello@thescalelab.io
Until then…
Team The Scalelab 🚀