Conversions on LinkedIn: From DMs to Dollars
Generating leads and turning them into paying customers is an ongoing challenge in B2B sales, especially in sectors with longer buying cycles, including hotel tech. One method that has consistently delivered results is cold outreach, particularly through LinkedIn.
Aishwarya Selvan
3/5/20243 min read
Generating leads and turning them into paying customers is an ongoing challenge in B2B sales, especially in sectors with longer buying cycles, including hotel tech. One method that has consistently delivered results is cold outreach, particularly through LinkedIn. For a startup offering hotel tech solutions with average deal sizes of $200k-$2M, LinkedIn outreach has proven to be a highly effective approach for driving engagement and booking sales calls.
Form to Meeting Conversion: The average conversion rate from form submission to booked meeting is between 30-40%. However, using advanced scheduling solutions can increase this to about 65.09% for qualified prospects.
Industry Variations: Conversion rates can vary significantly across industries. For example, companies targeting small businesses often see a high qualification rate but a lower meeting booking rate, indicating potential leakage in the funnel.
Increasing Demo Call Bookings
Customer-Controlled Journey: Provide more information upfront and allowing prospects to set the agenda for demo calls, which can increase engagement and conversion rates.
Pre-Demo Engagement: Allow prospects to explore your product through interactive demos or trial environments before the actual demo call. This can help them understand the product better and come prepared with specific questions, leading to more productive demo sessions.
Enhanced Personalization: Prepare personalized content and focusing on the features most relevant to the prospect's business challenges.
Efficient Scheduling: Real-time scheduling reduces the friction in booking meetings. Ensuring that your sales reps have flexible availability and quick response times can significantly improve booking rates.
Minimum Information Request: Short forms convert better.
Additional methods include, handling objections upfront, and adding social proof. We put all these together, and fine-tuned our approach to see what delivered the best results.
Conversion Rates in 2024
A good LinkedIn outreach response rate depends on the type of outreach and the quality of an account.
Invite to connect: A good conversion rate for an invite to connect on LinkedIn is around 5–10%.
InMail: The average reply rate for InMail is 5–20%. A response rate of 20–50% is average, 65% or higher is good, and below 20% is poor.
Cold emails and calls: The average reply rate for cold emails and calls is 1–10%.
According to data from 2023, LinkedIn Ads alone can cost up to $98 per lead, but organic outreach through LinkedIn messages and InMails has proven to be far more cost-effective in driving conversions.
Evidence-Based Gains: Higher Conversion Rates
After refining the approach, we saw an average acceptance rate of 36-39%, and an increase in the response rate by 17%, with 7-10% of these responses leading to booked sales calls. This is a significant improvement over the industry average for cold calls and emails. These calls often resulted in meaningful discussions with key decision-makers, and in some cases, led to deals valued at $200k+.
Not to forget, conversion rates are defined differently by different marketers and the conversion rates vary across industries.
Before now, only 10% to 15% of sales leads reached the bottom of the sales funnel and converted into deals. Plus, only 5% of sales reps said marketing qualified leads are of high quality with the average conversion rate in B2B at 2.23%.
Safe to say, conversions are a big deal in the B2B tech space.
Conversations to Conversions on LinkedIn
Precise Targeting: LinkedIn allows precise targeting of job titles, industries, and even company size, ensuring outreach is directed at individuals with the authority to make decisions.
Tailored Messaging: Personalized outreach that speaks to the specific needs of the recipient has consistently shown better engagement. Mentioning the prospect’s pain points or offering insights tailored to their role significantly increases the likelihood of a response.
Early Trust Building: Unlike cold calls or emails, LinkedIn allows potential clients to explore the sender’s profile, view mutual connections, and assess the company’s credibility. This trust-building factor is key when selling high-ticket items that require a significant investment.
Consistent Engagement: Consistent engagement makes it easier to nurture leads who may not be ready to book a call immediately. A series of interactions, from connection requests to personalized messages, helps build familiarity and engagement over time.
Bear in mind, I'm talking about organic conversations, not Conversation Ads.
It's Not a Guaranteed Win, But It Worked for Us
I believe our success of our LinkedIn outreach boiled down to a these key factors: Relevance, Timing and Tone.
LinkedIn outreach wasn’t an instant success. It took trial and error to find the right approach, and even now, it’s not foolproof. But when it works, it works well. For us, it is currently a cornerstone of our strategy, delivering more high-quality leads than any other channel we’ve tried so far.