“Imagine having your CRM filled with qualified prospects before you finish your morning donut.”
That’s what I posted a few weeks ago, because that’s my life now.
That automation is one of the first I built when I started at Bardeen. It automates lead gen like I have a personal 10-person sales team.
New qualified prospects from LinkedIn to HubSpot. Easy.
But…I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s see how we got here.
The state of AI in sales
“You should be using AI to automate your sales prospecting on LinkedIn” is a hot take in, like, 2022.
Now, it’s table stakes.
It used to look like this:
- Clearly define your ICP in Sales Navigator
- Create a list of potential leads
- Use a tool to automatically send connection requests to these profiles
- Leave the message blank, or hope it doesn’t break and say “Hello, {name}”
- Live with a low acceptance rate because “that’s just how this works”
But that just doesn’t cut it today. There’s a better way to do it.
Let’s walk through how we can automate this process with AI-generated, custom messages.
Why LinkedIn messaging should be a standard part of your prospecting
I hear “LinkedIn is dead” probably once a week, and it makes no sense to me.
If you’re in any part of the go-to-market stack (sales, marketing, revenue, analytics…I could go on), your ICP is almost certainly living on LinkedIn.
If they aren’t using it for prospecting, they’re at least checking it every day.
So…you should be there.
(This sounds obvious, but so many people still discount LinkedIn for some reason)
The built-in conversation feature makes it so much easier to strike up relevant discussions.
Going from connection -> engaging on post -> message -> booked call is completely realistic…with the right strategy.
What makes a good LinkedIn message template
A great outreach message follows a very simple format.
Hi {Name},
{Relevant opinion on recent post or compliment on recent project}
{Request for time / learning more / etc}
That’s quite literally it.
Let’s break this down. The message should be personal, short, and direct.
Don’t give your life story.
Don’t meander.
Don’t ask without context.
Attention is hard to grab these days, and taking 5 paragraphs to get to the ask is a losing strategy.
Get the name right, explain your connection, and make a direct call-to-action at the end!
How to personalize a LinkedIn message
This is where AI can be a game-changer.
It’s so obvious when someone hasn’t done research. Like the sales people who message me saying “Hey, I see you’re from Boston. Have you ever been to Fenway Park?”
Laziness isn’t just a lost opportunity - it’s a negative signal that could get you unwanted attention. You might actually get someone to reply, but it won’t be positive.
Thankfully, our prompt helps with this. (Don’t worry, the full prompt is below)
We focus on the profile contents, and the last five posts. That gives us a great idea of:
- What they do
- What they like to talk about
- The tone they talk in (casual, formal, engaged, etc)
- What’s top-of-mind for them recently
If I gave you those four pieces of information, you’d be able to craft a great personalized LinkedIn message praising someone’s recent post.
Essentially, we use AI to do the heavy, repetitive lifting.
Here’s an example based on my profile:
Hi Colby, I loved your recent post about automating lead gen with the power of donuts and Al - truly a sweet combination! Your approach at Bardeen is fascinating, especially how you integrate automation into daily workflows. Could we grab 10 minutes to chat about your strategy and perhaps share some insights of my own?
It’s short, personalized, and to the point.
You can tweak and adjust if you want, but the point is, you don’t have to - AI generates this all in the background.
How this automation works
Let’s demystify what’s going on.
We’ll be using Bardeen to automate all of this.
Here’s what it looks like:
- Create a list of information about each prospect, including LinkedIn profile link
- Extracting the important data from the LinkedIn profile (name, company, last 5 posts, About section, etc)
- Enriching for both personal data (experience) and company data (industry, stage)
- Feed all that info into OpenAI’s ChatGPT with a custom prompt that essentially teaches it to be an expert sales rep
- Generate a custom outreach message
- Create a connection request with that customized message
Since we’re using information directly pulled from the profile, there’s no worry of an embarrassing automation failure.
“WHERE’S THE PROMPT!!”
Don’t worry, here it is. Please steal it!
You are a sales rep. Your task is to reach out to prospects in Linkedln, make first contact and schedule a follow-up chat or call. Based on the background info provided below, but without mentioning what you do, write a short and catchy 2-3 sentence message to the person specified below, ending with a call to action asking the prospect if they have 10 minutes for a quick chat. The message should not be about selling but more about creating a relationship with the prospect so you can book a chat or call to see how you can help them. Keep the message short, mention any recent posts or other interesting information you can use to humor or praise the prospect based on the information gathered to make the message as personal and engaging as possible.
And to save you even more time, here's the automation template.
How much time does it save?
I tested this, and per-prospect, I’d estimate it saves between 10 and 30 minutes.
That’s between research, editing, outputting information, and actually creating the message.
Worth it. And imagine the impact on an entire sales team.
Why should I send LinkedIn messages with AI?
Because pre-AI automation sucks
You really should be automating your outreach on LinkedIn in some form.
Because every day, there’s more data and more information to sift through. A lot of it is unstructured.
RPA and automations built during the last decade or two are too rigid to deal with this fluid data.
Handing an AI the last five prospect posts with some background is a lot easier than manually browsing everything yourself.
And if you want to do it yourself…more power to you. But that will take much more of your time.
A little bit of work with AI goes a long way.
Why should I even care?
I know what you’re thinking…and I get it.
“This just automates one step out of the hundreds of things I have to do.”
And that’s just for prospecting!
That’s why it’s so critical to use automations on a platform that helps you automate more of your job.
Nobody can manage 50 different tools. Trust me. Consolidating is the only path…especially when each platform adds its own AI feature every other week.
Plus, these tools don’t natively talk to each other. You’ll be manually importing LinkedIn contacts into HubSpot, loading leads from HubSpot into Google Sheets…
An important point here. Notice how all of those tasks don’t really add value to your job? You’re not learning anything, you’re not “getting better at copy and pasting”, you’re just doing a manual task that takes away from your truly valuable work.
That’s where tools like Bardeen are helping. They’re not taking away the job of a BDR…just the tasks nobody wants to do anyways.
The bloat of the sales stack is only going to make your job more manual and confusing…not less.
Bardeen at Bardeen
I haven’t even been at Bardeen for a month, and I’ve completely changed how I run my sales process.
There are tons of others in the company doing similar things - for marketing, engineering, research, you name it.
Follow along here for more.
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