"None of my prospects are on LinkedIn." That's how my call started with Brian. He's from a small town in Pennsylvania. His flow of referrals was slowing down. He had played around with cold emails. Zero responses. So we started talking about LinkedIn. The whole small town thing was holding him back. But the thing with small towns is...they're small. Meaning he had the chance to be a big fish in a small pond.
LinkedIn is huge and its search tool gives you an unfair advantage:
>200M Americans have profiles
You can search people by location, company, job titles & more
Highly targeted ads for business-to-business marketing
Easily make lists of LinkedIn leads from company websites
Brian started to get a little more desperate in the summer as his referral pipeline totally dried up. That gave him the hunger to experiment. So here's what we did:
Scraped the member directories of 3 local Chambers of Commerce
Took their websites & used the Iceberg App to get all the LinkedIn profile of their employees
Loaded the LinkedIn profiles into Dripify
Sent them automated LinkedIn connection invites
Sat back and watched the magic happen
Dripify sent the maximum invites of 200/week and ran in the background. All Brian had to do was watch the connections come in and chat with people. So after thinking "no one from my small town is on LinkedIn" here's what happened:
In 12 weeks, he got 269 new connections. That a lot in a town of only 75k people
That's most of the businesses in the Chamber
That's a 10% acceptance rate which is what you should expect from cold invites
then......
he got recognized in Best Buy (because it's a small town!)
was begged to attend a BNI meeting
the Chamber did an "Ask the Expert" magazine feature on him
he got invited onto a local podcast
a Chamber member asked him to consult on their cyber readiness
Lesson: the smaller the town, the faster you can saturate and be "that IT guy/gal"
He's already gotten a 10x return on the $59/mon he paid Dripify. It's still running in the background and silently adding ~20 new contacts to his CRM per week. There's no cheaper marketing strategy that is as targeted and low-effort. That's the no-brainer way to prospect on LinkedIn.
PS. I also use Dripify. Need more proof of performance? I setup a giant campaign for all of 2024. Took maybe 30mins of effort in January. I averaged 43% connection rate and added.... 3861 prospects to my CRM > No brainer.