One of the biggest issues I see people face when trying to generate new sales, new leads on LinkedIn is they don’t have a clear understanding of what success looks like on the platform. Now this is especially true for people who have come… They haven’t come from a background in sales and they not used to having people say no. And so today I want to talk about how you actually define success using LinkedIn to generate sales and generate new leads and how you can understand how healthy your campaign is and how you know to keep going or whether you need to change something. So my name is Ryan from b2bleads.com B2B Lead Generation and today I just wanted to go over how you can get an understanding of whether your LinkedIn efforts or the time and money you’re pouring into LinkedIn are going towards good use or whether you need to change your approach and who you’re messaging.

Now it’s also really important to understand that there is no one size fits all metric out there. So every campaign that you run on LinkedIn, every person’s profile, every business, every industry is different. And so it’s important to understand for your specific campaign whether it’s being successful or whether it’s not working at all. So generating sales on LinkedIn really kind of looks like this. You’ve got the beginning of the process, which is your lead generation. Then you’ve got your sales process and then you’ve got obviously running your business and serving your clients and you’ve got your client journey. Although we’re probably more concerned with your customer lifetime value.

So everything you do really just comes down to this end goal here is how much value do you get from each client that you serve. And why this is so important is it means that everything is so different for each person who uses LinkedIn. So for someone who has a very low client customer lifetime value, they’re going to have to generate a lot more leads and a lot more sales in order to justify the effort that they’re putting in. So they need the cost per client acquisition to be much lower. And for someone who could generate $1 million contract, that means that they don’t necessarily have to be talking to hundreds and hundreds of people and generating hundreds of sales just as long as they’re talking to the right people. So the first thing that you really want to understand, and for newcomers, this might take a little while to get an idea of, but it’s definitely a good reason for you to start measuring and getting an idea is your average customer lifetime value. So if you know what your average customer lifetime value is, then you have an idea of how much you’re willing to invest or how much you’re willing to spend to acquire that client. So say that your average customer lifetime value is 5,000 and you have a pretty good confidence, you have confidence in this value, then you know that you can be spending more time and effort to acquire that client. And let’s say you wanted to spend a thousand… You’re willing to spend up to a thousand dollars to acquire that client then you know that so long as depending on your sales process and what percentage of people you need to talk to. Say you’ve got a 20% close, right? Then you know, you need to be talking to five leads in order to get that sale. So basically you need to make sure that in order to generate five qualified leads, that so long as you’re happy to spend this much, it’s not costing you more than a thousand dollars.

Now, where a lot of people go wrong and I see this all the time, is people always just look at the cost per client acquisition just as in the cost that you put in. But it’s so important to measure your time here. So say you’re only just paying… You’re doing this all organically. You’re just paying for your sales navigator subscription and maybe a bit of assistance, the cost could be down to $100 per acquiring those five leads. But if you look at the time that you spend on each person and each conversation that goes nowhere and you understand how much you value your time map and say it takes you five hours to acquire those five leads and you want your time to be valued at $200 an hour, and that adds up very quickly to $1,000. So then you can start saying, “Well, how can I reduce the cost?” And you can say, “Well, I could delegate that “to other people to run the campaign for me. “I can get sales reps to do it for me “at a lower cost than what I’m doing it.” But it’s really important to understand the big picture here. So I really don’t want to bore you with all the numbers and the intricacies and I hope I haven’t lost you here, but the idea I’m trying to get at is define what your success looks like early in the piece and then you will have an understanding of whether you campaign is going well or whether it isn’t. So understand how much your customer’s worth, how much you’re willing to spend to acquire that client, understand how many people you need to talk to to generate a new client, and then you have an idea of what you’re willing to spend to acquire those leads. So just something to think about. I hope that all makes sense.

If you have any questions, just feel free to leave a comment below or send me a message and good luck.

Hope this helps you generate some more leads and grow nice and fast, cheers.