If you’re like most marketers, you send out a lot of cold emails and LinkedIn messages in the hopes of getting a bite. And while you might get lucky every now and then, the vast majority of your attempts are met with crickets.

What if I told you that there was a way to dramatically increase your positive reply rate? Well, there is—and it’s all about using Linkedin to improve your timing.

 

What is a Change Event?

You see, one of the best ways to get someone’s attention is to reach out to them during a change event. A change event is defined as any professional or company milestone that signals a potential need for your product or service. For example, if someone gets promoted or changes jobs, they might be open to hearing from salespeople because they’re looking for new solutions to help them in their new role.

Fortunately, LinkedIn makes it possible to monitor for these change events with high precision; with over 700 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network—which means there’s a good chance that your target customers are using it too.

On the flip side, Linkedin makes it very difficult to access this information at scale.

Why?  Because Linked is first and foremost a social network that wants to drive viral loops by spending as much time in the platform as possible (it also doesn’t hurt that this sells more ads and Sales Navigator licenses 😅)

Thankfully, we have robots to help us with this scale problem… more on that later 🤖🤖🤖

 

The Best Change Events To Watch

1. Job Changes:

You can use LinkedIn’s “Advanced Search” function to find people who have recently changed jobs. Just enter in their current company and title, select “People” under the “All filter options” dropdown menu and click “Search.” Once you’ve done that,LinkedIn will show you a list of people who fit your criteria along with when they started their new role.

Pro tip: make this a saved search where you filter in “job changes in the last 90 days” and filter out “people I viewed”… this will give you a fresh list of prospects you’ve never spoken to before every day that you can use to target job changers before anyone else 🚀

 

2. Job Posts:

You can tell a lot about a company’s latest priorities by looking at their Job Postings. From the tools that they use (eg: hiring a Salesforce admin = Salesforce) to the roles they’re hiring for (Director Sales Enablement = efficiency) or how they work (No Location = Remote), you can use this data at scale to build target account lists that improve your chances of success.

Just click on Job Search in the top navigation on Linkedin to start searching for jobs/companies that meet your target customer profile.

Pro tip: make this a saved search and filter for jobs that have been posted in the past 1 day.  This way, you can refresh this list daily and see what changes are happening at the company in real-time, once again far before your competitors are likely to know.

 

3. Social Posts:

Finally, you can use Linkedin’s social features to keep tabs on posts by prospects.

Most people advocate for Sales Navigator’s Lead List feature for this because it cuts out a lot of noise that you find in the organic social feed, but we recommend against it because:

a) this becomes a list that needs to be maintained/transferred by the reps in sales nav (you can’t auto-build them based on account ownership in CRM) and

b) Sales Navigator limits you to just 1000 leads to follow per account.  This means that you’d need 100 accounts to monitor a TAM of 100,000 prospects, which is what most B2B companies have.  There is no limit on how many people you can follow so the Linkedin organic feed can become a really high leverage tool for consolidating all market events.

 

Okay, How The Heck Do I Scale This?

That’s where robots come in.

Most companies try to capture this data through SDRs checking linkedin periodically, although there is no check-and-balance to ensure they are actually doing this boring/laborious tasks in a methodical way.  Furthermore, they pay top dollar for this work, at $45/hour for up to half of an SDR’s work day, which is > $30k/year PER SDR.

Software robots can execute the same mechanical functions at just $0.07/hour (642 times cheaper than an SDR) and across all hours of the day/weekends.  Being able to monitor these changes, pull data into CRM in real-time and trigger outbound processes can reduce the time it takes to take advantage of change event triggers from weeks/months to just hours.

 

Conclusion

By timing your sales outreach efforts to coincide with change events, you can dramatically improve your positive reply rate. And thanks to LinkedIn, finding these change events is easier than ever before. So what are you waiting for? Start using this technique today and watch your positive reply rate soar!

Talk to a Truly product consultant today!