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UK How to Build a B2B Lead Generation Process Through LinkedIn: A Guide from Grinfi
LinkedIn has long since stopped being “just a job-hunting network.” Today, it’s a full-fledged B2B platform for building a systematic cold sales channel. When used correctly, LinkedIn can become a consistent and reliable source of lead generation.
In this article, we’ll break down the key stages of LinkedIn outreach – from defining your ICP to scaling campaigns and analyzing results – all based on Grinfi’s hands-on experience.
1. ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) – The First Step to Effective Outreach
Lead generation starts with understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Key ICP parameters:
- Industry: Which niches do your clients work in (e.g., healthcare, SaaS, fintech)?
- Geography: Determines not just the language, but also the tone and style of your sequences.
- Company size:
- Small → write to the Founder
- Medium → Head of/Marketing
- Large → C-level executives
- Company age: Influences growth stage and budgets.
- Pain points: Understand what your audience truly needs before crafting your offer.
- Intent-signals (optional): The most targeted way to pinpoint relevant leads. Examples: new hires, opening a new office, posting specific job openings.
More on intent signals: Database Enrichment by Grinfi
Don’t forget to map out all potential decision-making roles that align with your product.
2. Where to Find Your Target Audience
- Sales Navigator (LinkedIn): The go-to tool for company and lead search. Huge database, great filters – but parsing isn’t always precise, so expect some irrelevant leads (manual cleaning is needed).
- Apollo.io: Excellent for finding companies and leads. Useful filters (Revenue, Funding Rounds, etc.). Leads require credits to download, but companies are free.
💡 Tip: Export filtered companies from Apollo and upload them to Clay for lead search. - Clay.com: Search for both leads and companies. Includes filters for every LinkedIn industry and now supports B2B and B2C segmentation. Has its own built-in AI.
- Crunchbase: Probably the best tool for startups and companies raising funds (paid, with a 7-day free trial).
Once you gather your data, you can export your target audience to Grinfi via *.csv or connect your tools directly to Grinfi CRM for automation.
Once you gather your data, you can export your target audience to Grinfi via *.csv or connect your tools directly to Grinfi CRM via API (if supported by your tools) for further automation.
3. Building Sequences
4. Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile
5. Scaling Outreach
LinkedIn outreach only scales with volume.
If you use just one profile, your process will be painfully slow and may not produce results.
At Grinfi, we run outreach from 10 LinkedIn profiles simultaneously:
- Up to 500 invites per month from each profile
- That’s up to 5,000 invites/month from 10 profiles
Cross-profile strategy:
Don’t stop at one profile. If someone doesn’t accept a request from one profile, maybe they didn’t like the photo, headline or banner. Withdraw the request and “knock again” with another profile.
And yes – Grinfi can automate this too 😉
6. Analytics: How to Know What Works
Key KPIs to track:
- Connection acceptance rate
- Message reply rate
- Conversion from reply to target action
A/B testing:
Test different hypotheses – but don’t tweak every day or even every week. Frequent changes reset “the snowball effect,” meaning your outreach basically starts from scratch. Test one hypothesis for at least 1 month.
7. Is Outreach Just Spam?
Spam isn’t about volume – it’s about bad content.
- If you send the same template to 10,000 people with no personalization or segmentation – that’s spam.
- But if you’ve segmented your target audience, identified the pain points of each segment, and crafted offers tailored to those pain points – that’s B2B marketing.
Keep in mind that 95% of your target audience are not interested in your offer right now – your goal is to identify and engage the 5% who are ready for a conversation. At Grinfi, we launch 5,000-7,000 connection invites each month to a cold audience, competing only for that 5% who are open to dialogue at this very moment. To “catch” these prospects – scaling is essential.
Want to Sell on LinkedIn Systematically?
Grinfi helps businesses build effective B2B lead generation through LinkedIn – without spam, with analytics, scaling, and real results.
If you’re looking for a platform that lets you automate, analyze, and scale your LinkedIn outreach – try our free trial or book a demo call.
We’ll walk you through how it works and share our own experience on where to start in your particular case.
