Automating LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Summary

The Google Cloud Sales team had ambitious challenges to double their quarterly profit by maximizing sales revenue and minimizing costs. Alex was tasked with investigating potential development solutions which were scalable, efficient, effective and usable by the Sales team.

As a result, Alex conducted research and user engagement with the Sales team, understanding their challenges and the tools and processes they employed, identifying that LinkedIn was the go to tool for the Sales team. Following this, Alex determined a lean solution: directly automating the live LinkedIn session in browser for each member of the sales team.

This enabled them to reduce the highly onerous, simple task of outreach to sales prospects en masse, cutting the time spent on repetitive outreach from 80 hours a week for the team to 4 hours. Furthermore, Alex also proposed and developed a script which enabled the user to quickly scan the responses from prospects and highlight the most receptive, engaged targets for sales follow ups. 

This saved an additional 20 hours a week for the sales team, enabling them to reduce cognitive load, costs and maximize value add activities.

Stats

PROBLEM

The Google Cloud Sales team were spending upwards of 80 hours a week reaching out to and following up on sales prospects, reducing efficiency, profit margins and undermining staff engagement 

SOLUTION

Developed scripts to automate LinkedIn outreach to prospects and identified high priority responses 

BUSINESS RESULT

Revenue & time:  +80 team hours per week

PEOPLE RESULT

Employee Satisfaction: +50%

Discover

Initially Alex created a scraping tool which enabled him to quickly gather large amounts of data to inform his decision-making process, including sifting through past sales reports, bulk sales communications and best practices relating to sales engagement within the wider SaaS industry. 

Alex also interviewed the most successful sales representatives across the Google sales team to identify: 

  • Salesperson process and content for outreach 

  • Benchmarking data i.e. what ‘successful’ looks like 

  • Tools they used for their job 

Crucially, LinkedIn was the go to channel for sales outreach for a clear majority (and top performers) of the Sales team, so any solution had to ensure that LinkedIn was central to it. In addition, it was clear that the most onerous, repetitive task, which was crucial but manual, was the initial outreach to prospects

Design

With this in mind, Alex was determined that writing a script to reduce the time spent by salespeople on initial outreach was the immediate challenge at hand. Furthermore, given the simplistic, yet repeatable nature of outreach, as well as suggestions of some of the wider team, Alex identified a potential solution: Robotic Process Automation 

Alex started his first draft of the automation script, utilizing Javascript and Chrome extensions which enabled User Scripts across 3rd party pages like LinkedIn. Beginning with the automation of the Submit Message process and ending with the message definition, Alex developed an automated tool which would enable users to send messages en masse to a prospect list with the click of one button 

Having developed this, validatory research was conducted, with key performers being given access to the script to utilize and provide proposition and product feedback. 

Following a 2 week trial process, the team were able to reduce their time spent on outreach by 25%, increasing staff engagement and satisfaction as well. 

Some of the crucial feedback included: 

  • Additional template configurability and decision logic for full transferability across multiple industries and prospect personas 

  • Ability to manage script timing, as well as interrupt and resume workflows 

  • Ability to identify top prospects based on their responses

Deliver

As a result, Alex incorporated the feedback into his script, adding additional configurability and decision logic to maximize the ability for staff to personalize and customize messaging according to the context of the prospect. In addition, Alex developed a further ‘Top Priority’ script which would scrape prospect responses for key word sentiments and highlight specific opportunities for the Sales team to engage with rapidly 

After a final round of user testing with top performers, the team were happy with the end product and signed off the final output. With this, as well as the KPIs identified by the management team, Alex created a report, demonstrating the reduction in time spent reaching out to prospects from 80 team hours per week to 4 team hours per week 

Since then, the LinkedIn Robotic Process Automation script is now utilized by the Sales team throughout Europe when conducting outreach and identifying top priorities based on their responses.

Conclusion

Having spent 6 weeks researching, developing scripts, refining them based on user feedback and success rate, the LinkedIn Robotic Process Automation project managed to: 

  • Reduce time spent on outreach from 80 team hours a week to 4 team hours a week

  • Reduce time spent on identifying prospects from 25 team hours a week to 5 team hours a week

  • +50% increase in employee engagement and satisfaction

Next

Project 2