In short
The market for LinkedIn prospecting tools has been built around one promise: send more, faster. These tools serve a team of twenty salespeople just as well as a recruiter contacting hundreds of candidates. For a B2B SME that prospects with its managing director and one or two salespeople, that is rarely the right goal. The problem is not talking to more people; it is talking to the right people, with a message that makes them want to reply.
This article is not aimed at any particular vendor. It offers six questions for judging any tool, including ours. If you do not yet know which stage of your prospecting a tool should relieve, start by diagnosing your prospecting before buying a tool.
1. What does the tool do in your place?
This is the first question, and the most important. Some tools send invitations, visit profiles or dispatch messages without any human involvement, often through a browser extension. LinkedIn's terms of use prohibit this kind of automation, and an account that is flagged can be restricted.
For an SME managing director, the LinkedIn account carries years of relationships with clients, partners and former colleagues. There is no spare account. A tool that prepares the work and lets you send each message saves you time without putting that asset at risk.
2. Does the personalisation go beyond the first name?
Inserting "Hi {first name}" and the company name into a template is not personalisation: these are exactly the fields a mass mailing knows how to fill in, and your prospects know it. A relevant message mentions something the person has produced (a post, a talk, an announced recruitment drive) and links that point to a problem they probably have.
The test is simple. Ask the tool for ten messages to ten real prospects and reread them. If you could swap the messages between two recipients without anyone noticing, the personalisation is only skin-deep. Examples of what works and what does not are taken apart in six first messages, with commentary.
3. Does the tool help you rule out the wrong prospects?
A volume tool processes whatever list you give it. Yet in an SME, sales time is the scarcest resource. Every conversation with a company that is too small, in the wrong sector or without an identified decision-maker is time taken away from a real prospect.
Do the maths on your own week. If a discovery meeting, its preparation and its write-up take you an hour and a half, three off-target meetings a month add up to half a day lost, not counting the follow-ups that come after. No gain in sending speed makes up for that time.
A good tool helps you sort before you write: fit with your ideal customer, recent signals, company size and activity. That assumes you have first defined that ideal customer, which is what an ICP written in one sentence lets you do.
4. Where does the data come from, and where does it go?
B2B prospecting involves processing personal data: name, role, sometimes a work email address. The GDPR applies in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, and Switzerland has its own data protection law. Ask the supplier three questions:
| Question | Why it matters | |---|---| | How is profile data obtained? | Automatically extracting data from LinkedIn raises contractual and legal issues | | Where is it hosted? | Hosting outside the European Union requires specific safeguards | | Can a contact be deleted on request? | The right to object has to work in practice |
The detailed framework, country by country, is in the article on the GDPR in prospecting.
5. Which markets are really covered?
Many tools are designed with the English-speaking market in mind. For an SME selling in France, Belgium, Switzerland or Luxembourg, two points matter.
Language and register first: a message in German for a prospect in Zurich is not written like a message in French for a prospect in Lyon, and formal address is not handled the same way everywhere.
Company data next. Each country has its own register, and a tool can only use the ones it is actually connected to. Ask for the list of countries connected today, not the ones announced for later. An empty company record is a nuisance; an approximate one is worse, because it skews your targeting without you noticing.
6. How do you measure what the tool changes?
The number of sends tells you nothing. What counts is the number of people who reply, and then the number of qualified meetings.
To test a tool, build two cohorts of around thirty people from the same target. Handle one with your current method and the other with the tool. Count replies per person contacted, on day 21 after the last send. The calculation method is detailed in measuring your reply rate. If the gap comes down to two or three replies, you do not have a conclusion yet: extend the test rather than deciding.
What we chose
Trouve Tes Clients is built on these answers: the tool helps you target, understand each prospect and prepare a message, but nothing goes out on LinkedIn without you. How it works in practice, from the imported file to the meeting, is described in the LinkedIn prospecting system.