Updated on January 12, 2022
Now that we live in a time in which physical meetups and networking events are nearly impossible, sales reps are looking more and more for alternative solutions. The first and foremost chosen alternative is the usage of B2B lead-generation tools, such as Sales.Rocks and business networking platforms like LinkedIn.
Let’s give some special attention to the matter, since we’ve received quite some questions recently on the differences between Sales.Rocks and LinkedIn. Let’s start with some basics.
First of all, Sales.Rocks offers broad industry filtering based on official national industry codes called the NACE and SIC classification covering over 600 industries, whereas the LinkedIn alternative service is limited to their own 148 industry classes and therefore limiting you in your daily search criteria.
What this basically means is that by using Sales.Rocks, you will be often able to filter down to the type of products or services being sold.
Besides LinkedIn’s connection requests (will talk a bit more about this later), one of my great personal frustrations is the InMail limitations of a paid LinkedIn subscription. We believe that sending an actual email is extremely pricey at Linkedin since it’s giving me about 20 personal email messages a month at a cost of about 80 bucks a month, coming at a whopping 4 dollars per e-mail.
We thought there must be a different way and therefore we offer an alternative to the LinkedIn service. Our entry package comes for 0.37 dollars per direct email, saving an incredible 110%. Plus, many decision-makers are currently no longer active on LinkedIn since they have been spammed with hundreds of irrelevant sales pitches. Sales.Rocks gives access to important decision-makers, irrelevant whether they have a LinkedIn profile or not.
Coming back at the LinkedIn connection requests and search results, LinkedIn offers great access to hundreds of thousands of business professionals worldwide, but did you know that you can only see a very small percentage of these contacts as a basic user?
This is because LinkedIn works with certain networking limitations. First of all, you are only allowed to see up-to third-degree connections, meaning your connection’s connections and their connections. Pretty confusing right?
It basically means that when your network is small, you are seriously limited in terms of prospecting coverage. Besides, by having an invitation restriction, LinkedIn limits you in your daily sales operations. Using Sales.Rocks gives you immediate access to 115+ million companies and 200+ million contacts worldwide, including both LinkedIn and non-LinkedIn users.
And besides that, consider the case for account-based sales. You are trying to figure out the decision-maker and possible influencer in the IT department. With LinkedIn, you need to manually go through the various contacts in the IT department and figure out who is senior enough to be a decision-maker and then below to find subordinates that you might influence.
In Sales.Rocks on the other hand you get a complete structural hierarchy from which you can prospect right away.
Another hot-topic in the sales era is doing sales based on installed web technologies, or so-called technographics. Company websites have certain plugins installed that reveal some of their activities or programs that they use. Wouldn’t it be cool to target companies that have a certain e-commerce platform or payment module installed, work with a CRM system such as Pipedrive or Hubspot, or run a website that was built on WordPress, Magento, or Laravel?
Even though LinkedIn has started to realize the importance of technographics, it has currently mapped just a couple of hundred technologies, and coverage is generally very low. Sales.Rocks, on the other hand, has mapped nearly 16.000 different technologies and has classified them into convenient subcategories that can be accessed through a handy drag-and-drop feature, and offers full European and North American coverage, bringing a new dimension to your regular sales operations.
Identifying the right company and decision maker is one thing, but as most of sales fellows know, it is all about the outreach and conversational consistency. Although LinkedIn is doing a great job at sending single messages through connection requests (though with having some content restrictions, without an alternative solution…), it doesn’t offer a way to follow-up and do proper lead nurturing.
On the other hand, our Drip Campaign module does make this possible. It’s simple, just identify the companies or contacts you are interested in, push them into a campaign list, draft your campaign setup: content, conditions, and actions, and run your campaign without a sweat. Also in terms of account-based sales; with different email templates for decision-makers and influencers in place, it becomes a walk-in-the-park to close your account-based sales deal.
Since we definitely acknowledge the importance of LinkedIn, we have started working on integrating LinkedIn as a functionality within the Drip Campaign module: sending automated connection requests, auto-liking, auto-endorsing, and similar other functions based on (email) events: eg., if the mail was opened ->, send out a LinkedIn connection request.
Did I forget something? YES! Sales.Rocks has a Chrome Extension that enables you to directly retrieve all contacts, the organizational structure, and general company information while browsing the net. Want to add a certain fellow to your email campaign or CRM? With just one click you are able to push through all the necessary data fields.
Think I got a bit too excited, so, where were we? Oh, yeah, this is definitely getting way too long. So, let’s wrap up some of its advantages:
TL;DR
- 110% lower CPE (cost per email)
- Access to the entire contact-universe. No more network dependencies
- An Industry Filtering model that offers four times as many industry classifications
- Increased Account based Sales potential
- Advanced Technographic-opportunities
- A Drip Campaign functionality: automated emailing and messaging based on conditions, lead behavior, and actions.
- A handy free-of-charge chrome plugin that makes your prospecting so much easier.
Schedule a quick call with me, and we can discuss more on the subject.
Happy prospecting! ✌️
