Manual LinkedIn outreach is still a common practice for many salespeople. It involves logging in to LinkedIn every week or day and performing multiple repetitive activities like scrolling through profiles, sending connection requests, and writing messages without relying on automation tools or software.
Doing these activities manually may give you a feeling of control and safety, but this comes at a cost. It drains your time and energy. And when you start to measure your effort against the results, the numbers tell a sobering story.
We’ll look at the real cost of manual outreach on LinkedIn and explain why automated outreach is a better alternative.
The True Cost of Manual Outreach on LinkedIn
The hidden cost of manual LinkedIn outreach is way higher than you might imagine. Many people overlook the tangible and intangible costs of this approach.
Financial Costs
Calculate the hours spent each week searching for leads, personalizing connection requests, and writing follow-ups. Now multiply that by the hourly rate or salary. The number is often startling.
On top of the salary, you spend money training your staff to handle repetitive tasks involved in manual outreach on LinkedIn. And then consider how much revenue you lose because human speed limits the scale of your outreach.
When you add all of these costs, you can see how severely a manual approach affects your bottom line.
Time Inefficiency
Manual prospecting on LinkedIn eats away hours that don’t return much value because of the repetitive nature of the work. You jump between tabs, perform searches, apply filters, copy and paste information, write messages manually, and context-switch constantly.
This is painfully slow, and the process is inherently fragmented, making it difficult to build momentum or achieve a state of deep work. Meanwhile, prospects move on, or your competitors pick them up using automated systems.
Opportunity Costs
While your team is overwhelmed in the grind of manual outreach on LinkedIn, they ignore doing other important activities. They’re not strategizing on larger deals, they don’t have time to refine their sales pitch, and they don’t analyze pipeline data.
The manual approach is also not so effective at hyper-personalizing high-value touches for warm leads and refining messages based on real data. Plus, you miss chances to test subject lines, optimize send times, or scale workable strategies. Opportunities slip through the cracks while you’re still stuck managing message lists and spreadsheets.
Employee Burnout
Doing repetitive tasks daily can wear your sales team down, resulting in employee burnout. It numbs creativity and kills motivation. Plus, the pressure to chase a set number of connections can be overwhelming for your employees.
Manual Outreach on LinkedIn Tips
If you’re not yet ready to adopt automated LinkedIn outreach, take a look at the following tips to improve your manual approach:
- Focus on fewer, higher-quality leads instead of going after low-value targets;
- Create a library of proven templates and personalize the first line based on the prospect’s profile, a recent post, or a shared group;
- Track responses in a simple spreadsheet so you don’t double-message or lose follow-ups;
- Keep all notes in a single document to track replies;
- Use consistent follow-ups, ideally 2-3 touches spaced a few days apart;
- Schedule outreach blocks to avoid distraction and maintain rhythm, and don’t let other meetings or tasks intrude on your schedule.
While these tips can help improve your manual LinkedIn outreach, they won’t solve the main problem of inefficiency. For that and other essential reasons, it is a good idea to transition to a LinkedIn automation software.
Choose Octopus CRM LinkedIn Outreach Automation Tool
The Octopus CRM LinkedIn automation tool is a perfect solution for organizations looking to adopt automation for outreach. It is a cheap and user-friendly software that lets you automate almost all repetitive LinkedIn outreach activities.
Octopus CRM Is Useful for Data Sourcing
Unlike the manual approach that often involves missed names, incorrect profiles, and duplicate contacts, Octopus CRM pulls information directly from the profiles you want to target. This ensures accuracy and saves you the hours you would spend on manual data entry and cross-referencing.
Octopus CRM Is Time Saving
Octopus CRM allows you to automate LinkedIn messages, connection requests, follow-ups, and skill endorsements. Plus, you can use this tool to automatically send personalized bulk invites and messages, besides being able to track responses in a unified dashboard.
Now, imagine doing all of these activities manually.
Activities that could have taken you several hours daily now happen in the background while you are on sales calls, building relationships with customers, or strategizing.
Octopus CRM Helps Reducing Costs and Increasing ROI
Manual LinkedIn outreach requires several paid hours a day, whereas Octopus CRM costs a fraction of that and it pays for itself in the form of higher ROI.
For example, you have a sales rep whom you pay $30/hour for doing manual LinkedIn outreach for 4 hours daily. This means you’re paying them $120 per day or $3,600 per month for performing inefficient activities.
On the other hand, the pro version of Octopus CRM costs you only $9.99 per month, meaning you’ll save $3,590 per month or $43,000 per year.
Octopus CRM is super cheap, not to mention it replaces inefficient, repetitive labor with one affordable subscription. Your ROI will become visible almost immediately in the form of a large pool of qualified leads, increased reply rates, shorter sales cycle, and more closed deals.
Octopus CRM Improving Employee Satisfaction
With Octopus CRM handling the repetitive outreach activities, your sales team can spend more time building relationships and closing deals. As a result, employee burnout will decrease, and their satisfaction, morale, and motivation will go up.
Automation also helps reduce the frustration associated with manually doing mass messaging on LinkedIn. It improves employee performance and lowers turnover rate.
Octopus CRM Automates Almost Everything on LinkedIn
From lead search to follow-up sequences, you can use Octopus CRM to automate almost everything on LinkedIn. This includes visiting profiles to find leads, writing personalized connection requests, following up, and endorsing skills.
Conclusion
Manual LinkedIn outreach is now an old-school, costly, and inefficient approach. The advent of automation tools presents you with an opportunity to supercharge your LinkedIn outreach, automate repetitive tasks, improve your sales process, reduce your costs, save time, and increase your ROI.
With a purpose-built solution like Octopus CRM, you get full control of outreach on LinkedIn without the manual grind. That’s how modern B2B sales actually work.