Using linkedin as a prospecting tool

Because of the way that you are now able to interact with other people, you have an increased ability to build professional credibility, trustworthiness, and to position yourself in your niche or industry as a subject matter expert. The different aspects of prospecting: There are two main aspects of prospecting that can be done through LinkedIn. They are inbound and outbound prospecting. Of course, before you do anything at all, if is critical that you do your homework. If you can obtain those pieces of information, you will be able to get to the next step.

You will be on your way. As you are focusing on the important aspects that have been mentioned, you should keep in mind that location is one of the most important ones.

For all businesses, it is important that you get a sense of who is physically located close to where you are. This will give you the opportunity to interact with those people at various in-person events and you can start to build solid relationships with them.

If you have not been doing it up to now, you should reconsider using LinkedIn more religiously for your professional uses. There are so many ways in which it can be effective and it can truly bring your business to the next level. Making use of the LinkedIn Groups feature is a very smart idea as well. You can either join groups up to 50 of them or you can form your own groups and invite other people to join you. Either way, it is critical that you participate as much as you can.

When it comes to LinkedIn Groups, the most important thing is that you interact and build your relationships with other people.

As you are reaching out to others with the hope of eventually doing business with them, it is very important that you present yourself properly and professionally. That means that your LinkedIn profile is complete, you have a professional photo as part of your profile, and you follow the proper LinkedIn etiquette. Part of the concept of following the proper etiquette is that you make sure that all of your discussions on LinkedIn are conversational, not promotional.

The last thing that the other person wants or needs is to feel as though you are trying to sell them anything. Your only purpose in interacting with them through LinkedIn is to help them to solve their problems and to teach them something in the process. LinkedIn is undoubtedly one of the most effective and most used social media channels for professional people.

You owe it to yourself and your business to leverage it as much as possible and to learn about all of its features so that you can apply those to your business and to improve upon what you are already doing. When it comes to your connections through LinkedIn, you can make use of your first-degree, second-degree, etc, connections.

Here is what you need to do before sending the first message of the outreach campaign:. The same as any other channel, the most successful outreach campaign on LinkedIn starts with well-done research on your potential clients. You need to identify who, when, and where to target to achieve the best results. Your personal LinkedIn profile is like a landing page for your website: It has to be professional, relevant for your ICP, and reflect what your company has to offer.

A nice sales development representative SDR profile includes a short title in a few words, a professional headshot, a cover photo with company logo, and a completely filled up profile, including the about section, job experience, education, etc.

Just as you want to know everything about your prospect, they want to know everything about you. Filling up your profile increases your credibility and therefore improves your chances to get a reply. Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn outreach tool that helps to simplify the research process, target high-quality leads more accurately, and therefore increase engagement with prospects.

This tool allows you to sort prospects by a huge number of criteria without even opening their profiles: their company industry, headcount, seniority level, account activity, title, etc.

After collecting all the necessary data, it can be easily transferred to your CRM system for future campaigns. From the inside, Sales Navigator looks like a simple inbox where you can send multiple messages to prospects without previously contacting them. Besides that, it allows you to see information about the prospect or company not available without this tool.

With Sales Navigator, you can view as many profiles as you need and create more opportunities. Here are just a few other tools you should pay attention to:. After establishing a proper LinkedIn prospecting cadence, you'll want to create persuasive sales message templates for your outreach campaign. The very first LinkedIn outreach message you send to the prospect has to be simply constructed and state a reason for why you want to have a conversation.

Here is a good example of the first-wave LinkedIn prospecting template:. Of course, you can have a different approach here and make your LinkedIn prospecting scripts more personal and less formal, like in this example:. Depending on whether you received a reply to your previous message, you should contact your prospect the second time. Ideally, the second-wave LinkedIn outreach template has to be sent within three days after the first contact.

However, if the workload is too intense, you can do it later too, even within the next month. Your second message has to include a good hook that will provoke the prospect to have a longer business chat with you.

In case your first and second messages are not answered, you can still convince the prospect you are worth their time. Your job is to make them feel that you are fully engaged in the conversation, that you are not cold selling but genuinely interested in finding solutions to their challenges. During the third wave, use some humor to mitigate the tone of the conversation and then move to the pain point:. There are many other essential things to know about LinkedIn prospecting before, during, and after the message templates are sent.

The LinkedIn outreach templates offered above are just examples of how your dialogue could go. Your final message can be very different from what was initially offered in the script. For example, a landscape design software company might participate in groups for landscape designers and contractors, answering questions that arise about design software. LinkedIn has put more emphasis on company pages recently, just launching a new design in September of This can include when the company was founded, how many employees the company has and, most importantly, key employees at the company who have LinkedIn profiles.

This valuable snapshot gives you a view of key decision makers within a company and also illustrates how you are connected to each of them on LinkedIn. We use LinkedIn Company Pages to research new leads to determine if a company is a potential good fit to do business with us.

From a prospecting and research standpoint, use the search functionality to find company pages and personal profiles. If you are going to call on a builder about a new home he is building, search for his profile on LinkedIn first to see if you have a mutual connection that can introduce you see 7 below. Often times we will generate a lead through our inbound marketing efforts but only have the individuals name. We can then search for the individual on LinkedIn to determine who they work for, and then, as discussed above, determine if the company would be worth pursuing as a potential client.

For example, if your company offers commercial snow removal services you could run a LinkedIn ad targeting property managers, commercial realtors, HOAs, etc. These would be best for large, national B2B-focused brands. Be sure to use good judgement here. Only ask for introductions from your connections that you know well. And make sure they have a good relationship with the person you are trying to get introduced to. I use this function personally to get warm introductions to green industry conference and event coordinators in hopes of potentially speaking at their events.

It works great.