How to Prospect on LinkedIn – A Tutorial

As of January 2024. LinkedIn has reached its one billionth user. This steady growth is securing LinkedIn the position of the largest professional networking platform on the planet. If you are in the sales prospecting business - LinkedIn is the place to be.

This is a social media platform that is tailored for establishing and maintaining business relationships, unlike other social networking sites. This makes it the perfect place for focused prospecting within particular industries, job roles, and geographic areas.

It is specifically designed to provide easy access to valuable insights into individuals' professional backgrounds, skills, and connections. This makes acquiring tailored and informed prospecting information practically a touch of a button away.

LinkedIn Prospecting Tips

Effective prospecting is directly correlated to increased sales and revenue. This is achieved by expansion and diversification to newly discovered markets. At the same time, prospecting creates long-term relationships with clients and fosters loyalty.

This guide will help you get familiar with some of the most effective and advanced tactics of prospecting via LinkedIn. Using methodical guidance and practical illustrations, we will assist you in attaining concrete prospecting knowledge.

So, let’s get cracking.

Who is Your Audience?

This is the central question of any prospecting endeavor. To be able to locate the right customer means being able to accurately define what you are looking for, and LinkedIn will do the rest.

This task can be divided into three stages:

1. Define your ideal customer profile,
2. Locate business targets,
3. Use LinkedIn to connect.

Start with defining essential demographics and qualities for your ideal customers.        Consider the industry, job title, firm size, geographical location, and so on. Create thorough personas to help you understand your target audience's requirements and preferences.

For maximum impact, it is also a good idea to analyze previous successful contacts or conversions to improve your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Then proceed to conduct extensive market research to uncover potential industries and areas that are compatible with your offerings.

This can be a good point to start using some of the many quality LinkedIn offerings. Use LinkedIn's company pages to research companies in your desired industry. When the right company is tracked down, try to identify important decision-makers and influencers in these organizations.

Now you are in a position to employ the full gambit of LinkedIn prospecting tools and technologies. For example, use LinkedIn's search options to narrow down your target audience according to specified criteria.

Use the sophisticated LinkedIn search tools to identify people based on keywords, job titles, company names, and more. Save search parameters to quickly find relevant prospects.

Boolean Search

LinkedIN Search allows you to use Boolean Search parameters to combine search parameters.  

• AND
• OR
• NOT

That means you combine parameters, for example CEO AND Posted Lately. 

LinkedIn Prospecting Strategy

Monitor and tweak your search criteria regularly to keep up with changes in your target audience's preferences.  You can also save sets of search criteria that you have found to be useful.  This makes LinkedIn sales prospecting more productive, and is just one of the many techniques I recommend you use as part of your LinkedIn based sales process.  You can also check flag in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator (if you're a LinkedIn Sales Navigator user) to have to send search alerts when a new LinkedIn member fulfills your saved search criteria.

The real beauty of this process is its feasibility. LinkedIn is constantly improving its user interface, optimizing it, and making it even more easy to use.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Lead Generation

Your LinkedIn profile is your window to the world. You will use your optimized LinkedIn profile to interact with a variety of people and businesses, at the same time enabling others to take a look at you as well. And to stay in the metaphor, your window should be clean, with some nice curtains and perhaps flowers on the side. A LinkedIn equivalent is to have sorted out your:

• Profile picture,
• Headline and Summary,
• Skills, experience, and achievements,
• Multimedia content.

Profile picture

The first thing people see on a LinkedIn profile is the profile photo. Do anything in your power to make it look as professional as you can. Don’t take selfies. Pay a professional to make you a high-quality picture that reflects your brand.

Dress appropriately and maintain a friendly, approachable demeanor in your photo. Use a headshot where your face is visible and occupies a significant portion of the frame. Avoid using overly casual or distracting backgrounds, and ensure good lighting for optimal visibility. A solid color background is always a good idea.

Headline and Summary

Your headline should communicate your values and expertise. Use keywords relevant to your industry or profession to improve searchability.

Craft a concise and engaging summary that highlights your key skills, accomplishments, and career objectives. Personalize your summary to reflect your unique personality and professional brand.

Skills, experience, and achievements

Your highlighted skill set should be relevant to the message you wish to convey. List your relevant skills and expertise prominently on your profile. Provide detailed descriptions of your work experience, focusing on achievements and outcomes.

Use bullet points or short paragraphs to make your profile easy to read and digest. Quantify your accomplishments with metrics or statistics whenever possible to demonstrate your impact.

Multimedia content

Think of multimedia on your LinkedIn profile as candy for the eye, something to attract the viewers, but at the same time a way to showcase your expertise and craftsmanship.  

Magnetic Sales Pitch Tool

Supplement your profile with multimedia content such as videos, presentations, or portfolio samples. Use these elements to provide visual demonstrations of your skills and expertise.  

Incorporate links to external projects, articles, or publications to further validate your credibility. Ensure that multimedia content is professional, relevant, and adds value to your profile.

While you should not make your personal profile an outright sales pitch, if you're an expert, here's where you can structure your profile so that prospects reach out to you.

Network Building

The average marketeer looking to use LinkedIn for some prospecting doesn’t usually start from zero. You and your business already have some existing LinkedIn contacts, so the wise thing here would be to first use them.

It is always a good idea to strengthen existing contacts by starting some sort of business-related discussions with them. Your colleagues with whom you frequently interact in real life are also there to establish a LinkedIn line of communication. Using this network of actual coworkers can prove itself quite useful when you decide to use it for introductions and recommendations.

Don’t be hasty in connecting with people. Nobody likes generic LinkedIn prospecting messages that could be addressed to almost anybody. People like to see that they matter, and what better way to manifest it than by creating tailored LinkedIn connection requests for potential leads?  

LinkedIn Message Templates

We do recommend that sales representatives have and use message templates, and that they use a system to measure their effectiveness.  But a LinkedIn message template should only be your starting point.  Each should be customized for every prospect.  This approach will prove be the most productive approach for you.

LinkedIn Lead Generation Machine

Do some research beforehand. Scroll through your lead’s LinkedIn page. Discover points of interest and customize connection requests based on those findings. Each LinkedIn customized message you send to a prospect is one more potential lead.  Sales reps would be well advised to spend the time it takes to learn what they can from their prospect's LinkedIN Profiles before sending them LinkedIn outreach messages.

This is particularly important when your prospects are younger people. One survey found that 70% of millennials were particularly irritated by irrelevant emails that were typically delivered in bulk. Online content is practically always available to younger generations, and a large portion of it is promotional messaging. Thus, messages that lack personalization are viewed as spam or even offensive.

Rapport is something a good marketer should always strive to achieve. Social platforms have the same basic rules as real life: to build rapport you need to stress connections and shared interests with your prospects.

The idea behind LinkedIn Groups was to offer a structure for a community of shared interests and ideas. Judging by the sheer number of existing groups and their members, this goal was fully realized.

To prospect means to find the right people and LinkedIn Groups can make this task a lot easier. Search through various groups, join some, and engage in group discussions. Perhaps try offering some insightful commentary. Draw attention by carefully adding to discussions to demonstrate your knowledge. The rapport established within one coherent group can prove itself worth the time and effort.

Furthermore, you can use LinkedIn’s "People Also Viewed" feature, which enables you to find people who are perhaps in the same industry as you but aren’t part of your network yet.

LinkedIn’s Prospecting Tools

Certain LinkedIn tools are designed just for the means of efficient prospecting. Incorporating these tools into your everyday work can significantly enhance your success in generating leads and driving the growth of your business. Some of the tools in question are:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator,
• LinkedIn Messages and InMails,
• Platform activity,
• Profile views.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Since its debut in 2014. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been considered the platform’s flagship product. Iit is a tool that makes LinkedIn prospecting what it is.

It provides unparalleled access to advanced search filters and targeting options. Using Sales Navigator you can narrow down your prospecting efforts to very specific industries, job titles, company sizes, and more.

This tool enables sales professionals to identify and prioritize high-potential leads with greater precision, ultimately pushing the prospecting process to maximum efficiency.

LinkedIn Messages and InMails

Let’s say you applied Sales Navigator to your search and came up with a list of potential customers. The next logical step would be to reach out to them. One way to do it is to stay within the scope of LinkedIn and apply its messaging and InMail capabilities.

This is something we have already pointed out: personalization is key to successful LinkedIN outreach. Use the following data to tailor messages in a way your contact will know this was written for him, and not just anyone:

• shared connections,
• mutual interests,
• recent achievements.

This personalized approach not only increases the likelihood of engagement but also fosters genuine connections and builds trust with potential leads.

Platform Activity

Engagement is an essential component of creating relationships on LinkedIn. Sales professionals can display genuine interest in their prospects’ by actively responding to their material with comments, likes, and shares.

This not only helps to develop a close and harmonious relationship, but it also keeps you in the customer's mind, increasing the possibility of future interaction and conversion.

Profile Views

LinkedIn has this useful feature of offering its user to see who viewed their profile. Premium users have access to more detailed information, but it is nevertheless available to anyone on LinkedIn (if the browsing is not done in private mode).

This feature provides you with valuable insights into who has been researching or showing interest in your profile. By regularly monitoring this feature, sales professionals can identify potential leads who have expressed indirect interest in their profile or offerings.

This allows for targeted outreach to warm leads who may already be familiar with the sales professional, making the prospecting process more efficient and effective.

Content Strategy

The goal of every content strategy for LinkedIn prospecting is to engage with potential clients and establish a strong presence on this platform. We will now expand on several key components of this process.

• Creating content and sharing it: one thing is to possess knowledge, skills, and insights within your industry, but a completely different story is to be willing to present this to the world. Try addressing some pain points of your audience, or sharing some interesting or valuable insight into business affairs. Whether you are doing this on your LinkedIn profile, or within a certain group, you position yourself as an authority in your field, thereby building trust and credibility with potential prospects.
• Be consistent: this is so important for maintaining visibility and engagement on LinkedIn. By posting regularly you keep your audience engaged while reinforcing your brand presence. A posting schedule can be a good idea.
• Research and use hashtags and keywords: this can significantly improve your discoverability on LinkedIn. Conducting keyword research to identify terms and phrases commonly used by your target audience allows you to tailor your content to their interests and preferences. Additionally, strategically incorporating hashtags related to your industry or topic can help expand the reach of your posts.

Measure the Outcomes

Being able to receive feedback on your actions is always preferable, especially in business. This refers to prospecting on LinkedIn as well. Measuring prospecting outcomes is essential for understanding the impact of your actions and optimizing your approach to attract and engage potential clients on LinkedIn.

You’ve guessed it: LinkedIn has an integrated set of tools you can use to measure the effectiveness of your prospecting actions. You can use its analytics dashboard to track:

• profile views,
• connection requests,
• post engagement metrics,
• follower growth.

Analyzing these metrics allows you to identify trends, understand what resonates with your audience, and adjust your strategy accordingly to maximize your impact.

By setting benchmarks and targets for these key metrics you can assess the effectiveness of your prospecting strategy and make data-driven adjustments as needed.

Not all prospecting strategies will yield the same results, so it's essential to analyze the effectiveness of each approach and refine your tactics accordingly. Experiment with various outreach methods, content formats, and messaging techniques to identify what resonates best with your target audience.

Connect LinkedIn with HubSpot

Integrating LinkedIn with HubSpot offers a powerful solution for seamless prospecting, allowing you to enhance customer relationship management and prospecting in general.

HubSpot is one of the more advanced personal CRMs out there. Integrating it with LinkedIn provides a robust platform for prospecting. This integration allows for seamless syncing of LinkedIn contacts, lead information, and engagement data, providing valuable insights into prospect behavior and interactions.

Syncing LinkedIn contacts with HubSpot CRM is essential for maintaining a centralized database of leads and prospects. This integration ensures that all relevant information gathered from LinkedIn interactions, such as connection requests, messages, and profile visits, is captured within HubSpot's CRM platform.

By consolidating data from LinkedIn and other sources into a single database, businesses can gain a comprehensive view of their prospects and tailor their outreach efforts accordingly.

HubSpot includes sophisticated real-time automation options that may greatly improve prospect nurturing and follow-up procedures. Here are a few of HubSpot's many tools:

• sending automated follow-up emails,
• scheduling reminders for sales calls,
• updating lead statuses based on LinkedIn interactions.

Conclusion

As promised, we covered in this guide a lot of prospecting ground. Beginning with figuring out who your targeted audience could be, going over the tweaks you could make on your LinkedIn profile, learning how to build your network and apply a multitude of prospecting tools offered by LinkedIn or affiliated CRM solutions, learning about content strategies and finally, means of measuring the outcomes of it all - this and a lot more.

Go through this guide, learn a thing or two, go to your LinkedIn account, start prospecting, and come back to check if you applied everything you should and could.

One thing can be promised here - you will amp up your prospecting game and benefit your business one way or another.

In the end, we’d like to extend our gratitude to our readers for their attention and interest. We warmly invite feedback, questions, and the opportunity for further discussion.

Our commitment remains to deliver valuable and data-driven resources and support to facilitate successful prospecting endeavors.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Consulting

If you need help with realizing the benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we do offer expert level LinkedIn Sales Navigator based consulting.  Isn't it time you learned how to leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator!