Have you ever struggled with finding your ideal prospects on LinkedIn?
You might have heard that LinkedIn is an ideal platform for prospecting, yet you're still looking for and reaching your potential leads. Well, you're not alone.
Many marketers and businesses use LinkedIn with the same intention and then wonder why it didn't work out for them. This is a common problem faced by many businesses these days. It's further accompanied by the amount of time you have to spend identifying and segregating your leads.
Why Use LinkedIn for Prospecting?
With more than 870 million prospects, LinkedIn is the largest social media platform that is growing with each passing moment.
⮚ There are prospects who belong to 150+ industries
⮚ LinkedIn has 61 million senior-level influencers
⮚ 65% of decision-makers are on this platform
⮚ 10 million executives, 40 million+ small companies
These stats show that LinkedIn is a very potential platform for networking. 90% of B2B marketers prefer LinkedIn to find and connect with their ideal prospects and build strong business relationships. Unlike any social media network, B2B marketers and businesses have access to a much larger pool of prospects on LinkedIn. Thus, it's an excellent platform for prospecting!
What Exactly is Prospecting?
Prospecting is like putting in the effort, like a miner panning for gold.
Prospecting on LinkedIn means sifting through an ocean of millions of professionals, marketers, salespeople, CEOs, and other people to identify prospects more likely to convert into a sale. It might sound easier to find relevant people on LinkedIn, but only when your target is very small. When your target is finding thousands of prospects in a short time, doing it manually becomes a challenge.
In the past, prospecting was done using cold outreach: calling and sending emails to random people and convincing them to buy your product or service. Those days are over now!
But in the digital world of today, rules for prospecting have changed.
Valuable Techniques to Find Prospects on LinkedIn
- Start With Your LinkedIn Profile
Before you run any campaign or perform any other activity, such as visiting profiles that will put you in front of the key decision-makers, ensure you have an attractive LinkedIn profile.
Having a professional LinkedIn profile will contribute to your authenticity and trustworthiness. Make sure your profile is SEO optimized, client-focused, and presents you in front of your prospects in a way that helps your efforts.
Now that you know the importance of having an attractive and professional profile, let's move forward to the techniques.
- Use LinkedIn Automation Tools
This is the most practical and proven way to find the most relevant and industry-specific prospects in a short time.
The best LinkedIn automation tools come with advanced search filters that you can apply to find suitable profiles quickly. Why not find prospects manually or use LinkedIn's basic filters?
Of course, you can do that, but LinkedIn's basic filters are minimal, giving you only limited results.
Also, if you want to do manual searching, know that a search on LinkedIn will generate thousands of results.
Example: Suppose you're looking for a B2B marketing analyst in New York. You put this keyword and apply filters. LinkedIn will show you a list of thousands of prospects.
Now, will you go through each profile manually and collect data? How much time and energy will it take?
That's where the latest LinkedIn automation tools jump in. They have advanced filters and Boolean operators to reach the prospects that you have been looking for.
Moreover, these tools can do prospecting more efficiently, error-freely, and in a short time. Using LinkedIn automation tools, you can extract prospects using filters:
First and last name!
Connections (1st, 2nd, 3rd)
Connections of
Locations
Current companies
Industries
Profile language
Schools
And even more!
- Check the 'People Also Viewed' Option
This might sound like an obvious LinkedIn, but still, many people need to catch it.
Using this hack, you can find a lot of industry-specific and relevant prospects. Go to your profile, and on the right side will see the 'People also viewed' section.
On the bottom, you can click on 'See more to get access to even a long list of potential prospects. No matter the type of prospect or solution you're looking for, you need to find one such profile, and LinkedIn will do the rest of the work.
Make sure you choose a relevant profile because these profiles might already be close to your prospects. Using this tactic, you can create a very different yet valuable tier of prospects who might become your potential clients with little effort.
- Sift Through Your Competitors' Network
Sifting through your competitors' networks can help you find a lot of potential prospects. However, before you start spying on one of your competitors, make sure you change your turn on your privacy, so your competitors don't get any notification that you're checking their profiles.
Starting from analyzing their feed, what they post and what type of content they share.
Select a strong competitor and take inspiration from the type of content they are sharing.
Check out where events they are attending or what they are working on. Go into their connections and see the lists. You can even use LinkedIn filters to find the exact prospects you're interested in. You can also copy the URL and paste it into a LinkedIn automation tool that will automatically prepare a list of the best prospects for your business.
- Take Advantage of LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are great places where you can find relevant people more frequently. Most of the members in a LinkedIn group share the same interests and business objectives.
When you join a group, you will get an opportunity to interact with hundreds of potential prospects. However, to establish a good reputation, you must participate, participate in conversations, and like and comment on posts. Once your profile has become familiar, you can start posting in the group to establish a reputation.
The benefit of doing this is that people will get attracted to you and consider you an industry leader, and they will send you to connect requests so your network will grow.
Thus, you must provide value consistently to get the group members' attention.
Moreover, the latest LinkedIn automation tools can help you in this regard. These tools have features to scrape out members' profiles from a particular LinkedIn group. You can then use this list of prospects to run an outreach campaign.
- Scrape Prospects' Profile From LinkedIn Posts
A LinkedIn post with a high engagement rate can be an excellent source of finding prospects. Sometimes, people post exciting content that gets thousands of likes and comments.
Find one such post with thousands of likes and comments and use a LinkedIn automation tool to scrape out profiles.
The best LinkedIn automation tools have features to scrape our prospects' profiles from a LinkedIn post. You can generate lists of potential prospects and run a campaign for them.
It's a good tactic to find an influencer in your industry who has a lot of followers and analyze the content they share.
In the comment section, you will find a lot of relevant prospects which can be beneficial connections for you in the future.
- Look Through Skill Endorsements
Skills and endorsement are the sections that need to get more attention, but there's a lot of value to be found here.
LinkedIn members who belong to the same industry or job title often endorse each other's skills. All you need to do is find a LinkedIn profile of a skillful person and go to its endorsement section.
Check out the profiles of those who have endorsed their skills, and here you will find several quality leads.
But the best thing is that the people who have endorsed skills will have endorsement from more people from the same industry. This way, you will be connected to a tier of relevant prospects.
- Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Though we have mentioned it last, this could be one of the most effective ways to help elevate your prospecting efforts.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes with the best search filters you won't find anywhere else, and you can use these filters to find pretty much every prospect you're interested in. It comes with the premium version of LinkedIn and helps to find the most specific prospects. You can play around with different filters to get desired results. It also recommends other prospects' profiles that can benefit your business.
Sales Navigator also sends alerts when there are new results related to the keywords or filters that you used. This is a beneficial method of finding prospects, but you should know it's not free.
Conclusion
There are many valuable ways you can use LinkedIn to find ideal prospects. Some are very obvious; only savvy marketers use others, but all these techniques are beneficial to find your ideal prospects. We have mentioned 7 prospecting techniques that we have tried and tested. You can use LinkedIn's unique features or a LinkedIn automation tool to research and reach out to the best prospects quickly.
If you're someone who has ignored LinkedIn for prospecting, it's time you use these techniques and level up your prospecting game.
No comments yet