Savvy salespeople are increasingly using LinkedIn as a primary source of new leads and tangible revenue. In fact, for business to business, LinkedIn is a critical tool that can make your prospecting faster, smoother and, ultimately, more profitable.

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Ten Tips for using LinkedIn for sales prospecting
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Tip 1: Never miss a chance to connect
The first thing any salesperson who’s
ready to get serious about LinkedIn should
do is to take a long hard look at his/her
contacts. Contacts are the currency of
LinkedIn. Connections breed connections.
Your first level contacts open up a route to
a wide range of second and third level
connections. This is how you scale your
network. Strike while the iron’s hot –
whenever you meet anyone (online or off)
always follow up quickly with a connection
request while you are still fresh in their
mind.
1
If your contacts are predominantly family, friends and old
school pals, you’ve got some work to do.

3. Tip 2: Discover a better way to map
your prospects
LinkedIn can help you map out decision
makers within an organization. When
you deal with large multinational
companies there are often numerous
people involved in making and
influencing a purchase. Even for smaller
B2B sales, you’ll often need to influence
a number of individuals.
You’d be surprised how much people put
in their profiles – which team they’re in,
which office they work out of, what
projects they’re focusing on.
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With a little detective work, you can quickly build up a picture
of who you should be talking to, what they’re like (check out
their recommendations) and what they’ve done before.

4. Tip 3: Never make a cold call again
With LinkedIn, you can almost always learn
enough about someone to make your call
more relevant and useful to them. Before
calling have a look at their LinkedIn profiles.
Pay particular attention to changes in
profile, status updates, connections you’ve
in common and anything they’ve posted to
a group (which can be reason enough to call
them in the first place).
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Also, with a paid account, you can see expanded profiles of
everyone on LinkedIn (not just those of your immediate
contacts). This provides even more useful insights you can use
to make a real-life connection.

5. Tip 4: Get past the gatekeeper with
InMail
InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system and
allows you to send an email to any LinkedIn
user without requiring an introduction.
Basically, it ensures your email gets through
to their inbox. LinkedIn claims that an InMail
is 30 times more likely to get a response than
a cold call. InMails are only available on paid
accounts. On the entry-level business
account you’ll get three InMails each month.
But the good news is that if you do not get a
response to an InMail within seven days,
your credits are refunded.
4
Senior decision makers are a tough group to get through to .
They get besieged with calls and emails every single day. So to
protect their time they screen calls, ignore most of their mail
and have gatekeepers to prevent unwanted sales approaches
from getting through.

6. Tip 5: Unlock a smarter way to
search
LinkedIn has a fabulous search facility.
With their advanced search you can find
people by title, company, location or
keyword. Grab a paid account and you
can add company size and seniority level
too. By intelligently mixing the different
filters you can get really deep and
identify key individuals quickly and
easily.
5
You can also save your search criteria and get a weekly report
listing anyone new who matches the customers you’re looking
for.

7. Tip 6: Learn what’s happening in
your prospect companies
LinkedIn makes discovering these
changes easy. You can follow any
company that has a LinkedIn page. That
way you’ll see anything that changes
directly in your updates. It’s an easy way
to stay up to date and spot new
opportunities.
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As any salesperson will know, change creates opportunity.
People join, people leave, companies make important
announcements – any change can present a good reason to
get in touch and offer to help.

8. Tip 7: Use groups for more than simply
keeping up to date
1. They can give you further insights into
what’s happening within a prospect’s
company – how active they are, whether
they’re hiring etc.
2. They allow you to see more of an
individual prospect’s details – in particular
their full name. This is usually restricted to
first, level contacts
3. Group membership gives you both the
reason and capability to make more
connections (it’s one of the criteria you can
select when you send a connection request).
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Most people on LinkedIn use groups to learn more about the
industries. Member questions are great for telling you about
frustrations and unmet needs. They can also give you the
perfect reason for making contact with a prospect.

9. Tip 8: Make your profile work harder
for you
If they’re interested, your prospects will
invariably look at your profile. So it makes
sense to ensure it is 100% complete and
delivers a professional impression of both
you and your company. Make sure you
include current links to your company site,
your Twitter account and Facebook page.
Finally, always add a photo. It makes you
more tangibly real and creates a good
impression. Make sure it’s a good quality
shot and don’t forget to smile!
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You should also get some high quality recommendations –
especially from existing happy customers (quality is better
than quantity). This will give visitors a better idea of what
you’re like as a person. After all, even in B2B, people still buy
from people.

10. Tip 9: The ‘look and look back’ trick
This can work for you in two ways:
1. The fact that someone looked at your
profile is a good excuse to reach out with a
connection request
2. If you look at other people’s profiles, a
certain proportion will always look back (see
1 above)
LinkedIn will give you a list which will
include the actual visitor. It then takes just
minutes to quickly visit each profile to show
you’ve looked back.
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Unless visitors have set their profiles to anonymous, you
can click on the “Who’s viewed your profile?” link and see
a list of them. The free account limits how many you can
see while paid accounts give you the whole list.

11. Tip 10: Integrate LinkedIn with your
CRM
We guess you use a CRM to track and
manage your sales pipeline. Most good CRM
systems now allow a way out to link with
LinkedIn. This would allow you to gain more
insights on your prospects. It means you can
quickly see their work experience and
education as well as shared connections, if
any.
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