You probably know that LinkedIn is the most powerful and effective tool for reaching virtually anyone in almost any business industry.
But not everyone is using its full potential every day.
On that matter, only 16.2% of US LinkedIn users are active every day, which speaks a lot about the percentage of worldwide users who actually don’t use the benefits it can bring.
You’re probably trying to win new customers that are willing to pay you cold hard cash without having to spend all your days contacting non-relevant people.
And LinkedIn is a great place for even passive sales prospecting.
In this post, we will explore the benefits of using LinkedIn sales prospecting and share some advanced tips for sourcing hot LinkedIn leads.
So let’s begin!
What is LinkedIn Sales Prospecting?
LinkedIn Sales Prospecting is the most popular and best way to make more cold calls, generate leads, and increase your sales.
It helps you find potential clients, identify their needs, and connect with them.
You can then contact them through email or phone call to pitch your products or services.
But first, you need to identify them.
Just like any other type of prospecting, there are different strategies you can use to identify prospects easily.
Here are some advanced tips you can use immediately.
1. Use Sales Navigator for Better Prospecting
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a CRM that allows you to track and manage your sales pipeline from one place.
You can connect with your prospects, create tasks, reminders, and notes, track conversations and follow-ups, collect leads and get insights about your leads’ behavior – all in one place.
Some of LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s best practices can help you easily identify and contact your prospects, but here are two tips we think might be valuable for you:
1. Use Sales Navigator’s Leads by Stage feature to focus on specific sales process stages at once.
For example, if you’re trying to convert leads into customers but aren’t sure how many of them actually want to buy yet, create a list of leads where each one has been in touch about specific products or services.
What’s great about Sales Navigator is that it lets you organize your leads into a separate list and sort them by using tags and notes.
This way, the critical information about them is always close to your hand.
This way, you will always know what might be relevant to them at each stage in their buying process.
2. Use Sales Navigator’s Lead Scoring feature to identify top-priority people.
You can set up scoring rules based on the amount of time someone has been in contact with your brand, whether they’ve downloaded a whitepaper or webinar, or even the number of times they’ve been in contact with your company.
The more points they earn, the higher priority they’ll have when you’re selecting who gets contacted first.
3. Use the “Saved Search” option
Using this option will let you keep track of your groups of people and identify new ones anytime with a single click.
2. Use the Power of Boolean Search
LinkedIn Boolean search is a popular tool used in many marketing campaigns but is not often used for prospecting.
Boolean search is a way of searching for specific keywords.
You can use it to find people with specific interests or professions.
To find them, Boolean search uses a set of rules to perform searches by allowing you to search for keywords that are connected by AND, OR, and NOT.
For example, let’s imagine that we sell software as a service (SaaS).
We might want to find companies who are interested in purchasing SaaS products and services but haven’t yet done so (or at least haven’t done so recently).
We can use an advanced search operator like “marketing automation” AND “CRM.”
This will show us all the companies who have mentioned those two phrases on their site over the past 12 months (you can also use this method for other businesses).
Using Boolean search for your prospecting might be great for you if you know your audience pretty well.
Using it will be much easier for you to find them.
3. Use LinkedIn Events To Your Benefit
By using LinkedIn events, you can generate one of the most qualified leads for your business.
What’s great about it is that those event attendees showed interest in a specific topic.
In case that’s a topic where your product or service is, you can use it to your benefit.
How?
1. Enter the event page
2. See the attendees list
3. Send them a connection request referencing the event
You can also enter the event’s chat and engage with people for a better acceptance rate.
This way, you will seem familiar to them, and they will be more open to accepting your request and replying to your messages.
4. Inspect the Comment Section
To find prospects, you can navigate to relevant industry influencers’ profiles and check for the people commenting on their posts.
There are high chances those people are your prospects.
To do that, search for the specific influencer within the search box and then click “Posts.”
It will show you all the posts of that influencer and the ones that mention him within their posts.
This way, you can not only identify all the posts from the influencers and then contact the people liking and commenting on them, but you can also take one step further.
Consider exploring the people that are mentioning that influencer within their posts, which will also be within the search results.
If they also fit within your niche, you can engage with that post to provide some engagement and then add them referencing to their post or comment in the previous case.
If you don’t have concrete ideas on how to reach them and what to write to attract them, you can grab some ideas from our “50 Proven LinkedIn messages.”
Don’t be afraid to say, “Hi, I’m Not Selling Anything…” or start in that manner.
It can be a great way to hook your prospects, and keeping the promise in that first message might give you extra credits later.
5. Follow the Hashtags
If your audience is creating content on LinkedIn, they are likely to use hashtags within their posts.
And you can use its power to identify prospects.
Just enter the search box, write the hashtags they use most, one by one, and hit enter.
After you enter the hashtag results, you can search within the post and contact the prospects that look interesting to you.
Not only will their posts help you meet them better, but they can also reveal the pain points that you or your product are already solving.
Note: Make sure not only to consider prospecting the people that posted using specific hashtags.
Combine it with the inspecting comment section and find the people that might be relevant to your audience.
6. Use Competitors as Your Allies
Using your competitors’ pages can be great for finding prospects that may be interested in your product or service.
You can save your competitors’ pages and visit them from time to time to check who engaged with their page.
Those people might be interesting to you, so you can add them and outreach to see if they’re relevant to you.
Pro tip: On the other hand, you can also follow their SDRs, partnership managers, and other relevant people who may bring you something valuable and reveal other prospects to you.
Conclusion
We hope these 6 advanced tips for LinkedIn Sales prospecting will help you improve your strategy and increase your success.
But you need to adapt them well with the prospects you’re reaching out to if you want to get the maximum benefits of it.
With the right LinkedIn tools, engaging with your prospects and connections is no longer a problem.
So choosing the one that best fits your needs is important to increase your LinkedIn outreach success.
With a LeadDelta capital manager, you’ll be more productive by viewing and organizing your network in the best way it suits your needs.
Whether you’re looking to get in touch and engage with your prospect or simply organize your personal connections, LeadDelta can help you improve your connection overview and make the most out of your network.
LeadDelta’s CRM view is fully customizable and allows you to tag your connections, hide and unhide them, apply filters, and sort your connections to find the contacts you need easily.
Download LeadDelta extension and improve your LinkedIn connections game.
