LinkedIn is the best platform for lead generation and nurtures leads, of course. The platform is thoughtfully designed for people and businesses to find and work with each other. Luckily, you can search for top people and businesses in many ways.
And if you don’t know how to do it, let’s get down to business and take a look at the most prolific ways of finding business leads on LinkedIn. Before finding the prospects, we recommend you spend a couple of hours on your profile and polish it as top prospects contact only those if they feel you are a reliable person.
11 ways to search for people or prospects on Linkedin
This post will show you eleven actionable tips regarding how to use LinkedIn for sales prospecting. This guide covers the following sections:
- People Also Viewed;
- Who’s viewed your Profile;
- Prospects in New Roles;
- Competitor Networks;
- Endorsements;
- Alumni Search;
- See and analyze your posts;
- Browse user interactions;
- Follow the dedicated hashtags;
- Join LinkedIn groups;
- Referrals work like magic;
People Also Viewed
Let’s start with this simple and quick hack. You can easily search for prospects by clicking on LinkedIn profiles.
Visit all the profiles that you have already interacted with and analyze them. To do it, look at the right sidebar on your profile page, and you will see a list named ‘People Also Viewed.’ This section includes other profiles who have similar interests, and they can be hot prospects for you.
The hack is especially useful if you intend to use Account-Based Marketing. Use this ‘People also viewed’ list to create different tiers of prospects and contact to build fruitful relationships.
Who’s viewed your Profile
This is another quick and extremely beneficial feature to find valuable prospects. The feature states who has viewed your profile recently. Furthermore, it provides various valuable insights like designation, location, and other similar details.
This allows you to know more about the people who have similar interests like yours. You can also find different filters in this feature, and you can use the available filters to understand and find hot prospects to pursue further.
Search for prospects in New Roles
Connections on LinkedIn are mostly people that progress with time and keep changing roles. This gives you an opportunity to knock at new businesses and companies. As they switch to other organizations, you can start the conversation with them and pitch your offerings.
In your LinkedIn profile, go to the ‘Connections’ tab and click on the ‘Keep in Touch’ button to stay updated.
Competitor Networks
While your competitors can also use it to spy on your contacts and they cannot use the arguments that you are using in the form of USP to advertise and sell your services or products.
Analyzing your competitors is essential for any business, and you need to pay close attention to them.
You will find various hacks and a lot of opportunities that you can use and capitalize if you know your competitors.
By paying attention to your competitor’s activities, you can know their advertising and marketing strategies. This also helps you to find their weaknesses, and by addressing those weaknesses in your advertising strategy, you can easily gain the upper hand. Just fill in the blanks that your competitors are missing and meet your consumers’ needs.
More importantly, understanding and analyzing your competitors will enable you to determine new opportunities, and this process will also help you in finding potential prospects. So, know and understand your competitors with whom they are connected and find new prospects.
Endorsements
This is another useful feature that states who are interested in your business. You can use all those users who endorsed your existing connections; you can invite and work with them.
Alumni Search:
A very powerful and effective but not so common feature of LinkedIn is the Alumni Search that you can access via this link:
https://www.linkedin.com/edu/alumni
Users from these common groups will be much friendlier and open to hear from you. Thus, listing and mentioning people from known alumni groups and networks can work as icebreakers for you.
Alumni search features can help you find the right prospects, and you can shoot messages to those lists.
See and analyze your posts:
Another way to find healthy prospects on LinkedIn is to look who is commenting on your posts from your work industry. However, this method works best for more active users.
Furthermore, you can also do it by reviewing your competitors’ pages. But, a more effective and beneficial tactic is to find an influencer in your work industry with a good number of supporters.
By reviewing the influencer’s post, you can easily find hundreds of comments from individuals actively interested in a similar topic! To do it:
Go to the “See all activity” tab and click on the “Posts” button at the top of your screen to see the latest posts of influencers/prospects. Then, tap on “comments,” and you can find a lot of potential opportunities!
These people can be ideal connections for you or your business as they are active in the group and already following an influencer from your work industry.
Browse user interactions
To grow your audience, you must post engaging and meaningful content regularly. If you do so, you will see many people interacting with your posts. And this can help you in finding the prospects.
On the other hand, if you are getting only a few interactions, you need to check your content strategy or use LinkedIn advertising.
So, to take the maximum benefit of those interactions and to convert them into valuable leads, you can do a number of things like:
Schedule a time to review your profile daily and check out if there are newly engaged users.
However, if you have many connections or too much engagement on your LinkedIn profile, you can take help from a third-party tool like Expandi.
Follow the dedicated hashtags
If you are not following companies on LinkedIn, you are doing it wrong. You should follow the companies whether you are interested in their activities or not. Even if you don’t like their stuff, you can still acquire various advantages by simply following their activity.
By following them, you can reach out to the people that are interested in their activities. You can identify their followers, and you can also identify the users that are interested in similar content but don’t follow the company.
To do this, you will need hashtags. Browse through the official company’s page and see if they are using any assigned or dedicated hashtags. Almost all companies use these hashtags, and just by clicking on these hashtags, you can follow them!
Join LinkedIn groups
You will find many different communities and groups on LinkedIn that will be relevant to your business. These groups provide you detailed insights about the industry, and you can also interact with other group members.
Furthermore, all LinkedIn groups are private and no spam! Hence chances of finding trustworthy leads and prospects are much higher in them.
Apart from it, LinkedIn allows you to create your own community from scratch. The process is a little bit time-consuming but pays off extremely well in the end.
However, experts recommend taking advantage of readymade, relevant groups with a lot of members. No harm in joining small groups, but your lead potential will be limited in them as compared to the big ones. In our opinion, you should target both.
Go to the ‘Discussion’ tab located at the top of the group’s homepage, and from here, you post questions, comments, or announcements to others.
However, keep your messages personalized to each group, and you should know to whom you are writing so that they can easily make an informed decision about you and your company.
Referrals work like magic
Referrals are effective for the growth of any business. As your first-tier connections grow, you need to introduce yourself to others. This opens up new possibilities of collaboration for you and your business.
Explore recent customer connections and determine which of them are more suitable for your business. If you are comfortable with them, send them a list of the targeted people and ask for their referral.
The process is simple, and the worst thing that can happen here is they will deny your request; nothing else.
Here your sales team plays a vital role as they exactly know how to pitch the customers for referrals. If you have an experienced sales team, they can get decision-makers in the first attempt and outrun the others. Overall the referral things work flawlessly and can help you in building fruitful relationships that drive sales.
Things to do before approaching a prospect
Now that you know how to find prospects on LinkedIn let’s look at some important things that you need to do before approaching them. These things will draw their attention and helps you in building a subtle relationship. Few effective tips and ways are provided below and you may also check out our article about writing personalized cold messages.
Concise, updated, and relevant summary: Authentic people read and review your profile summary, but at the same time, most of them don’t like to read long, verbose, and complex summaries. As mentioned earlier, polish your profile first and try to keep the description to the point, up-to-date, and short.
Share Meaningful Content: Your published content is viewed by the people on LinkedIn. You will find two channels to share your content; the first is the news feed, and the second is LinkedIn Publisher.
Via news feed, you can quickly post your opinion about any topic, share a link, comment on posts or publish any multimedia file like video or image.
On the other hand, LinkedIn Publisher allows other users to publish their mind in the written form, which is visible to the entire LinkedIn community.
Special Events Occasions: Use the notifications tab for this purpose. It prompts timely and shows you the necessary details about various occasions and events that people celebrate. By using this feature, you can start a conversation with your prospects. You can also wish or congratulate them to start a conversation.
Group Conversations: LinkedIn groups are handy to build a community, or you can be a part of any community. Pick relevant groups and post engaging content to attract your prospects.
In-mails: It is a paid LinkedIn feature and enables you to initiate serious and meaningful conversations with your first-time prospect. Via this feature, you can quickly design customized templates, highlight your purpose, and start communication with them.
The Conclusion
All these methods are effective when you are searching for new and the best prospects on LinkedIn. All you need to do is be creative and find people who like what you do and say.
Abovementioned LinkedIn search techniques can be a handy addition to your arsenal and come in handy on various occasions. Lastly, don’t forget to follow the things mentioned in this guide to engage your prospects.
Best of luck!
