8 Steps to Master LinkedIn Prospecting and Boost Your Sales

Like it or not, LinkedIn continues to be the number 1 professional social network. No other competitor has managed even to come close to stealing its limelight. 

Which is why you’re reading this post. LinkedIn prospecting is a thing. 

You may be wondering: How can I use LinkedIn Prospecting to generate leads and conversions? 

Well, that’s precisely what we’ll explain in a short minute. 

LinkedIn prospecting isn’t hard per se, but you need to follow a set of steps to get the most out of it. 

Step 1: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Before moving ahead with any LinkedIn prospecting strategies and tactics, you will first have to optimize your LinkedIn profile for prospecting. 

This means:

• Adding an up-to-date and high-quality profile picture that aligns with your brand.
• Adding an up-to-date banner (preferably related to your company branding or your services).
• Crafting a bold headline about yourself. This is where you can be as witty as you like.
• Writing an engaging summary of your professional expertise. Here’s where you must communicate your value proposition and let other professionals know how you can help them reach their goals. 

Step 2: Define Your Ideal Prospect

This is another essential step you must take before crafting your prospecting messages or contacting any potential leads. 

You need to know who you are looking for and what value you can offer them.

From having a specific industry in mind to identifying their job title and company sizes, everything about your ideal prospect that you define right at the start will help you to tailor your outreach messages better to ensure that:

1. You understand their pain points
2. Your messaging resonates with them 

Step 3: Choose the Right LinkedIn Subscription

At the moment, LinkedIn Premium subscription includes four plans:

• Career
• Business
• Sales Navigator Core
• Recruiter Lite 

The Sales Navigator Core plan is the right one for prospecting purposes. It will help you with your prospecting efforts and generate leads from LinkedIn.

Step 4. Find Your Leads’ e-mail Addresses on LinkedIn

After selecting the right premium subscription plan, it’s time to find the email addresses of your target leads. 

There are three ways to do it:

1. Retrieving the emails manually by clicking on the Contact Info button. Since you will have to manually check each profile for each lead and go through the same steps for each profile, it can become very time-consuming. 

2. Using a scraping tool: You can use various extensions for this but we’d suggest Google Chrome’s Web Scraper. This method may help you save time, but it can become tricky if you are not used to such tools. 
3. Using a third-party tool: Genesy, for instance, among other things, can also automatically scrape all the emails of your leads, automatically qualify them, and help you save a ton of time. 

Step 5. Find Your Leads’ Telephone Numbers on LinkedIn

Similar to Step 4, you have the option on LinkedIn to find out the phone numbers of your leads. 

But there’s a catch: most people do not show their phone numbers publicly for obvious reasons. 

Nevertheless, you can still follow the same steps as with LinkedIn emails to retrieve that data. 

1. Retrieving the phone numbers manually by clicking on the Contact Info button. Just like with emails, manually checking each profile for each lead and going through the same steps for each profile to find each phone number can be very tedious. And the worst part is that you are not guaranteed that they will have their phone number publicly displayed on LinkedIn. 
2. Using a scraping tool: We suggest either following the same strategy as with the emails or trying out Google Sheets using Google Script. 
3. Using a third-party tool: Here’s where third-party tools like Genesy can help you automatically find the phone numbers of your target leads. Best of all, even if the leads do not have their phone number attached to their LinkedIn profile, Genesy can search other platforms to make sure each lead is matched with a phone number that belongs to them. 

Step 6. Personalize Your Connection Requests 

Going straight into selling mode since message one can alienate potential leads. 

That’s why, when sending connection requests and introducing yourself, start slow, get to know the lead first, and adequately introduce yourself as you go on with the conversation.

Avoid generic or boring conversation starters and see how you can grab their attention based on their personal interests. 

Step 7. Build Sales Prospecting Messages

After you’ve established a good relationship with the potential leads, it’s time to craft a personalized LinkedIn message to them.

While the purpose of these messages is to sell your product or services, that doesn’t mean you can’t still write to them in a conversational and natural tone. Just make sure that you include a clear call to action, such as: 

• Scheduling a call (share the link to your Calendly or another tool where they can schedule a meeting with you) 
• Scheduling a demo (you can link to the demo page where they can schedule the free demo with someone from your team)
• Inviting them to your next webinar, where they can learn more about you and the company. 

Step 8. Build Relationships Through LinkedIn Engagement

This step is often overlooked. However, it is strongly related to Step 6. 

Once leads accept your connection requests and you start building relationships with them through direct messages, another aspect that can help you generate more leads and increase conversion is keeping your social selling strategy active on LinkedIn. 

What do we mean by this? 

If someone connects with you and either shares, interacts with one of your posts, or leaves a comment, follow up with that. 

Reply to their comment back.

Comment on the post they reshared from you. 

Or send them a direct message linking back to the post they interacted with on your feed. 

It will help you start or continue a conversation and build stronger relationships with your leads. 

Final Thoughts

We hope the steps above have given you a full idea of the strategy you need to follow when it comes to LinkedIn prospecting. 

Every step is essential and has its purpose so, if you want LinkedIn prospecting to work for you and reach your sales targets, please do not overlook some steps in order to cut some corners. 

Frequently Asked Questions