According to data, LinkedIn has around 740 million users with over 250 million monthly active users. Of course, every social media platform plays a crucial role in helping businesses connect with their target audience, engage with them, and convert them into their potential customers. When it comes to LinkedIn, it seems that the platform is developed for lead generation with myriad of groups and communities of professionals from diverse backgrounds. As stated in the previous article, LinkedIn is one of the best platforms for lead generation, especially if you want to connect to the “C” level executives. So, the question is how to find the right prospect?

Pinpoint the Target Audience for your Product/Service

Are you looking for low-level managers, middle-level professionals or is your target the “C” suite? Are you looking for collaboration opportunities or is your company making an amazing product for the healthcare industry? What is your target geography? These are some of the questions which would help you find out whom to target. After figuring out your target audience, the next step would be to search for people matching these criteria.

Ways of Searching the Right Prospects on LinkedIn

Let us assume that we want to offer a service. And my target audience consists of CEOs of Indian companies having employee strength of more than 50 people, who are not connected to me. This is how both the search methods would work.

1. The Simple Search Method

For this, we will be using the normal search option provided on LinkedIn. As shown in the pictures below, you can search for a person, company, or even a specific designation (CEO in this case) based on your target audience. For demonstration purposes, we searched for “CEO” and got a list of people which we refined by selecting the “All Filters” icon. This provided us with various parameters to refine the list based on the connection level, location, current company, industry, language, etc. as shown in the pictures below. Since we wanted to target CEOs in India who are not connected, we selected 2nd and 3rd connections along with “India” as the location. This will give us a refined search result page wherein we’ll have to open individual profiles to know more about the company’s strengths and other details. For demo purposes, we opened up the first profile on the results page and the company met our criteria of 50+ employees. So, we sent them a personalized connection request. (Pictures below) We can even create a search alert under the “Saved Searches” option on the right to save the effort of applying all the required filters in the advanced search for any future searches. This is how the simple search method helps in finding the right prospect for our business, though it’s a bit tedious but helpful nonetheless.

2. The Sales Navigator Tool

For this, we’ll be using a premium tool offered by LinkedIn called Sales Navigator. To subscribe to sales navigator, you can click on the “Free upgrade to premium” option on the top right of your profile. You’ll see a page like the one in the picture below. Click on the “select plan” below the sales option to start the one-month free trial of sales navigator! The next step would be to add the search parameters by selecting “search for leads” in the advanced search option as shown in the picture below. This opens up an advanced search panel similar to the one we saw in the simple search method but with some additional parameters. Now we can add company headcount, title, seniority level, years of experience, and many other parameters to refine our search. Coming back to our target audience, we’ll choose the desired parameters and click on search. This brings the search result page to the sales navigator. As you can see, it gives more options to interact with the prospect’s profile. We can now save it as a lead, send a connect request from the search result’s page itself, and open the company’s page for additional details. Since we want to contact CEOs of Indian companies with a headcount of 50+ companies, we opened up the company’s profile which shows additional details like the summary; employees on LinkedIn, etc. (See the pictures below) As the company has 50+ employees (always see “*** employees on LinkedIn” just below the organization’s name), we can send the prospect a personalized connect request and save it as a lead. We can save the search with a customized name so that we don’t end up applying the required filters again during our next search. This marks the end of prospecting and how LinkedIn can be used for lead generation based on our target audience. Did we miss something? Do have an amazing way of using LinkedIn to grow your business? Share your thoughts by writing to us at contact@vomaara.com or send us a message on our social media handles. Want to increase business reach? Check out our blog page Happy lead generation!

LinkedIn Statistics and Facts