Answer these questions:

• Do you want more customers?
• Do you have a list of your target customers (either name, company name, position)?
• Are you on Linkedin and have a good number of connections (say 250+)?

If you answered ‘yes’ to these questions…read on (and if you didn’t, you should keep reading too)…

LinkedIn often doesn’t get business owners too excited under the collar as a lead generation tool, the likes of Facebook and Twitter often get more press as the place to be. Not so: in recent research* it was shown that LinkedIn is 277% more effective as a lead generation tool than both Facebook and Twitter.

There are many reasons for that, including effective contribution to LinkedIn groups & use of ‘Answers’ but for me, the killer feature of LinkedIn is the ‘How you’re connected to’ feature. You don’t know who knows who, until you can see who knows who and LinkedIn does that brilliantly.

Let’s say your target client is Sir Richard Branson, your options are call his PA, hope she gives you the time of day and then says Richard is unavailable til 2018 OR you go to LinkedIn, type his name in the search bar and see if you’re connected to him via your connections. Next to his name, if you’re lucky, will be a number, either a ‘2nd’ or a ‘3rd’. If it’s a 2nd, result!

Click on their name to look at their profile, scoot down the right hand side of the page and LinkedIn shows you how you’re connected to them. In an ideal world you know that connection well enough to pick up the phone (or use the ‘Get introduced through a connection’ feature) and ask them how well they know Sir Richard and would they mind providing an introduction or give you some insider knowledge to turn a cold lead into a warm lead.

The above process can save you a huge amount of time trying to turn cold targets into warm leads. I continue to gain clients through it and every client who I’ve done this process with has got at least one client from it.

Even if you don’t have a name but have the business name or a position of the usual decision-maker for your product/service (e.g. operations director), the LinkedIn search still works really well, just use the filters down the left hand side once you’ve done the search to narrow it down by geography, position, 2nd level connections only – the options are really good.

And if your target is a 3rd level connection? You can still access them; you just have 2 levels of connections to get through but it can still save you huge amounts of time.

My advice – before you do the searches makes sure you’ve connected with as many people as you can (that you know well enough to pick up the phone to) to increase your reach.

Have you tried out this feature yet within LinkedIn? If not, why not?

If you like what you read, why not share it?

Jan

*Data from Hubspot, January 2012

Image from wittwertrainingsystems.com

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