How do I get sales leads from LinkedIn?

Grant Leboff: Danny, this is the million-dollar question that businesses want to know. They’re on LinkedIn, they’ve got a profile, they’ve written their biog, their spending time… I think a lot of people don’t mind spending time on this, but what they want to know is:- show me the money! Where am I going to get sales leads from? So what are the things that businesses can do to get sales leads on LinkedIn?

Danny Bermant : Step #1 is be very, very, clear about who you want to contact. A lot of businesses try to save money by going for the free LinkedIn version, I would urge businesses to upgrade to the premium. Where it is really key is that say, you only want to speak to companies employing over 250 staff, the advanced filters of linkedIn will enable you to just speak to those people, otherwise sales reps will waste huge amounts of time trying to qualify businesses.

The next thing they need to be doing is, using LinkedIn in the right way. It’s a network of interconnected people. If you have some great clients, the likelihood is that a lot of the prospects you are looking to connect to, will also be connected to your LinkedIn network.  So what are you doing to leverage the contacts you already have? If you have a very good client who likes you, who trusts you, and those are also people who happen to have a good relationship with the clients you want to talk to, why aren’t you using them to get referred? So that could be a great opportunity.

And the other thing is that if you see a contact on LinkedIn who you think could be a great contact, be a great client, why don’t you go directly to them? Why don’t you send them a connection request asking them – I think we should connect – and actually explain why you want to connect. That’s where businesses often go wrong. They send a connection request but they don’t put any message. And then there are other ways to get in front of contacts, there’s a great tool called LinkedIn emails, again you need a premium account to use that, but these will let you send direct messages to senior decision-makers and they have a very high response rate. So, previously, you may have made cold calls, you might have had to call 20 or 30 people until you get an appointment, the beauty of LinkedIn is that people are very happy – provided you explain / provide the context of why you want to connect to people – people are very happy to connect with you, so it’s a highly effective way of getting in front of prospects.

Grant Leboff: What’s interesting is, you’ve got this situation on LinkedIn, with referrals. We’ve always wanted word of mouth referrals, and on LinkedIn you can be proactive about it because, if you see someone’s connected to someone else, you can actually ask them for that referral – kind of, waiting reactively – which is what we always used to do. In your opinion, what would be best way of going about that? So, you can see that someone is connected with someone else, of asking them and getting that introduction?

Danny Bermant : I think with LinkedIn, people often do things the lazy way. They’ll just send someone an email saying ‘I see you’re connected to Joe Bloggs can you introduce me?’ 9 out of 10 times you’ll get no response. You need to make it really easy for the person who is going to refer you. Sometimes it’s as simple as saying to somebody, ‘Hi Grant, I see you’re connected to Joe Bloggs. I’d be very interested in speaking to him, would it be okay if I mentioned your name? And then when you are properly connected to them, you can say ‘I’d love to have a brief chat with you, Grant Leboff said that you’d be a good person to me to talk to’. On other occasions it might be that this is a client of yours, who is connected to someone on linkedIn who you would like to speak to. Next time you meet that client, mention to them, say “I see you are connected to Joe Bloggs, this is someone who I would really like to meet, would you be happy to introduce us?”

Grant Leboff: Just make it easy for the other person?

Danny Bermant : Yes make it easy for the other person but also establish whether the person knows that contact. A lot of people on LinkedIn will have lots of connections who they don’t actually know that well. So is actually doing a little bit of background work and finding out that they actually know them.

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