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Prospecting with LinkedIn: a how-to for B2Bs

October 22nd, 2009 Posted by: Bill Gadless

In any number of recent posts, we’ve always included LinkedIn in our Holy Trinity of B2B-useful social-media networks.

Recently, Dianna Huff took another look at LinkedIn in her guest-post for Savvy B2B Marketing and concluded: “In the last year or so, LinkedIn has significantly increased its functionality – making the business networking site a great way to gather market intelligence about your prospects and connect with them as well.”

Of course, you gotta know how; so here are some of Dianna’s tips:

Company profiles – to find companies in a niche you’re targeting, try using LinkedIn’s “Search Companies” function. Along with lots of company profile-type information, you can find employees with the job title you’d like to target, and see whether any of them are already in your network.
Individuals’ profiles – once you have a set of individuals you’d like to target, you can learn quite a bit by viewing their profiles: their connections, groups they’ve joined, events they attend, even books they read. Imagine the impact your first contact with Prospect X will have when you can seed the conversation with info that makes it clear you’ve put in some serious study time…
Groups – You can also find people in your target markets by using the “Search Groups” function, using keywords likely to be of interest to those markets. Then you can join a few groups (Dianna suggests a max of 2 or 3, for reasons of time required), get to know the people and start answering questions.
Answers – Do another search using your market-related terms and you’ll find questions and answers that people in your market find of interest. You’ll want to take note of the “experts”, and of any people that match those on your growing target list.

Concludes Dianna: “Yes, doing all of this ‘grassroots research’ does take some time and effort. But the result is worth it: over time, you get to know industry players, you begin to add them to your network, and eventually they’ll begin clicking through to your Website, downloading content, and then doing business with you.”