LinkedIn Prospecting: How to Find Your Next Customer on LinkedIn

Do you use LinkedIn for your business?

Are you wondering how to use LinkedIn to find prospects and customers?

To learn about how to build strategic relationships through LinkedIn, I interview Viveka von Rosen for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Viveka von Rosen, author of LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day and founder of Linked Into Business.

Viveka shares how she prospects on LinkedIn for her business.

You'll learn about the tools available to make prospecting easy and what you need to do to get started.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
LinkedIn Prospecting
What is prospecting?

Viveka explains that a prospect is someone whom you either find or attract to you who's in a company, business, industry or organization that has a need for your product or service.

Before social media, prospecting was done through very expensive outbound sales. However, social media and LinkedIn in particular have changed this. You'll hear why Viveka loves prospecting.

Social media has changed us from the age of the seller to the age of the consumer. Consumers now tell us want they want. A large part of prospecting is to know who your ideal clients are and know their needs. Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn and Twitter make the research a lot easier.

As a seller, it's also a lot easier and cheaper to get out there and position yourself as a thought leader. This engenders the feeling of "know, like and trust" in a client or prospect with whom you may not have had direct interaction. It makes it easier to close the sale.

In Jill Konrath's book, Selling to BIG Companies, she talks about how you have to know whom to sell to. This is why LinkedIn is so important—it tells you who works at the companies, their positions and whom they interact with. It enables you to reach out to the right person.

Listen to the show to find out why groups can be so powerful.

LinkedIn for prospecting

Viveka explains the two aspects of prospecting—inbound and outbound. Actively prospecting is just a matter of research.

With a combination of keywords, titles, company name and location, you can use the Advanced Search on LinkedIn to discover the people you want to interact with. These are your prospects.

You'll hear about some of the great benefits of LinkedIn and also some of its limitations.

One of the most powerful search categories is Location. Not only can you see who lives in your town, but also when you attend trade shows or conferences, it's a great way to connect with people before the event.

A really cool app that you can use for conferences is Bizzabo, which has a LinkedIn API interface. There are thousands of events in there and you can see who will be at the event. It shows you their LinkedIn profile. In the show, you'll also discover another app which can be used for prospecting.

If you want to meet prospects face to face before an event, a cool new app called Trendr will set up a live meeting place.

Listen to the show to find out how you can discover if a prospect is active in a particular LinkedIn group.

Viveka's experience on LinkedIn

Viveka is extremely active on LinkedIn, either prospecting or inbound. She says that 70-80% of her business comes through LinkedIn and the remainder through things that she markets on Twitter.

When you own a LinkedIn group, it allows you to position yourself as a thought leader. Viveka owns quite a few groups.