Last month, I shared a couple of posts on LinkedIn about LinkedIn. Very meta, I know. The real gist though was about thinking strategically about your relationship building efforts using social networks like LinkedIn. One of the challenges, particularly as you add lots of contacts, is that these sites become a lot of noise and little signal. If the point is to build stronger relationships, adding lots of contacts defeats the purpose.
The strategy I see some sales reps take with LinkedIn however is to connect with as many people as possible. Every prospect, customer, and random inbound connection. They then like every post in their feed. Their LinkedIn network then becomes chaotic to manage and furthers the propagating of spam.
You can read more in following two posts:
Why I Declared LinkedIn Bankruptcy – why flushing your LinkedIn account might make sense
Building a Less is More Network – how to build a network on LinkedIn that is more signal
In the latter post though, I glossed over was the long and painful process of cleaning up data. The reason is that going over the details would take another several pages to explain and would make for a painful read event for the data nerds out there. As I revisited my notes, there was one section that I thought would be broadly applicable to sales reps and worth sharing here.
There are those times when you will have an email address and name, but nothing else. If you are extra lucky, you will also have company name and even a title. This often happens with lead lists from events (both virtual and in-person). You can also see this happen though with newsletter signups or website content downloads where only a minimal amount of information is captured.
You could just start prospecting away and firing off emails, warming up the dialer, and getting your prepared openers ready. However, I like to get to know the person before doing any of that and hopefully increase my chances of a response and a positive interaction. If there is at least something you can do to personalize your outreach, you stand a greater chance of creating an opportunity.
To do that, it will help if you can find their LinkedIn account. LinkedIn is the best source for professional information about people (though there are other sources as I will point out later). So if you are going to go hunting for LinkedIn accounts for your prospects, here are some tips that will help:
Get a Microsoft 365 Outlook email account, this is online and free. The reason is that this is the only way remaining to do a LinkedIn profile lookup by email address. Years ago there was a handy tool called Rapportive, a Gmail extension on the side of your inbox that would find the LinkedIn profile of the emails you entered. LinkedIn bought them and rebranded the tool, but it worked the same. Then LinkedIn killed the tool earlier this year. But Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so you can create a new email message, copy in the email addresses for the contacts you wish to search for, then click on each email address to get a popup that pulls in more information, INCLUDING their LinkedIn profile if it is tied to that email address. Works about 50% of the time.
Run a Google search on the first part of the email address. For software engineers in particular, they will use that part of their email as an identifier on other services like Stack Overflow, GitHub, Twitter, and other social media sites including their LinkedIn URL.
If you have the full name of the contact, try different variations of your LinkedIn search mixing information you have from the contact. For example, first names often use alternative forms, like Andy for Andreas, which results in an unsuccessful search. Try again using alternative forms, or leave out first name and just search using last name and company (if you have this).
If you do have company name for the contact, find the contact by searching for the company on LinkedIn. This will not work for a massive company, but for startups and small businesses, this can yield success. Find the company in LinkedIn and look under the section listing people that work in that company and scroll through until you find a likely match.
LinkedIn is not the only source for information though on people. Many developers and designers do not bother with LinkedIn. Also in certain parts of the world, many people do not use LinkedIn at all. If that is the case for your situation, see if you can get creative with Google searches and source information from other professional sites or social media like Twitter.
I have loads more of these contact finding and data management hacks. If you are interested, I can share more in a later post. And if you have some good hacks you uncovered, please do share!
Mark
Founder, Enterprise Sales Forum
The Enterprise Sales Forum is a professional community championing the practice of sales through monthly sales talks at chapters globally. Our chapters provide an open, collaborative and diverse environment to share new ideas, network and learn actionable insights for professional sales development.