Master the basics of LinkedIn prospecting. Find all the activities and tools for successful lead generation and outreach on LinkedIn in this guide from Snov.io experts.
LinkedIn Prospecting 101: Everything You Need to Start Generating Quality Leads on Social Media Now
TL;DR:
LinkedIn prospecting helps you find, connect with, and convert potential clients using inbound (content-driven) and outbound (direct outreach) strategies. Mastering prospecting on this platform is essential for generating quality sales leads.
Key tips include:
Choosing the right LinkedIn plan (like Sales Navigator for advanced filters and insights)
Using tools like Snov.io to automate profile visits, extract emails, send messages, and analyze results
Combining LinkedIn with other outreach channels (like email) for better conversion
Applying automation safely, within LinkedIn limits, to save time while maintaining personalization
With the right strategy, including personalized messages, optimized profiles, targeted outreach, and smart use of automation tools, LinkedIn becomes your strongest B2B sales channel.
This guide describes the basics of searching for clients on LinkedIn and engaging with them to ensure your sales success.
In this digital age, you’re probably already looking for leads on social media. But sometimes, finding the right prospects feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. You know your ideal clients are out there, but without the proper strategy, reaching them becomes a nightmare.
The key to success isn’t just finding your ideal customers and their information. It’s making them notice you, trust you, and become ready to engage in a conversation. LinkedIn is a perfect place to quickly find sales opportunities and benefit from them – you just have to know how.
LinkedIn prospecting is the process of identifying and reaching out to potential customers, a.k.a prospects, on LinkedIn. This process is divided into two categories:
1. Inbound prospecting
This approach focuses on attracting leads through relevant, high-quality content and interactions, fostering engagement, and showcasing thought leadership.
2. Outbound prospecting
This method is more proactive and involves actively reaching out to future clients via coldmessages, cold calls, or emails.
LinkedIn prospectingspecifically refers to finding and interacting with potential clients on LinkedIn.
Inbound prospecting on LinkedIn is performed through posts, comments in Groups, and articles. Outbound prospecting on LinkedIn involves utilizing connection requests, messages, InMails, and ads.
What are the benefits of using LinkedIn for prospecting?
There’s a good reason why many sales professionals add LinkedIn to their strategy. While LinkedIn is only one of the social networking platforms, it offers the most benefits for B2B businesses.
The main advantages of using LinkedIn for prospecting include:
Direct access to key decision-makers and industry experts.
Advanced search filters that help you quickly find the best opportunities.
A chance to build a relationship with your potential clients by engaging with their content instead of just sending a coldmessage.
Users are more inclined to read and respond to your messages than via mail or other platforms.
An ideal environment for organic marketing and sales, with minimal cold pitching.
Analytical insights that are useful for refining your inbound and outbound strategies.
All in all, LinkedIn streamlines the entire prospecting process, helping you not only identify your prospects faster but also approach them in a more personalized way. With its networking opportunities, advanced filters, and reach data, LinkedIn stands out as a powerful platform for generating high-quality B2B leads that convert.
How to use LinkedIn for prospecting?
To successfully find and convert leads on LinkedIn, you must include the following components in your sales and marketing strategy:
The right LinkedIn subscription plan
An optimized LinkedIn profile
A regular posting schedule and quality content
Your prospects’ contact information
A well-written, personalized prospectingmessage
Analytical software
Let’s review each of the components and how to use them for prospecting on LinkedIn in more detail.
1. The right LinkedIn subscription plan
Choosing the right LinkedIn plan is essential for successful prospecting without breaking the bank.
The free version offers basic networking features, so if you are on a tight budget, it can still satisfy most of your needs.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides more advanced sales and marketing features. Among them, you can find detailed search filters, lead recommendations, and real-time insights.
This premium solution allows you to find potential clients more efficiently, build targeted outreach campaigns, and analyze their impact. It can significantly enhance your social selling success and compensate for your investment in less than 6 months.
2. An optimized LinkedIn profile
Your LinkedIn profile forges your potential clients’ first impression of you and your business. Therefore, it should look polished and professional. Additionally, the LinkedIn algorithm analyzes your profile page and places it in the search results depending on how well-optimized it is. High placement in search results increases the chances of being noticed by relevant decision-makers.
To make your profile attractive to your audience, use a high-quality profile photo, craft a compelling headline that highlights your expertise, and write a summary that focuses on how you help your customers. To make your page appear higher in search results, include industry-relevant keywords in every section of your profile.
🎁Need to boost your brand’s visibility on social media?
Posting valuable content establishes you as an industry expert worthy of your customers’ trust. Posting regularly makes your profile constantly visible to a wide circle of LinkedIn users.
Share insightful articles, industry news, success stories, and tips that resonate with your audience. Follow the 4-1-1 rule. For every six posts, four should be industry news or articles published by others, one should be your own thought piece, and one can be openly promotional content.
As for the frequency, posting 2-3 times a week is enough to attract attention. Some influencers aim for a couple of posts per day, but no more than that. Prioritize quality over quantity. If your content doesn’t add value for your audience, they begin to view your posts as a nuisance, which can hurt your marketing efforts.
4. Your prospects’ contact information
While using LinkedInmessages to contact your future clients is a viable strategy, it’s still better to acquire their emails or phone numbers. Not everybody who has a social media account logs in to social media platforms frequently. Thus, it is wise to have a backup for your LinkedIn outreach.
To move conversations off LinkedIn, you need access to your potential customers’ contact details. You can manually check their “Contact Info” section or use LinkedIn prospecting tools to extract the needed information.
5. A well-written, personalized prospectingmessage
Generic sales pitches rarely work on LinkedIn. A strong prospectingmessage should be personalized, concise, and focused on the potential client’s pain points. Reference their recent activities, shared connections, or industry challenges to make your message relevant.
Instead of pushing a sale immediately, start a conversation by offering immediate value and connecting on a human level. This will help you get more positive replies.
💡 Need ideas and templates to craft strong prospectingmessages? Watch this video to ensure your requests get accepted by your prospects:
6. Analytical software
Tracking the results of prospecting on LinkedIn helps find gaps in your strategy and improve outcomes. You can use LinkedIn’s built-in analytics and third-party software to monitor such metrics as engagement, connection acceptance, and response rates.
If you need more detailed insights, aim for more powerful analytical solutions and consider subscribing to Sales Navigator. It provides additional data about your audience’s behavior. Analyzing these metrics will allow you to optimize messaging, targeting, and overall marketing and sales efforts for better conversion rates.
Top LinkedIn prospecting and automation tools
If you’ve decided to use automated LinkedIn prospecting software, make sure to choose the one that best fits your needs. We have prepared a compilation of the best LinkedIn prospecting tools on the market to help you find the best solution for your unique needs.
1. Snov.io
Snov.io is a comprehensive sales engagement and automation platform created for SDRs, lead generation agencies, and email marketers. Snov.io offers LinkedInprospecting and multichannel outreach as a part of its functionality.
With Snov.io, you can:
Find and validate email addresses to ensure your messages reach the recipients’ inboxes.
Implement key LinkedIn touches, including profile views, post likes, connection requests, messages, and InMails, to help you steadily grow your LinkedIn sales.
Combine LinkedIn and email outreach to cover more ground.
Seamlessly connects with tools like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Calendly to unify your workflow.
Provides comprehensive campaign analytics for LinkedIn and multichannel outreach to help you further optimize your strategy.
My journey with Snov.io began at least three years ago, and today, I’m still actively using LI Prospect Finder, prospect lists, campaigns, and CRM. With Snov.io, we generated R$100.000,00 in just 4 months.
Pedro Stob
General Manager at Salestech
Pricing:
LinkedIn Prospect Finder (Chrome extension): free
Starter pack (all core capabilities needed to set up a steady sales pipeline): $39/month
LinkedIn Automation Tool (can be purchased with the Starter pack and other advanced plans): $69/month per slot*
*All prices listed in this article pertain to the plans that include LinkedIn automation features. The pricing is subject to change, so make sure to check the corresponding website.
This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.
2. Evaboot
Evaboot offers LinkedInSales Navigator Scraper – software that refines LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results and extracts emails and phone numbers from the search page.
Source: Evaboot
Source: Evaboot
This tool can help you to:
Clean and export lead lists from Sales Navigator.
Remove irrelevant or duplicate contacts.
Simplify the process of managing and exporting leads with an intuitive interface.
Pricing: starts at $9/month for 100 leads.
3. Taplio
Taplio helps you increase visibility and build relationships with your audience on LinkedIn. It streamlines content planning, creation, and posting with versatile templates and optimized scheduling. It also helps findleads’ contact data if you purchase more advanced plans.
Source: Taplio
Source: Taplio
This tool can help you to:
Create LinkedIn posts with pre-made templates.
Schedule your content plan to help you maintain a consistent presence on social media.
Find your lead’s contact information to engage with them outside of LinkedIn.
Track your posts’ performance and audience engagement metrics.
Pricing: a 7-day free trial is available for each plan. Paid plans start at $39/month.
4. Lempod
Lempod allows you to boost the visibility of your posts. This solution creates “pods” – groups of people in your network who will automatically engage with your content. This will increase the value of your content in the eyes of the LinkedIn algorithm and thus enhance your profile’s attractiveness to potential customers.
Source: Lempod
Key Features:
Creates groups where members mutually like, share, and reply to each other’s posts to boost their visibility.
Optimizes the timing of LinkedIn posts to achieve the best engagement from users outside the pods.
Displays the number of likes, shares, and replies on each member’s posts.
Pricing:
Marketplace: $9.99/monthper pod
Private Business Pod: $3.99/monthper user in a pod
How to use automation for LinkedIn prospecting?
Performing both inbound and outbound prospecting on LinkedIn manually is very time-consuming, especially if you combine it with other channels. To save time and improve results, many professionals use LinkedIn prospecting automation.
There are multiple LinkedIn prospecting tools available on the market, but be careful. They should be used with LinkedIn’s guidelines and safety limits in mind to bring you positive ROI.
Extract prospects’ contact information
When you’re hunting for your future clients’ contact data manually, you usually have to visit their page. At the same time, you have only a limited number of profile views a day. The solution? Leave it to specialized software.
With automated LinkedIn prospecting software like the Snov.io LI Prospect Finder, you can download other users’ information from the search, company, and personal pages in bulk. It will save you time and ensure you’re not hitting the profile view limit as fast.
💡Expert tip:
You can also supplement your strategy with the free Email Finder and collect leads from anywhere on the web, not just social media.
Interact with your prospects’ content to get noticed
Do you want to get on decision-makers’ radars before approaching them? Viewing their page, following them, and liking their posts will increase your chance of getting a reply. But try doing that for every contact you have – and you’ll be swamped with social media work for days to come.
Instead, you can set up software to do the job for you. For example, the Snov.io LinkedIn prospecting tool can handle all of your routine LinkedIn activities. Then, you’ll be able to use your time doing more meaningful work, like forging relationships.
Interact with your prospects’ content to get noticed
Do you want to get on decision-makers’ radars before approaching them? Viewing their page, following them, and liking their posts will increase your chance of getting a reply. But try doing that for every contact you have – and you’ll be swamped with social media work for days to come.
Instead, you can set up software to do the job for you. For example, the Snov.io LinkedIn prospecting tool can handle all of your routine LinkedIn activities. Then, you’ll be able to use your time doing more meaningful work, like forging relationships.
❗️Remember:
If you’re using software to streamline LinkedIn activities, make sure it follows LinkedIn’s best practices. The Snov.io LinkedIn automation solution protects your account from being restricted with the following measures:
Location-based proxies built into your subscription. You can also add your own proxies.
LinkedIn account rotation that enhances your outreach safely.
Account warm-up to prepare for bulk prospecting.
And much more!
The struggle is over
Find prospects anywhere on the Internet and reach your sales quota early with Snov.io.
If you’re dealing with a high volume of leads daily, manually sending messages to everyone can quickly become overwhelming. In this case, you can prepare an array of templates and set up the mass sending of your messages. With the right segmentation and personalization setup, you won’t have to sacrifice the relevancy and humanity of your correspondence.
Personalized LinkedIn connection request in the Snov.io app
Reach out to your leads and follow up with them via multiple channels
Using LinkedIn for sales prospecting is a reliable strategy, but adding other channels can skyrocket your results. Combining email and cold prospecting on LinkedIn ensures that your message reaches a recipient, even if they aren’t active on social media. Additionally, you can use alternative channels to follow up with your leads and to upsell your product in the future.
Analyze your results and optimize your strategy
Regularly accessing the outcomes of your campaigns is crucial for increasing your sales. The social media platform itself provides insights into your posts’ and profile’s performance. It doesn’t show your messages’ open and reply rates, which is very inconvenient. Even LinkedInSales Navigator provides insights for InMails, not regular messages.
Specialized software can help – if it has analytical capabilities. For example, the Snov.io LinkedIn Automation solution displays a dashboard with all of the meaningful outreach metrics. You’ll be able to monitor how many of your recipients opened and replied to your messages. At the same time, you’ll understand how their reaction correlates with your activities.
Your next steps
Now that you know the basics of LinkedIn prospecting, it’s time to start implementing your knowledge into everyday actions. Combine inbound and outbound prospecting techniques and, most importantly, be patient. Building quality prospect lists takes time. The more time and effort you put in during this stage, the faster you’ll be closing deals afterward. Besides, Snov.io is here to help you every step of the way.
Remember that LinkedIn frequently updates its platform, best practices evolve over time, and new solutions emerge every day. Stay informed, keep optimizing your approach, and come back to this article to keep your LinkedIn game strong.
Also, if you want to know more social selling tips and tricks, take a free course at Snov.io Academy. There, you’ll learn how to facilitate all aspects of growing your business on LinkedIn.
It’s the best platform for B2B sales. It offers access to millions of decision-makers and provides sales and marketing specialists with built-in solutions for lead generation and networking.
What’s the best LinkedIn prospecting technique?
It depends on your business niche and your potential customers’ interests. In general, a combination of valuable content, engaging with your audience, and personalized communication shows the best results.
Do you need technical skills to use LinkedIn automation tools?
No, usually you don’t. Most software is designed for sales professionals without technical expertise and has a user-friendly interface.
What is the difference between prospecting and networking?
Prospecting focuses on generating leads and sales, while networking is about building long-term relationships. That said, networking often serves as a stepping stone for prospecting.
