If you ask most professionals if they are on LinkedIn, chances are they will say yes. We all have our LinkedIn profiles with (hopefully) up to date information about our professional career, a nice (in most cases professional) photo and usually a few good recommendations about our work.
LinkedIn has been around for a long time and some may argue it’s not as fresh and cool as other networking sites, but the fact remains that Linkedin is still the most trusted source to find people and make professional connections. The area where I consistently see the benefits of Linkedin is prospecting.
As our networks grow our worlds get smaller
Leveraging LinkedIn for prospecting is obvious, but with new integrations into salesforce.com, LinkedIn has become even more powerful than before. And let’s face it, cold calling is harder than ever. If you can make or get a personal introduction to a prospect and find that common denominator it immediately turns ‘cold’ to ‘warm’. I’ve always been an advocate of knowing who you are calling by doing a bit of research first and now it’s super easy with this integration. You can see your prospects’ LinkedIn public profile, if and how you may be connected and other people at the company that you may want to be connected with as well.
Even if you don’t have a connection to the prospect, you have direct insight into their LinkedIn profile and can see what they are doing at their current job and where they were prior to that. Reading their personal recommendations is always helpful in learning more about them. This little bit of insight will make a cold call introduction go much better. We are proud beings, and if someone says in an intro call “I noticed on your LinkedIn profile you ….” we generally are flattered that someone took the time to do a bit of research before calling.
We have many professional networking options to use out there, but for me living in the world of sales and networking, LinkedIn continues to be my go to site on many levels. We would love to hear about what networking sites have proven successful for you in your prospecting efforts.
