LinkedIn Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide For Sales 2024

Do you find it challenging to reach the right prospects and convert them into clients?

Traditional prospecting methods can often be time-consuming and yield few results, leaving you frustrated and overwhelmed.

This is where LinkedIn Prospecting enters the game.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, with about 1 billion LinkedIn users. It provides access to a huge pool of potential customers and industry leaders.

In this guide, I’ll uncover for you the following:

1. What is LinkedIn Prospecting?
2. How to Use LinkedIn For Sales Prospecting?
3. 7 LinkedIn Sales Prospecting Message Templates
4. How To Boost LinkedIn Prospecting with LinkedIn Marketing?
5. 7 Tools To Supercharge Your LinkedIn Prospecting Strategy

Following the prospecting tips in this article will boost your LinkedIn Prospecting strategy, save time for building relationships, and get more replies.

Let’s dive in.

What is LinkedIn Prospecting?

LinkedIn prospecting is identifying and reaching out to prospects on LinkedIn.

It avoids mass, generic messaging and focuses on building real relationships to convert new prospects into paying customers.

LinkedIn prospecting involves prospect list building, copywriting, and automation.

There are a lot of frequently based questions about LinkedIn Prospecting, like:

1. Should you prospect on LinkedIn at all?
2. Does LinkedIn work well for prospecting?

Should you prospect on LinkedIn?

The answer depends on whether your ideal clients use LinkedIn daily and thoroughly fill out their profiles.

If your targets are digital-friendly and you use LinkedIn daily, you should use LinkedIn as your main B2B lead generation channel.

If your audience is less digital and doesn’t use LinkedIn as often as traditional SMBs, e-commerce brands, and health companies, this social media might not be the best place for them to prospect.

Does LinkedIn work for prospecting?

Yes. Definitely. The reply rate metric of prospecting messages is usually higher with LinkedIn than with cold emails.

It’s also a goldmine of prospect information, making it easy to build qualified LinkedIn lead lists using this social network.

The difference is quite remarkable in some of our campaigns. For example, in this one, we get a 48% reply rate on LinkedIn vs. 6% with cold emails.

Convinced?

Now, let’s see how the best salespeople use LinkedIn to prospect.

How to Use LinkedIn For Sales Prospecting?

There are 12 steps to accomplish for successful LinkedIn Sales Prospecting:

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile for sales
2. Use LinkedIn Boolean search
3. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator
4. Export leads and find contact details
5. Don’t add notes in connection requests
6. Send hyper-personalized messages
7. Always add value in follow-ups
8. Identify Open Profiles
9. Use paid InMails as a last resort
10. Automate LinkedIn outreach
11. Combine LinkedIn prospecting and cold email
12. Scale LinkedIn outreach using multiple accounts

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile for sales

Before sending prospecting messages on LinkedIn, the first step is to optimize your LinkedIn profile for sales.

Would you spend money on ads to drive traffic to a landing page that is not optimized?

I guess not.

The same rule applies to your LinkedIn profile. You never got a second chance to make a good first impression.

When people receive your message, they will first visit your LinkedIn profile.

You need to ensure that it’s appealing and that your value proposition is visible.

Here is a short checklist to make sure your profile is optimized before you send any message:

1. Design an original profile picture and banner
2. Write a simple and clear headline
3. Detail value proposition in the About section
4. Display social proof and links in the Featured section
5. Customize your LinkedIn URL
6. Detail job experiences and education

Now that your LinkedIn profile is optimized, it’s time to use the LinkedIn search engine to find leads.

2. Use LinkedIn Boolean Search

LinkedIn makes it easy to build a lead list by providing various filters, such as Job Title, Company Size, and Industry.

But that’s not it. You can use LinkedIn Boolean search to build even more targeted lead lists.

LinkedIn Boolean search helps you narrow or expand your keyword searches to help you find the prospect’s profiles you are looking for. 

It uses logical connectors:

• AND
• OR
• NOT

Combined with punctuation:

• Parentheses
• Quotes

Find out how it works in this video:

3. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

To make LinkedIn your main B2B lead generation channel, you need a Sales Navigator license.

Sales Navigator is the advanced version of the basic LinkedIn search engine, making it easy to reach your target audience.

It offers many more search filters and exclusive features to help you find and reach out to identify and target your ideal customer profile.

Here is a video that will tell you exactly how to get the most out of Sales Navigator.

The advanced search features that Sales Navigator offers are a must-have for a high-performing sales organization.

4. Export leads and find contact details

The only drawback of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that it doesn’t allow you to export your leads into a CSV.

Hopefully, many 3rd-party tools like Evaboot make this step effortless.

You simply need to download the Evaboot Chrome extension to have access to a new button, “Extract With Evaboot”.

Just click the button on the top right corner to export your search results in one click.

You can also use Evaboot to get the emails of your prospects, so at the end of the process you end with a read-for-outreach file like this one.

If you want to add cold calling to your sequences, you can also use tools like Datagma to find phone numbers from LinkedIn.

5. Don’t add notes in connection requests

Ok, great.

Now you have your lead list, and it’s time to start the LinkedIn outreach.

You can’t send direct messages to your 2nd and 3rd-degree connections on LinkedIn; you must send a connection request first.

I advise you not to add notes in your LinkedIn connection requests, except if you have a super relevant icebreaker, like mutual connections.

Several studies show that connection requests without notes have an average 3.5% edge over connection requests with notes.

So, if you don’t have something super relevant to add to your notes, send a plain connection request; that will do the job just fine.

6. Send hyper-personalized messages

We are all receiving awful LinkedIn prospecting messages on LinkedIn every day… yes, I’m talking about this one:

You can see from a mile away that this message has been blasted to thousands of people without doing any research on anyone.

You can expect replies from your prospects if you don’t provide any effort, you must deserve these replies.

That is why you need to show your prospect you did your homework.

For that, here is a template you can use. I call it the RABT Formula. The structure of the message is the following:

1. Reason for outreach
2. Ask a question
3. Backup with data
4. Tease your solution

Here is a message we use to send that gets a 28% reply rate.

Let’s analyze all the steps in detail:

1. Reason for outreach: Tell your prospect why it’s relevant for him to read the message.

It can be a generic icebreaker for all of your list, or you can also write a personalized icebreaker for everyone on your list.

2. Ask a question: Find a question to qualify your prospect.

99% of the time, that will be: “Do you have the problem my company solves?”

3. Backup with data: Show your prospect that you did your homework and asked this question for a specific reason.

4. Tease your solution: Tease the benefits of your solution without telling how it works.

Here, we want to focus on outcomes. If the prospect is interested, he will ask you about the “how” later.

If you follow this template and fill it out with relevant information, you can be sure to get replies.

7. Always add value in follow-ups

When prospecting, add value every time you send a LinkedIn follow-up.

Most people repeat their proposition value and ask for a meeting again.

There is no added value for the lead in this type of message.

In this message, the person asks for a meeting, whereas the prospect has not yet shown interest in the proposition value.

Instead of just repeating your proposition value, try to bring new arguments to the table.

You can, for example, send content you created on the topic to show your expertise.

Client testimonials are gold for following up.

It also proves that you are a legit business and have already created value for similar people.

8. Identify Open Profiles

InMail messages are premium LinkedIn messages that allow sales reps to skip the connection request step and directly send messages to 2nd and 3rd-degree connections.

Open Profiles are a great opportunity on LinkedIn because you can send them free InMails.

Given the weekly limitation on LinkedIn connection requests (100-200 per week), Open profiles are a great way to increase the volume of messages you can send.

There is no way to filter your search for Open profiles using LinkedIn or Sales Navigator.

However, you can detect who are the Open Profiles in your list using Sales Navigator and Evaboot.

The Evaboot extraction has a column named “Prospect Is Open Profile”.

Filter on TRUE to get all the open profiles in your list. Here is the process:

1. Make a search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator
2. Export your search into CSV with Evaboot
3. Look into the column “Prospect is Open Profile.”

9. Use paid InMails as a last resort

If your prospect is not an Open Profile, you can still send paid InMails.

You get 50 InMails per month if you have a Sales Navigator subscription.

It’s a rare resource, so it’s important to follow the InMail best practices to ensure a reply.

LinkedIn InMails are a unique opportunity to get into your prospect’s LinkedIn inbox, so you would rather not waste them.

When contacting your prospect, I advise you to keep these InMails as a last resort.

Proceed like this:

1. Send a connected request
2. If it’s not accepted, find your prospect’s email address and write a cold email
3. Follow-up 3–4 times via email
4. Send an InMail if you don’t get a reply to your emails

With this process, you can maximize the value of your InMail credits.

10. Automate LinkedIn Prospecting

LinkedIn automations tools like LaGrowthMachine or LinkedIn Helper can help you automate your LinkedIn prospecting messages and follow-ups.

They are huge time savers, and you can use them to build specific scenarios like this one:

The best part?

You can use custom variables in your messages to personalize your messages at scale.

Let’s say you want to write a personalized icebreaker for all your prospects.

Simply add these icebreakers to your CSV file and then upload them to your outreach tool.

Your icebreakers will be automatically placed at the beginning of your messages along with other variables like first name or company name.

11. Combine LinkedIn prospecting and cold email

Focusing on LinkedIn prospecting doesn’t mean that you should forget cold emails.

Combining both channels can make your prospecting process 10 times more efficient.

This strategy is called multichannel cold outreach.

If you are keen to learn more about how to combine LinkedIn prospecting and cold emails to get more replies, you can take a look at this video:

12. Scale LinkedIn prospecting using multiple accounts

If you start having good results with LinkedIn prospecting on one account, you might want to apply the same strategy to multiple accounts to get more replies.

LGM makes it super easy to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts within the same platform

You can even manage all the replies to your campaigns in the same place using the shared inbox feature.

7 LinkedIn Sales Prospecting Message Templates

Here are 7 LinkedIn prospecting message templates you can use to get more replies.

1. Reach out to LinkedIn event attendees
2. Reach out to competitors’ post commenters
3. Reach out to competitors’ followers
4. React to company news
5. Reach out to LinkedIn group Members
6. Leverage your existing clients
7. Contact the client’s alumni

1. Reach out to LinkedIn event attendees

Attending a LinkedIn event is a great sign of interest in a topic.

If some companies in your niche or your competitors create a LinkedIn event, you can steal everyone who signed up for it.

First, look for an event in your niche.

Find an event from which you want to extract the attendants.

You must register for the event if you want to have access to the list of attendees.

You now have access to the list of participants.

Once you complete these operations, you can go to Phantombuster and look for “LinkedIn Event Guests Exporter”.

Copy-paste the LinkedIn event URL into the field.

You will get a CSV with all event participant information.

You can now import this CSV into LaGrowthMachine and repeat the process described in part one.

Here is an example of a prospecting message you could send after the event.

Message

Hello <first name>

I’m trying to collect feedback on the webinar {{webinar_name}}.

Did you attend to it?

Interested in your thoughts.

Best, JB

Many people sign up for the event but never show up, so make sure to ask if they participated in it.

2. Reach out to competitors’ post commenters

Commenting a post is a great sign of interest for a topic. And all post comments are public.

Why don’t you steal post commenters from a post related to your niche?

Thanks to the LinkedIn search engine, you can look for posts in your niche and extract the commenters.

Type your keywords and select “Past week” to be sure people will remember having commented on this post recently.

Just repeat the process described in part 1.

Here is an example of the results I got.

Here is the message I sent:

Message

Hello <first name>,

I saw that you commented <competitor>‘s post regarding the generation of icebreakers via AI.

I’m doing a webinar with WeClose on the subject next Tuesday 2 p.m.

Here is the link: <your link>

Most tools available today are in English and don’t work well in French.

WeClose’s AI is trained in French, so I thought this might interest you.

Best, JB

3. Reach out to competitors’ followers

There is a hack to steal your competitor’s followers on LinkedIn.

These people are a great target for a LinkedIn prospecting campaign.

As they follow your competitors on LinkedIn, you can be sure they are interested in your topic.

Pro-tip: make sure to exclude employees and founders from the followers list.

Here is an example of a campaign you can use:

Message

Hello <first name>,

I’m reaching out because I see you follow <competitors name>.

Is it a product/service you are using?

Or you simply like the content they post?

Best, JB

The goal is to start a conversation and to gather information on your prospect.

4. React to company news

One company event is a great opportunity to reach out to someone, as people love to be congratulated.

Any good news, like fundraising, is an excellent opportunity.

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an efficient way to detect them.

Here are message templates you can use:

Message

Hello <first name>

I came across a post mentioning that <company news>.

Just wanted to say congrats. Great job you guys did there.

Best, JB

This is completely disinterested. Giving an honest “good job” is always a kind gesture.

5. Retarget LinkedIn Group Members

Being part of a group is a good sign of interest. It means the person is interested in the topic and wants to learn about it or exchange information with other people in the community.

Contacting people who are members of some LinkedIn groups in your niche is worth a try.

So, how to get them into a CSV?

You can use Sales Navigator to prospect group members, but it is not mandatory.

You can also use the basic search engine and Phantombuster to do that.

Search for a group on the LinkedIn search engine.

Join the group by clicking on Request to join.

Warning: You will have to wait for the admin of the group to accept your request to go through the next steps. Otherwise, this error will show up.

Once you get accepted into the group, look for the Group Extractor Phantom.

Copy-paste the URL into Phantom Buster.

You get all the group members into a CSV a few minutes later!

You can now import this CSV into LaGrowthMachine and repeat the process described above.

Here is an example of a prospecting message you could send:

Message

Hello <first name>,

I just joined the <group_name> LinkedIn group, and I had some interesting thought about the <topic>.

Would you be interested in exchanging ideas?

Best, JB

Most LinkedIn groups are dead, full of spammers, and people don’t even remember having joined them.

Make sure that your prospect is still interested in the topic.

6. Leverage your existing clients

People always like to hear about what their competitors are doing.

You can use that as leverage if you already have clients and authorizations to work with similar companies.

Message

Hello <first name>,

I’m reaching out because we have started to work with <client>, one of your competitors.

We help them <the problem you are solving> and they are pretty happy with it.

Do you have the same issue at <company name>?

Before sending any sales pitch, you want to ensure that your prospect has the same pain points as your client.

No problem. No sale.

You know how to write LinkedIn prospecting messages and have suitable message templates, but you are not done yet.

Before you start sending your first prospecting messages, there are some things you must do.

7. Contact your clients’ alumni

There is a high chance that some people who used to work with your clients have become potential leads.

Here is a quick way to find clients’ alumni employees on Sales Navigator:

1. Use the filter “Past Company”
2. Add your clients
3. Add other filters to find decision-makers

You can send a message like:

Message

Hello <first name>,

I saw you used to work at <client name>, it’s one of our clients.

I see that you are now <new position occupied>.

I wondered if <new company name> could also benefit from our solution.

<Client name> is currently achieving <benefit of your solution>.

Would you be interested to get the similar results with <new company name>?

Here, you tell your prospect that people close to him are achieving good results with your product/service.

That might trigger its curiosity.

How To Boost LinkedIn Prospecting with LinkedIn Marketing?

Here are 5 ways to boost LinkedIn prospecting with LinkedIn marketing.

1. Post on LinkedIn daily
2. Engage with post commenters
3. Engage with other LinkedIn posts
4. Run LinkedIn Ads on prospecting audiences
5. Use a LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing Strategy

1. Post on LinkedIn daily

People are more comfortable starting conversations with people they are familiar with.

If you receive an email from Salesforce SDRs tomorrow, you will at least read it because they have a strong brand, and everybody knows their name.

That is why it can be efficient to position yourself as a thought leader on LinkedIn while prospecting.

Because your future clients might be your LinkedIn post viewers, likers, and commenters.

Someone who came across some of your LinkedIn posts is much more likely to accept your connection request if they have seen post relevant content.

So, posting on LinkedIn is all about warming up your potential prospecting audience while sending messages to increase your reply rate.

2. Engage with post commenters

LinkedIn prospecting is about starting a conversation.

However, the inbox is not the only place you can convert on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is above all else a social selling platform.

You can also interact with potential customers in the comment section of your posts.

It’s critical to reply to all the people commenting on your post to start as many conversations as possible and increase the reach of your posts to get even more comments.

You can also use Phantombuster to scale that technique and automate sending your connection request to everyone commenting on your post.

Go on Phantombuster and select the post commenters extractor to extract all post commenters into a CSV.

3. Engage with other LinkedIn posts

Your comment section is not the only place to leave comments; you can also comment on other LinkedIn posts in your niche.

This provides 2 benefits:

1. You get visible: If your comments get some likes, they will likely be promoted on LinkedIn at the top of the comment section.
2. You create a relationship: Commenting on someone’s post is a great way to initiate a conversation before sending a connection request or a message.

My advice is that you block 15 minutes in your calendar every day to comment on LinkedIn posts in your niche.

4. Run LinkedIn Ads on your prospecting audiences

Another way to warm up your prospecting audiences on LinkedIn is to run ads on the people you are prospecting.

But how do you target the people you are prospecting with LinkedIn Ads?

This is easier than you think if you use Sales Navigator to hack LinkedIn ads.

Here is a tutorial:

There are 3 techniques.

1. The warmup Ads: The goal is to run ads BEFORE the SDRs start sending emails to maximize email replies and connection request acceptance rate on LinkedIn.

2. The Cover Ads: You also want to run ads on leads WHILE SDRs send messages.

This way, you stay top of mind in their head.

3. The Wake-Up Ads: Use this type of ad campaign to stay on top of mind among people who have not replied to your SDR campaigns.

5. Use a LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing Strategy

Combining LinkedIn marketing and LinkedIn prospecting is called LinkedIn account-based marketing.

LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a sales-oriented marketing approach.

Marketing teams using ABM focus on the quality of leads, not the quantity.

They work hand in hand with Sales teams to convert targeted lists of accounts into customers.

Here is a complete tutorial on implementing LinkedIn ABM in your company.

People often oppose LinkedIn prospecting and LinkedIn marketing, but the truth is that the best thing to do is to combine both techniques.

Adding Sales Navigator to the mix makes this strategy even more powerful.

7 Tools To Supercharge Your LinkedIn Prospecting Strategy

Here are 7 LinkedIn prospecting tools that will improve your LinkedIn strategy:

1. Evaboot
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced
3. LinkedIn Smartlinks
4. Taplio
5. Lempod
6. LaGrowthMachine
7. LinkedIn Voice Messages

1. Evaboot

Combined with Sales Navigator, a LinkedIn scraping tool like Evaboot allows you to create a list of potential prospects and find their emails in seconds.

Here are all the operations realized by the tool:

1. Extract search results
2. Extract all profile information
3. Extract all company page information
4. Clean names and company names
5. Filter false positives in your search results
6. Find the emails
7. Verify the emails

In one click, you produce a read-for-outreach prospecting file that you can directly import into your favorite outreach tool.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced is the upgraded version of Sales Navigator Core.

It offers features that can save you time, like account file upload.

This feature is handy because it allows you to import data from other B2B databases, such as Crunchbase, Wappalyzer, or job boards, into Sales Navigator.

Instead of using the search engine to find target companies one by one, you can bulk upload your Excel and save a lot of time.

3. LinkedIn Smartlinks

Another feature of LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced is LinkedIn Smartlink.

Sales Navigator Smart Links allows the creation of Sales presentations by aggregating files and websites.

You can then easily share and track your prospects’ interactions with this content.

You will be notified each time someone opens your link and will receive a detailed tracking of your prospect behavior on your document.

It tells how long the person viewed the material and the date/time they clicked on it.

4. Taplio

Sometimes, you won’t have the inspiration or the energy to create LinkedIn posts.

To anticipate these moments, you can do 2 things:

1. Batch LinkedIn posts creation
2. Use a scheduling tool to program publications for next week

I use Taplio for that.

The tool is simple to use and saves a lot of time.

Every month, I take a few hours to write all my LinkedIn posts for the month.

I program their publication using the scheduling tool and don’t need to worry about anything.

All I need to do is connect to reply to comments.

This saves much time compared to connecting to LinkedIn daily and writing posts on the platform.

5. Lempod

Engagement pods allow you to get likes and comments from members of the pods automatically.

They are often used to give LinkedIn posts an initial boost to increase their chances of getting viral.

They have a bad reputation, and many people abuse them by adding thousands of fake likes to their posts. 

However, there is a smart way to use them. The condition is that you can create engagement pods with people you know.

Here is how to process it:

1. Create a pod
2. Invite your friends and colleagues
3. Add your LinkedIn posts link to the pod
4. Your friends and colleagues will automatically like the post

That way, you don’t have to send DM’s to all your friends and colleagues every time you publish a new post on LinkedIn.

6. LaGrowthMachine

LaGrowthMachine is, for me, the best LinkedIn automation tool out there for several reasons:

1. UX is dead simple
2. It’s 100% safe as automations are launched from your desktop
3. It’s technically robust
4. It has an API
5. You can manage multiple LinkedIn accounts with it
6. It can connect to your CRM

I use it for all our outreach campaigns, and I’ve never been disappointed.

If you want to benchmark with other solutions, you can also take a look at:

• Lemlist
• Expandi
• Waalaxy

Always test your messages manually before adding any automation to your prospecting efforts.

7. LinkedIn Voice Messages

LinkedIn voice messages can get up to 40% reply rate.

That’s an opportunity you don’t want to miss for LinkedIn prospecting.

If your prospect is not responding to your LinkedIn DMs, try to follow up with a LinkedIn voice message.

When following up on LinkedIn or email, it’s always good to switch channels or the format of your messages to surprise prospects and trigger curiosity.

The best part?

You can also automate voice message sending with LGM:

Conclusion

To conclude this article, I want to remind you that LinkedIn Prospecting is about building relationships and starting conversations.

Templates, techniques, and tools are only helpful if they serve this purpose.

It can be achieved using outbound and inbound strategies without picking one side and discarding the other.

Some actions won’t provide immediate ROI, but eventually, building a high-quality network of relevant LinkedIn connections will always beat any short-term hack.

FAQ

What is the difference between prospecting and networking?

Prospecting empowers salespeople by helping them identify and contact potential customers, connect with decision-makers, and close deals.

Networking involves building relationships with people who share similar interests or backgrounds. It’s about creating connections and trust, which can indirectly lead to business opportunities.

What should you say on LinkedIn to break the ice?

When starting a conversation with a potential client on LinkedIn, you can effectively break the ice by:

1. Compliment their recent work
2. Mention a mutual connection
3. Share relevant industry news
4. Highlight a shared background
5. Offer assistance

How to get started with LinkedIn prospecting?

To get started with LinkedIn Prospecting, you need to:

1. Define your ideal customer profile & buyer persona.
2. Find prospects using LinkedIn search filters.
3. Structure your outreach campaign.
4. Reach out and follow up consistently.
5. Automate your LinkedIn outreach with tools.
6. Combine cold emailing with LinkedIn messaging for better results.