Let’s talk about how to generate leads on LinkedIn.
Did you know that LinkedIn has the highest visitor to lead conversion ratio of all social media platforms. Something like 3% of visitors on LinkedIn converts to leads. Now are you using LinkedIn properly to create leads? It’s a great place for new business generation.
What I am going to talk to you about very briefly now is how to do it. Now, you have got on LinkedIn lots of people that you are connected to and what you need to do is you need to be leveraging those connections. What I mean by leveraging is that many of the people that you are connected to are talking to your customers. What you need to do is find out who is connected to those customers and whether they can introduce you.
Let’s just say that you are a solicitor and you are looking for new business with Accountants. Now Accountants are really good customers for you so how are we going to find new customers? What we can do is we can go on to LinkedIn’s advanced search and we can search for all the Accountants based in the area you are. Did you know that on LinkedIn for example if you are based in Central London you can find Accountants who are 5 or 10 miles away from you? Why would you want to travel to somewhere hundreds of miles away?
So what you do on LinkedIn is looked for the Accountants for example that are close to you and what you can then do is for each Accountant that comes up in the results, LinkedIn will tell you how you are connected to them. So the Accountancies you are already connected to are first level connections. You will also see on LinkedIn that there are Accountants who are second level connections. A second Level connection is an Accountant that you are not yet connected to but someone you already know is connected to them.
For example, if there is an Accountant called Joe Bloggs LinkedIn will tell you who you know that knows them. Their might be a client of mine, there might be a friend or colleague who is connected to them and what I can then do is I can ask that person I know to introduce me to the person that I yet don’t know and LinkedIn gives you a few ways to do that. For example you can get introduced where you can forward a message to that person who will introduce you to that person but you could also be a bit old fashioned. For example if I would like to meet Joe Bloggs but I see that I have a good friend that knows him, I can actually pick up the phone to my friend and say ‘how well do you know Joe Bloggs? Is he a customer of yours? I wondered whether you would be able to facilitate an introduction between us.’
What you need to do is put down that phone, stop making cold calls and go on to LinkedIn. See who you don’t yet know, who you could know because the people who are in your network are talking to your customers. What LinkedIn can do is tell you who you know that knows your customers.
