LinkedIn Prospecting Secrets: How to Turn Connections into Clients

Unlock the hidden sales potential of your LinkedIn network. Learn how to use LinkedIn connections to find new clients and grow your business.

Do you often wonder what’s the net worth of your LinkedIn network? If you have never thought about this, maybe you should now. Can you associate a dollar value to your hundreds or thousands of connections on the world’s numero uno professional network?

At the time of writing this article, I have over 2500 connections on LinkedIn – friends, some family members, past colleagues, clients, prospects and a large number of connections I have never met or spoken to.

But, LinkedIn is not Facebook or Instagram. I am here strictly for business. So, what’s LinkedIn’s report card?

In my case – I must say LinkedIn has a stellar performance report.

It’s been more than fourteen years since I started using this platform and it has been my go-to source for building a personal brand and approaching clients.

A disclaimer here – I am using the free membership. I did use LinkedIn premium in the past for a few months. However, that was a part of a training program for one of my consulting clients. The free membership works for me. It does for most if you know how to use LinkedIn connections for sales outreach.

That’s exactly what you’ll learn in this article.

P.S. Use this Google sheets subscription tracker to monitor all your paid subscriptions. Spend smart!

How to Use LinkedIn Connections for Sales?

As of February 11, 2024, LinkedIn has removed an ability to add tags for free LinkedIn users. Tags were great in organizing and segmenting connections and we could have used them to easily filter based on our search criteria.

Note: If you are a LinkedIn Premium user, you could continue to use tags.

Now that we no longer have access to this useful feature, let’s see how we can use LinkedIn connections for sales outreach.

This is my LinkedIn profile – 2500+ connections.

The most obvious method to reach out to my connections is going to their profile and sending a message. 

Well, you know that! The problem is we do not remember the names, location, company, designation etc. for most of our thousands of LinkedIn contacts.

So without tags for filtering connections, we could use the following two options.

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Option 1: Using Search Filters

Go to “My Network”, then click on “Connections” and then click on “Search with filters”.

Once you are on the page which lists all your connections, click on “All Filters” on the top menu. That opens another window where you can choose pre-set filters such as “Changed jobs – on or off”, “connections of or followers of”, “locations”, “industry” etc.

These are helpful – for example if you are traveling to another country or city and would like to send a message to all your connections living in that country or city to set up a meeting.

At the bottom of this filter window, you could use keywords for filter – name or title.

This is helpful when trying to use LinkedIn connections for sales.

Use keywords in combination with pre-set filters.

Example

I want to reach out to all my connections in Mumbai that have the title Founder or Co-Founder in their LinkedIn title.

Results of the filtered search: 94 of my connections who are a founder or co-founder live in Mumbai.

That is a manageable number of connections. Down to 94 from 2500. Now, I can easily browse through the list and send a personal message to selected connections with a sales pitch or meeting request.

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Option 2: Export LinkedIn Data

I prefer this method. If, like me, you are comfortable with spreadsheets, I’d recommend this method to filter your connections for a sales outreach.

How to export LinkedIn connections?

Here’s a video demo on how you can export connections and other data from your LinkedIn account.

1. Click on your profile picture on the navigation bar and select “Settings and Privacy”
2. Click on “Data Privacy”
3. Then click on “Get a copy of your data”
4. You can select what data you want. For the purpose of using LinkedIn connections for sales, select “Connections” and click on “Request archive”

LinkedIn will notify you when your data archive is ready for download. You will receive your data in CSV format. Open the file and save it as an Excel file or you could choose to convert it to Google sheets based on your preference.

The connections archive will have the following columns:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company
• Position
• Email Address
• Connected On
• Profile URL

Note: Email address will be available only for connections that have allowed LinkedIn to share their email address. That means only a handful of email addresses.

I got 73 emails for 2500 contacts. Hence, don’t keep your hopes high. Also, most people do not use their work email for LinkedIn sign-in so you cannot use this for email marketing. Work with their profile information and URL.

How?

• Use the Position column to filter contacts based on their title (such as designation or department)
• Once you have a shorter list, visit individual profiles using the profile URL and send them a message
• I have added an additional column to calculate how long have I been connected to each contact (Formula mentioned in the image above)
• This helps me personalize the message if I am reaching out to someone that I have not met or spoken to for a while

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Take Away: Use LinkedIn Connections for Sales

Don’t underestimate the worth and importance of each LinkedIn connection. Directly or indirectly, they could contribute to your growth and success.

Social networking is all about connecting and helping each other. Don’t hold yourself back. Use one of these methods to reach out to your hard-earned connections and make a pitch.

Yes, make a pitch.

Ask for references or introductions.

Seek feedback.

And, never miss out on reciprocating. Help your connections.

Do you have a tip or trick up your sleeve? Share with us in the comments. And don’t miss to subscribe to receive notifications for new posts. Thank you!