LinkedIn Business Sourcing Tip

December 05, 2020

by a searcher from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Something I've been toying with the build outbound leads is to utilize LinkedIn to find business owners. Go to LinkedIn search, select People ->

* Connections: 1st, 2nd (I like to do this so a warm intro is possible, or there at least there is a connection to reference when reaching out)
* Locations: Any geographies you want to limit to
* Title: "owner" (since most SMB owners don't use keywords like "founder" or "ceo")
* Profile Language: English (Or any languages you want to limit to)

At the very least this has helped in networking, best case is it will help in sourcing potential deals.

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Reply by a searcher
in Loudon, NH, USA

How have you approached the actual messaging? There is the first 'connection request' message and then the first follow up. I've tried to determine how to balance asking directly about a possible sale vs. building the relationship. In other words, cold out reach needs to balance the goal of the outreach (ie. why are you contacting me? What are you selling or what do you want?) as well building rapport. How do you ensure a higher response rate while staying true to the goal of the campaign? I've also found that by just filtering for 'owner' includes all of the solo/side hustle business owners as well. I've tried using the 'Employee Count' filter as well to try to get to larger companies.

Reply by a searcher
from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, USA

Definitely adding more filters will help weed out companies you're most interested in (I'll add industry filters for example). I've tried a few different approaches for messages, either directly messaging on the platform and keeping a spreadsheet of names/companies and using other tools to find emails and messaging off the platform.

Since these leads are in theory closer to my network already, I've tried to craft the messages to be more friendly and relationship driven ("I found you through my network and I'd love to learn more about your business"), vs leading with directly asking about a possible sale.

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