In B2B, LinkedIn has become an essential part of prospecting. But it still has to be used properly: most of the advice in circulation dates from a time when the network worked differently, and some of it is now counterproductive.

Here are five practices that still hold up, and the ones you should drop.

The team behind our flexible, automatable CRM tells you everything.

1. Treat your profile like a sales page

The first thing a prospect does is look at your profile to gauge your credibility. Yet the most common flaw is still an incomplete profile.

Completing it does not mean copying your résumé into it. The classic mistake is to describe your career path, when the other person is asking only one question: how can this person help me?

So write your headline from their point of view: the problem you solve, for whom, and what sets you apart. Use the words your customers use to describe their situation, not your company’s internal vocabulary.

2. Build a useful network, not a large one

This is where the advice of ten years ago has most reversed. At the time, people recommended accepting every connection request, on the grounds that each contact opened up a second-degree network.

This recommendation is bad advice today, for two reasons. The first is that connection requests are widely used for dubious solicitation and phishing attempts: accepting without checking exposes you and your company. The second is that your news feed fills up with content unrelated to your market, which makes you lose the network’s main benefit, namely observing your customers.

What works instead:

• Quickly check the profile before accepting: account age, real activity, consistency of career path.
• Add the people you meet without delay, while the context is fresh in both your minds.
• Always include a note with your request recalling how you know each other or why you are writing. A request without a note is treated as solicitation.
• Target the decision-makers, but also those who influence the decision without making it, who are often more accessible.

3. Use messaging, in moderation

Traditional channels give limited access to decision-makers, who are screened by a switchboard or an assistant. LinkedIn messaging bypasses this filter, since the message goes straight to the person.

Two caveats apply. First, this advantage has eroded as everyone has exploited it: professional inboxes are now saturated with solicitations, and many users no longer open them. Second, the response rates still being quoted come from old marketing materials and no longer mean anything.

What makes the difference is the content of the message, not the channel. Short, precise, tailored to the person’s situation, with a clear request. The same rules as for email prospecting apply word for word.

4. Use groups to observe, more than to prospect

Groups bring people together around a common interest. For a long time they served as prospecting ground: identifying a prospect, taking part in their discussions, getting in touch with a credible reason.

Let’s be honest: their activity has declined a lot. Many groups have become self-promotion spaces without real exchanges. They are still useful, however, provided you change the objective: use them to listen, to spot current concerns and the words people use, rather than to solicit.

Three rules remain valid. Target a few groups that are truly aligned with your market. Take part in discussions before publishing your own. And publish content that answers a question, not advertisements.

5. Bring exchanges back into the CRM

This is the step almost no one takes, and yet it is what turns social activity into sales activity.

An exchange that stays in a sales rep’s LinkedIn messages belongs to that sales rep, not to the company. The day they leave, everything disappears: the history, the context, the commitments made. Record qualified contacts in your lead database, with their source, and you will finally know what LinkedIn brings you.

Two warnings

Automation tools. Extensions that send invitations in bulk, bots that visit profiles, contact detail scrapers. They breach the network’s terms of use and expose you to restrictions, or even permanent closure of your account. For an account holding a professional network built up over years, the math is quickly done.

The data framework. A public profile is still personal data. Building a prospecting list from collected profiles does not exempt you from informing the people concerned, allowing them to object or justifying the origin of the data. The topic is detailed in our article on GDPR and your CRM data.

The overall approach is developed in our articles on B2B prospecting and leads from social media.

Your questions about prospecting on LinkedIn

Do you need a paid subscription?

Not to start with. It becomes worthwhile when the volume of searches becomes a real constraint, not before: the free version is more than enough to test the approach.

How many invitations should you send per week?

Few, and all personalized. Ten carefully crafted invitations produce more than a hundred generic ones, which also lower your acceptance rate.

Should you post regularly?

It helps, but it is secondary for prospecting. Commenting relevantly on other people’s posts gets you in front of your target faster than posting into the void.

What should you do with contacts who never reply?

Keep them in your network, but stop soliciting them. A relationship that goes nowhere now may pay off in two years, with a different employer.

Should the account be in the sales rep’s name or the company’s?

Prospecting is done through personal accounts. Plan for this in your organization: the network leaves with the person, hence the importance of recording contacts in the CRM.