In our last post, we discussed setting up a strategy for prospecting on LinkedIn and creating prospect profiles. In this post we show you how to research and qualify your prospect. Enjoy!

After you have completed your strategy and have established your prospect profiles, it is time to start hunting. To begin the process you must do your research and qualify your prospective client. You want to make sure you are not going to waste their time or yours. Keep in mind there is only so you can learn about someone over the internet. You can only fully qualify a person until you have a conversation with them whether that is via email, phone or in person; preferably the latter two. That will be information for a later post.

I am going to provide you with a step by step process of how to find and qualify the prospect through LinkedIn. You will need your prospect profiles handy. Do you have them? Great!

Let’s begin.

1. Log-in into your LinkedIn account.

2. Begin prospecting with the Search Box on the upper right section, right below your name

3. Start with entering the position of the person you are looking to contact within the company in the Search Box
a. Such as CEO, Managing Director, Owner, etc.

4. Click on the Blue Button that looks like a magnify glass

5. The Results will appear like this

6. Begin to narrow or filter down the search
a. Pick the location in the Location Box on the left side below Relationship
b. You can only pick Major Cities (Chicago, New York, Phoenix, etc.)
c. Select the industry if you would like to narrow it down that far or you can choose to keep it general and just based on the Position
d. Make sure to select 2nd Connections and Group Members only in the Relationship box

7. The search results should look something like this

8. Then Click on the person’s profile

Once you have reached the person’s profile, your job then is to see if they are qualified to be a prospect. If it looks like it makes sense to reach out, you will want to make contact with them. How you do that successfully with LinkedIn? That will be in our next post. Wink!

Do you have any questions on how to research and prospect using LinkedIn that we did not answer here?