5 Quick Steps to Find New Business on LinkedIn

Since LinkedIn’s founding in 2003, most users have seen LinkedIn primarily as a personal branding asset

useful for telling the world ones professional story. LinkedIn is shifting away from the “online resume”,

towards a valuable sales tool through new features like the recently revamped LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

While the Sales Navigator offers a robust prospecting solution (paid version), any insurance agent can

use the free version of LinkedIn to prospect in five easy steps.

Let’s try an example…say I’m an independent insurance agent who does business in San Francisco, CA

and wants to prospect for small business owners of technology companies.

1. Navigate to Advance Search: on the right of the search bar

2. Select the Right Filters:

- Relationship: You want to select 2nd connections and group members. This will provide

results of people that you are connected with through mutual connections (aka people

you could be introduced to through a warm introduction).

- Location: Type in the location where you do business, in our example its San Francisco.

- Company: If you have a specific company you’d like to target, feel free to enter it here.

In our example we don’t have a target company in mind, so we’ll leave that blank.

- Industry: Industry is a very helpful search filter when you target specific business types

(and you can select more than one in an advanced search). For the technology industry,

some valuable industries include:

- Electronic Manufacturing - Biotechnology

- Computer & Network Security - Information Systems

- Computer Games - Information Technology and Services

- Computer Hardware - Computer Networking

- Computer Software - Consumer Electronics

- Telecommunications

For our example, let’s try Computer Software.

- Title: if you have an idea of the type of title that your prospect may have you can include

it here, however there can be numerous titles for the same position. As an example,

Small Business Owners can be listed as President, CEO, President & CEO, Owner,

Managing Partner, etc. For our example, since our target can have many titles we left it

blank for broader results.

- Click Search!

Note: The LinkedIn PRO version gives you access to more “search filters” including company size

and role of your prospects within the company (i.e: owners).

3. Review Your Search Results: Our search yielded 1,321 results with 4 small business owners that

are potential prospects on the first page. If your results don’t yield many prospects, adjust the

filters in the right rail by adding or try different titles.

4. Pick Your Prospect: Let’s use Nicole as an example that fits my ideal technology small business

owner after reviewing her profile and seeing that her business activities match my appetite.

From the search results I can see who we know in common that may be able to introduce us.

5. Get Introduced: Since Ryon is someone I trust, I’m comfortable asking him for an introduction.

Be careful using people you don’t know well to make introductions- it’s likely they wouldn’t feel

comfortable doing it.

- First, select the person you would like to get introduced through (if you have multiple

connections in common).

- Next, write a personal note to the person you are asking to introduce you that explains why

you want that connection, make sure to note that if they don’t want to introduce you for

whatever reason, they don’t have to. Some folks also provide a template email for the

introducer to pass along to save them time. Note: the message you write will only go to the

person who is introducing you, not to the person you are trying to get introduced to.

- Finally, click “Ask for an Introduction”

Tip: First connect with all your small business owners clients on LinkedIn. Your clients are more

likely connected on LinkedIn to other small business owners in their industry, and they will more

likely be happy to introduce you to one of their connections/ aka: a prospect!