LinkedIn Contact Mining – LinkedIn Automation is the answer

Have you built up a list of 1st level contacts in your LinkedIn? It most likely includes past and present – clients, colleagues, prospects etc.

There will be hidden opportunities within that list. But how can you tap into them.

1. You could start manually “working LinkedIn” as LinkedIn want you to do – going through the list and reaching out to them via LinkedIn messages. You can do that, but to my mind that is labour-intensive work. (and I am always looking to minimise work through automation)

2. You may think “Ahhh – I’ll download my list of contacts from LinkedIn and get a CSV file and I’ll use that as a database”. And when you do this you will find basically a list of names with the odd email address sprinkled in for good measure”. This is next to useless.

3. Or you can use a LinkedIn automation tool. Recently I have been using LinkedHelper2. This can run some sophisticated invite and follow-up campaigns on autopilot to your LinkedIn account. But the key one for me is this. LinkedHelper2 is able to go in and extract all the contact details of your 1st level connections and download them to an Excel file. Imagine being able to extract a full list of 1st level contacts with name, email (often their personal email address, so it does not go out of date when they switch companies), telephone number, company website + more. Then with a little work on your part you could identify past/lapsed customers and prospects and then selectively target them. You could do this by a targeted LinkedIn message campaign by LinkedHelper2 or import the list into your CRM/ Marketing automation tool (I recommend Keap 😉 and then you can follow up offline by email, phone calls and direct mail.

4. Now once you have this valuable list – what you could it is work through it and identify your top 100 that you would love to turn into clients. Once you have your “Dream 100” then we can apply the “Dream 100 marketing strategy” developed by Chet Holmes in his brilliant book – The Ultimate Sales Machine – read about it here.

Let me know how you get on with accessing your LinkedIn databases and leveraging it to the full. Contact Julian