Assuming that you’ve processed your address book into LinkedIn, now it’s time to start seeing which of your existing members might know potential prospects that are CEOs, Presidents, Entrepreneurs, Owners, Founders (and for some unknown reason - they've not yet provided a referral).

You should also be looking at your members' connections for Trusted Advisers that are in a position of influence in your local community and whose primary contact/relationship is at the CEO level.

Begin to systematically go through your members' connections for whom they know. If you see someone’s title that interests you, click on their profile to check them out. Unfortunately, Linkedin forces you to do this one-by-one. There is no tool yet to filter a contact's connection list. This is why I made the suggestion in our last lesson to do about 10 every day as you plow through all your contacts' connections.

Is this someone you would like to be introduced to and get to know – someone who might either be an immediate CEO prospect or a stepping stone to a prospect through a one-degree connection, such as High Level Retained Executive Recruiters (like yours truly), High level Bankers, CPA Managing Partners, Senior Partners of Business Legal/Employment Law Practices, and so on.

I assume you’ve upgraded your LinkedIn accounts to the Business Pro Version. If not, you should upgrade to Business Pro from the free version. Once you click on the profile of someone you would like to know better, add them to a “bucket” or “category” in your profile organizer on LinkedIn (see the screenshot below).

 

 

You can keep notes on the person – when you contacted them, next steps, etc. Once you’re a first degree connection, LinkedIn opens up a tagging dialogue box where you can further refine your categories (there is a limit on the number of categories you can have – I think it’s 15). My analogy is that the categories are the titles of the file drawers and the tags are individual folders. You can put someone in one or more categories and in one or more tags.

Doing this allows you to sort/refine/cut/slice/dice your prospecting list right within the LinkedIn Application.

Here’s what I do to track contact information and it does involve a little bit of double entry of data. It’s not too bad of a duplication of work since I don’t add more than 20-25 new contacts every week.

Upon finding a “prospect” on LinkedIn, I put them in a category. I then make sure I have them in Outlook also since 90% of my client/candidate communication is through email and I want to track those emails outside of LinkedIn. The one other thing I do is I take a look at Gist (we’ll cover this in a later lesson) to see the social media networks on which they are registered such as twitter, facebook, and linkedin. I can see whether they blog and I can track their public postings through Twitter right within Outlook/Gist. I can also decide whether I want to connect to them on these other networks.

Now that you’ve categorized and added this prospect to outlook or whatever contact manager you use (act, goldmine, salesforce.com), now we have to reach out and connect. There are a few of options for connecting to new prospects:

1. Send an invitation to connect to you. If you don’t have some connection basis – worked at the same companies, friend, did business together at one point, you’ll need an email address to send them the connection notice. In this message you could reference the relationship with your existing contact.

LinkedIn does a great job of minimizing spam. Be careful of sending invites to people, claiming you have a prior relationship (friend, co-worker, business deal) where there is none. If a few people tattle-tale on you as sending spam, then LinkedIn will force you to use an email address for every invite you send out. They tattle-tale on you by checking the box on the invitation request as “I don’t know this person”.

If you have the person’s email address and send them an invite, LinkedIn will always consider this an appropriate invitation request and NOT spam.

I find about 80% of the email addresses I need to send invitation requests either by Googling the person or using Jigsaw.com to look them up.

2. Use the Inmail to send an invite. Unfortunately, Inmail has a bad rap within the LinkedIn Community. Many consider it spammy. However, I’ve talked to a few chairs who have had great success in sending inmails as an introduction. LinkedIn only gives you a limited number of these inmails on a monthly basis. Again, the concept is to control unsolicited requests and notes.

3. Send a request through your contact to be “introduced” to this “person of interest”. Let the contact you have facilitate the introduction by forwarding an introduction/networking invite with their approval/note”.

The introduction note might go like this:

“Bob, Attached is a note from a good friend of mine and one of the most respected CEO coaches in Vancouver. John would like an opportunity to invite you to join his network and perhaps begin to get to know each other. I can’t say enough good things about John. He’ll become one of your most powerful connections within the Vancouver business community.”

I would recommend setting aside some time each day (maybe 15-20 minutes) and starting to systematically go through the connections for every single one of your contacts on LinkedIn. It might take you 90-120 days (or more) to plow through all of them if you have a lot of LinkedIn contacts.

 

Lesson 6 Action Items

 

1. Review each connection for each one of your members

2. Upgrade to the Business Pro Version of LinkedIn

3. Force yourself to spend time every day for a few minutes going through your members' connections

Lesson 6 Discussion Points

 

1. Have you ever provided an introduction for someone on LinkedIn?
2. Have you ever asked for an introduction on LinkedIn?
3. What has been your most successful technique for inviting people to join your network on LinkedIn?
4. What level of depth/diligence have you applied so far in looking at the connections of your contacts?
5. It’s been my experience that you need roughly 1000 local contacts that are high level contacts (CEO level and TAs working at the CEO level) before your network begins to pump out on an almost self-sustaining basis an abundant level of referrals and leads. This is NOT your total number of contacts – it’s your “A” list of contacts that are either directly CEO prospects or could you lead you to one through one-degree of separation.

Where do you stand in this effort to build a strong local network on LinkedIn?