So a lot of, you’re probably familiar with LinkedIn’s, premium paid subscriptions, giving you a lot of functionality around how to find your ideal market on LinkedIn. But what a lot of people don’t realize is how powerful the free LinkedIn search feature is and how to get the most out of it in terms of finding your prospects and even starting conversations, getting ’em onto calls and make the sales.

So let’s jump straight into it.

And I’ll share some information around how to get the most out of your LinkedIn research. So just to give you a little bit of context, if you jump onto your LinkedIn profile, takes you to your feed here. If you’ve got a premium subscription, you’ll, it’ll show up here. I can show you for comparison. In a minute, but basically the search up here is kind of a broad search. It searches across everything, people, products, companies, services, events and so on. What we wanna look for in this which kind of brings me to my first point, is really the first thing you need to do is what do you want to achieve? Like, what do you want to use the free search for? And for pretty much everything we wanna do in business, we wanna reverse engineer back from that.

So what do we wanna achieve? In this video? We’re really gonna be focusing on finding ideal prospects for sales. So in that case, we’re looking for people. Sometimes we might be looking for people at specific companies, but ultimately we can’t start a conversation with the company. We need to find the right people at these. So it could be as simple as typing in director up in your search bar on LinkedIn and then clicking on people. And so we’ve got 38,000 results. So what we need to do is start reducing those numbers. So one limitation of LinkedIn, both across the premium and the free subscriptions is it limits the number of pages you can go.
So it shows a hundred. So I think there’s generally on sales navigator, it’s 25 per page, but here it looks like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 10 across a hundred. So a thousand results. It only shows you the top 1000 most relevant results, which is fine for most people, but if you wanna make sure you capture everyone, for instance, within a target market, let’s say your list ends up being 10,000 what you’re gonna need to do is create 10 separate mutually exclusive list. So list that wouldn’t overlap with the other lists that are gonna capture all your target market. So for instance, if we were to say, all right, I want to target. All the directors in Australia as an example, and let’s say there’s 10,000, you could say, or you wanna say, I wanna target all the directors, founders, you know, head decision makers at companies within Australia and there’s 10,000 of them.

If you did a list of directors and then a list of founders and a list of. CEOs. The problem with this is that these three lists can potentially overlap with each other. Someone could call director and founder, director and managing director, CEO slash founder. They overlap. They’re not mutually exclusive of one another, and they’re not gonna be the best way to create three separate lists, but however, People can’t be in Queensland and New South Wales or America and Australia at the same time. So that be, that makes the list, you need to use characteristics to separate the, the people that you wanna search for that are singular, they can’t overlap with other lists anyway. That’s if you want to separate and create smaller. So coming back to my dot points. So, you know, we’re trying to find people sales.
How do we find them? So we’re getting there. So quite simply, you pop in people here and then click on all filters and it’s gonna give you all the filters that you can use to find these people I recommend. So the way you run a campaign is gonna be different depending on whether they’re first degree connections, third degree or second degree. So if they’re first degree connections, they’re already part of your. And so you would essentially, you can just reach out and start conversations for them. For this purpose is we’re just gonna focus on second or third degree. It’s gonna depend on what you are doing, what strategy you’re running to reach out to these people. But for the most part, we’re always trying to grow our network with new people. And so in this case, we’re gonna look at second and third degree connections. You can see people who have connected to people you are connected with. You can select your locations, let’s say Australia, current company. You can even add the company.
So that looks like a good company. Past companies, school, industry. So there’s tons of different industries you can choose from. They’re, they’re bucketed, so these aren’t, you don’t have to type it in. So the way industries work on LinkedIn is quite interesting and they’ve made some pretty good updates on this. In the re last. They used to be once again mutually exclusive sort of list, and now what they’ve done is they’ve created broader categories and subcategories within them. So rather than having just manufacturing of a specific thing, they’ve got manufacturing and then they’ve got manufacturing, food manufacturing, like wine and beverage, manufacturing, healthcare, product manufacturing and so they’re still a little not perfect because people haven’t had a chance to correctly categorize themselves. But it’s getting there. It’s pretty damn. And if you need to go more specific on the types of companies within an industry, probably need to use a premium search, but for the most part, you can just go the, the, the updates they’ve made to the search functionality is pretty damn good and it’s allowing you to use LinkedIn free search to get pretty far with that sort of functionality. So let’s say it services and consulting. Actually let’s just leave out industry cause we’re going after a specific company profile language. If you’re going international, you might want to look at English or you know what, whatever language you’re looking for. So you can go international, but the danger of going international.

If is that you need to make sure it’s English if you’re only going after English speakers or you know, Spanish if you’re only going after Spanish speakers. And keywords is obviously good if you’re looking at names and keywords in the title as well. The problem with the title keyword search from my experience is it’s not as good as your search with sales navigator or your premium subscriptions.

So when those, you can generally write rules like this, director, owner, founder, And you can use advanced bullying searches to write really strategic rules to make sure we pull in all the right target market and also exclude a lot of the wrong target market. Well see how it handles this. I’m worried it’s gonna break it. Yeah, so that’s one of the key benefits of the paid subscription versus this. But like I said, we’ll go back people, we’ll get rid of the term director. All filters. Second and third degree Australia. We won’t put the company in this time. Round. Professional services, first name, company title. We’ll put director down here show results. So 145,000 results. Yeah, so I’ve got sales navigator so you can get better results there. So there’s, there’s plenty. So we might say, all right, well let’s, let’s tighten that up a bit further. So another thing it’s missing, which is really powerful, Found and sales navigator is your company size search.

But for the most part, we can go after specific industries, service categories, first name, title, director, trying to think what else we can do or ceo. Cool. All right. Now one of the downsides of not having the premium subscription is the ability to do, to organize and save your list. So you see here, you’ve got your free search, but it’s really hard to kind of save it and organize these and, and categorize them. You might wanna build multiple lists. You don’t necessarily want to use this list straight away. So there is a workaround to this, and what you can do is just copy. This is what’s called a query string. It’s basically the rules that determine the search are actually determined by this URL here. So if you copy that and you come to your spreadsheet. So we’ve gone through how to find them. Like just play around with the filters. It’s, it’s pretty intuitive. You’ll work it out. Just the limitations are things like company size and getting really specific on the company type and title type, which is really what makes the premium services more powerful.

And if you work with us, we need to have it cuz we wanna make our work as effective as possible. But this is a great place to get started and to start realizing the benefit of LinkedIn. So let’s say you wanted to save your ceo. Ceo, you can simply pop in a link here. You can just add it as a link cuz it’s a little bit tidier than having this gigantic thing. These, these URLs can get crazy, they can get like three pages long. So I suggest nesting it and then you might create a list for director list for founder, obviously. They’ll be more specific to what you’re looking for, but that’s a great way to actually save your list as well. Now the next question is, okay, you found your people, what do you actually do with them?

Now, there’s a number of ways you can do this. Most people will just start basically connecting with these people, but it’s, it’s almost next to useless in some ways because problem is, is once you start connecting, you start creating this essentially decision tree where everyone starts to be in different places.
Then like it’s a very difficult to. Where everyone’s at on LinkedIn, you dunno if people have connected what messages to send next, what campaign they came through. Like was it the CEO campaign, the director campaign, and if you wanna do this at scale, it’s, it’s just a dog’s breakfast. It’s next to impossible.
So what you can do and what I recommend doing, Is if you do want to actually do something effective with this list is rather than just willy-nilly, start connecting with people and then randomly messaging people that you see, which is incredibly ineffective. If you want to sort of scale this up, and if you wanna learn anything from it, you’re not gonna be able to get any meaningful data from that is adding it, like scraping these guys outta here and adding them into a sheet, a spreadsheet. So first you can see, all right, who overlaps with what list, and then you can put columns in. So as an example, let’s. Have a blank spreadsheet. You might have name URL and you know, sent connection, sent message. Or you could even have like a sta rather than having a whole bunch of what status they’re at, you could just have a status column and have And a dropdown menu.

This is for do Google Sheets. It’s very similar for Excel list items. You know, sent connection, waiting for a reply didn’t connect. And so you can choose basically where you’re at with each of the prospects that you’ve gone out to so you can keep track of everything. Our LinkedIn doesn’t natively support extracting data out of it or scraping that data so you can use things like Phantom Buster is the one I’ve kind of used in the and for free, you can set up a platform. You add a little if you’re using Chrome, you add a little Chrome extension. It asks you to install the extension. And then if you look for LinkedIn search, yeah, LinkedIn search export. You click use this Phantom. And it’s a really, I won’t go through it now, but basically it runs you through a little setup wizard.
It connects to your account and it, and you put in the url, that same url here, pop that. You follow the steps and then it’ll spit out a CSV file, I believe, with all that data, links all the information they can get on that person, and you pop it in a spreadsheet here, and if you’re gonna run lead generation or reach out to these people, you can actually start to organize it. So if you’re interested to see how we do it, it’s, it’s definitely far more advanced than this. This is a great place to get started, and that’s what this video was about. If you want to take it to the next level, get a free premium subscription, run this with a CRM or something that’s set up to handle more data.

But for people who just want to get started, start seeing the benefits, start seeing how useful LinkedIn can be for them, then I highly re. Giving this a crack. So any questions, let me know if you have questions around how to find specific types of people on LinkedIn using search or are you running into any dramas?
Just pop a comment in the comments below. I’ll have a look and see if I can help you out at all. I do enjoy little tricky ways to build searches and work arounds. A big part of work with LinkedIn is to work out how to work around some of the limitations that it has. So I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, reach out to me, my team, leave a comment below and as always, have a great day.

Cheers.