3 LinkedIn Search Tricks that Will Make You Dangerous

If you use Lead Builder and Premium Search, then you already know how effective they are for sales prospecting in LinkedIn's 277M+ member base. You probably already know the basics, like how to create lead lists using custom criteria to find new accounts. But there are a few tricks you may not be using that make these robust sales solutions extra lethal.

Search your named accounts to find the buying committee, not just a single prospect Multi-threading into an account not only gives you a better understanding of the stakeholder map, it also gives you more access points and increases your chances of making the sale. LinkedIn recently conducted a sales prospecting survey of several thousand sales professionals. We asked sales reps about their performance against quota and then compared it against their LinkedIn sales prospecting activity.

The results?

Sales professionals who viewed the profiles of at least 10 people at each of their accounts were 69% more likely to exceed quota than those who viewed fewer than 4 people at each account.

Use keyword modifiers and boolean search terms

Keyword modifiers and boolean search terms help you get better results for the prospects you need to find. Simply type keywords into the search field at the top of any page or build search strings in the Keywords, Title, Name and Company fields in Advanced People Search.

Here are the modifiers you can use:

• AND – If you want to search for profiles that include two terms, you can separate those terms with an uppercase AND. For example, sales manager AND business to business
• OR – Using OR, you can broaden the search to find profiles that include one or more terms. OR is commonly used to search for alternate spellings or for terms that mean the same thing. For example, “Vice President” OR VP OR “V.P.” OR SVP OR EVP
• NOT – NOT is probably the least used and least understood modifier, but that doesn’t mean you should underestimate the power of NOT. A big part of what you ARE looking for is what you are NOT looking for, and NOT helps you eliminate search results that are not qualified or would not be a fit for your product or service. For example, director NOT executive NOT VP NOT “Vice President”
• Quotes – As you’ve seen in the previous examples, you can use quotes in addition to other modifiers. Quotes are ideal if you need to search for an exact phrase or for terms that include punctuation. For example, “account manager” will be much more accurate than account manager without the quotes
• Parentheses – Parentheses are great for combining terms and modifiers if you’d like to do a complex search. For example, advertising NOT (print OR “business to consumer” OR B2C)

Start using keyword modifiers and notice how your search results improve. Here are a few more LinkedIn keyword modifier examples to get you started.

Organize and prioritize by connection level

When performing advanced searches, you can sort by 1^st and 2^nd level connections. This helps you perform sales prospecting and sell more efficiently by starting with the prospects most likely to buy.

With TeamLink, you can identify how your entire company is connected with your 2^nd level connections, allowing you to prioritize prospects with warm paths.

There you have it. You are now more dangerous than you were three minutes ago. If you have three more minutes available, learn additional ways LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes sales prospecting simple.