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How to find business
opportunities on LinkedIn

by | Jan 27, 2021 | Article, Dimitar Stoev

With more than 722M+ active users, 50M+ listed companies and more than 14M+ open jobs, LinkedIn has become a formidable force in the business world. 40M people search for jobs on LinkedIn each week and 3 people get hired on LinkedIn every minute.

The advantages of keeping an updated personal and/or company profile on LinkedIn include access to a huge, trusted network of professionals from all over the world, the opportunity to find relevant information about businesses and companies, applying for a job, finding a business partner, or even promoting and selling your services and products.

I have been using LinkedIn since 2006 and I am a big fan of this social network because, unlike Facebook, it offers a rich, realistic, and trustworthy source of business information.

In this short article I would like to share my experience of promoting and finding customers on LinkedIn. First, however, a few notes on maintaining a LinkedIn profile. I have always maintained a thorough profile, taking care to list my work experience, interests, and education. Keeping a relevant profile increases the chances that somebody would be interested to learn about you and your business.

Start with fine-tuning your profile

Make sure you spend some time to go through your profile, update all required information, carefully choose your profile picture in line with the message you want to convey. Do not forget to write a couple of sentences about your personality, hobbies, family, etc. People would like to get to know you and adding a human touch to a business profile builds trust among strangers.

Once your profile is set up (by the way check the LinkedIn Profile Strength Meter for advice on how to improve your profile, you can find it here https://cutt.ly/Oj0tGfZ ) you are ready to start looking for new business opportunities.

Now, in my case, I run a family training company and I promote trainings. I usually aim for more exotic training topics, which are not yet mainstream. So, I would carefully choose the topic of my training (by the way LinkedIn Events is a great tool for event organizers), schedule my training on LinkedIn Events, write couple of posts to set up the stage and… once the above-mentioned is done, the real work will start – I need to find and invite potential customers, who might be interested to pay and attend my training.

Be consistent in planning your approach and your search

The best thing about LinkedIn is that I can search for people regardless of where they live or work. I live in Bulgaria and I usually promote my trainings in the entire region (Greece, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, etc.). So, to start a campaign I simply define my target audience, target geography, and start searching for potential contacts! Let’s assume that I want to invite all SharePoint developers in Finland to an online training for the new features of SharePoint server. The below screenshot is of a  search I did for “SharePoint Developer” in Finland, just for the purpose of our short story here. LinkedIn will show me hundreds of profiles that match my search and all I need to do is carefully go through the list and connect with the ones I consider meet my criteria.

LinkedIn filters

Once I have found the people I would like to connect with, I need to send them an invite. In my invite I briefly state the reason why I am connecting with them, so that I make sure they understand and are aware of my intentions. If they are interested in the service or product that I am offering, they would accept my invite and I will be able to send them a more detailed message, attach a file, invite them to have a short meeting, etc. By following the above simple technique, I was able to sell my trainings to absolute strangers, who trusted my LinkedIn profile and my proposal, and travelled from Serbia and Turkey to Bulgaria to attend our company trainings.

Of course, searching for partners and customers on LinkedIn might be a repetitive task, tedious and… hardly an exciting one. You need to be patient and consistent. You would have to shift through hundreds of profiles and invitations before you reach the right person. In conclusion, set up your goals wisely, evaluate the time you plan to spend on LinkedIn for finding new business opportunities and make sure that the possible gains are worthy of the time and energy you are going to throw into this project. If you are persistent you will soon discover the benefits of LinkedIn, and like myself, you will start using it regularly. Good luck with your LinkedIn journey!

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Dimitar Stoev

Dimitar Stoev

Learn Valley

Digital Sales, E-Learning

Dimitar is interested in sharing with other small companies his experience in creating easy-to-follow sales strategies, implementing cost-effective digital tools and using simplified scrum to get things done.

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