Using LinkedIn as a social prospecting tool.

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The Anatomy of a LinkedIn Profile:
HotProspect.com Podcast, Episode Two
Joe: Hi! This is Joe Fahrner, co-founder and CEO of hotprospect.com.
I’m here with Kelly Huffman, VP-Sales at hotprospect.com.
Kelly: Hello.
Joe: How are you doing?
Kelly: Well, thank you.
Joe: Excellent. This is your podcast. It’s our second podcast in an
ongoing series where we talked about use of social selling, use of
big data in the sales process, marketing segmentation and about
our product, hotprospect.com. Today, we’re going to dive into
some fairly narrowly focused strategies around using LinkedIn as a
prospecting tool. Specifically, Kelly and I have both been doing
sales for over a decade. LinkedIn’s been around for eight, nine
years at this point so we’ve developed a bunch of strategies around
dissecting a LinkedIn profile, potential prospect , and employee of
a prospect company that we’re going to run through. To kind of
give you a better idea of kind of when we’re viewing in a LinkedIn
profile, what are the kind of context we’re pointing out of it, what’s
the insight that were getting in looking at different sections and
segments. So, really we’re going to dig into the anatomy of the
LinkedIn profile.
The first thing to talk about is that there’s actually a two versions of
most LinkedIn profiles. There’s the public version which anyone
can see and that’s typically the first version you’ll jump off on if you
find the LinkedIn profile from like a goggle search or something on
these lines. But the other type of profile is the logged-in version
and there tends to be different levels of information you can see if
you’re logged-in into LinkedIn and you find an individual, say
through a search on LinkedIn search or something on those lines.
So, we’ll talk about a little about both versions of those profiles but
we’ll just jump off right into the logged-in versions because that’s
were a lot of meat of the profile is. One thing, Kelly, we’re talking
about earlier, is that there are some things you developed just kind
of -- some strategies developed around the first time you’re looking

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at the profile to figure out even if you’re on the right track. Like is
this sort of about a real person actively in that position. You want to
talk about that a little bit?
Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. I may think the first thing I always looked at is the
particular person’s tenure versus the number of connections that
they have. In today’s world, people jump around from job to job a
lot. So, it’s lot uncharacteristic to see somebody that has ten more
years of tenure at the same organization. But it is uncharacteristic
to see someone who has been in the work force for a long time and
is only showing maybe one job or possibly two jobs on LinkedIn but
they have a very low connection count.
So, someone that’s been working for 15 years at Company “A” and
they have 14 connections, that implies to me that that’s not even a
valid or active profile. Somebody filled that out at some point when
they got a LinkedIn invitation and have never really comeback to it
so it’s really necessarily worth even investigating further. Joe, will
give you some more indicators. But generally speaking if you see
that and you don’t see other activity, and there’s no
recommendations, and there’s just not a lot going on the page,
probably time to move and find somebody else.
Joe: Yeah. The other thing I’ve noticed -- particularly if you’re searching
for a specific person -- it’s not uncommon to people to have
multiple LinkedIn profiles rather than updating an existing one.
When they jump from job to job, they just create totally a new one
for whatever reason. That’s something as well. It maybe a matter
of just looking through the top couple of profiles that match a
specific name that you’re looking for.
The other point around that item is just that, I think LinkedIn’s got
about 100 million registered users and the numbers I’ve seen
online, anywhere from about 25 to 30 percent of those are active.
So, that gives you an idea of kind of the rate of which you may see
these is kind of – for lack of a better term -- dead profiles that have
not been updated in years, these type of things.
So, once you kind of use Kelly’s technique to figure out – does it
seem to be an active profile, does it seem to be a place where it’s
worth spending your time -- where I like start is really in that initial
summary chunk at the top of the profile. You’ll see, it’s typically
where the profile photo is, if there is one. You’ll see the individual’s
headline. The headline is slightly different than the title. It’s a short
summary that the individual profile owner can add, that gives you a

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little insight into kind of how they think about themselves often.
Sometimes people just input their title and their company name.
Other times, people give you very specific descriptors about how
they look at themselves. For example, it may say something like,
“Analytics-driven marketer,” or something like that. I almost think of
that as like a tag; something that you can put on top of that
prospect to say, “Gee, this is a sort of an indicator of how they think
about their role broadly or specifically within in a particular
organization.”
Then, you’ll see things like the current job. You’ll see the previous
jobs listed there. Again, Kelly, you got a great strategy around kind
of using the previous jobs as a way to get some context on a
potential prospect.
Kelly: Yeah. I like to look at the previous few roles to get some functional
expertise from a particular prospect. Typically or quite often you’ll
find somebody that’s at a role, let’s say, it’s a year or two. They
really actually haven’t put more than say the company description
as the description of the role. So, you can take a look at what they
were doing a past and make inferences about the fact that maybe
they are in the right functional position that you’re looking for. For
example, if somebody’s in marketing, well obviously, there’s lots of
different marketing roles but you’ve found somebody that is in
demand gen in the previous role. Now, they’re in business
marketing or marketing communications. The implication there, is
they’re doing something very, very similar.
Joe: Yeah, that’s awesome. Then I think education, you can think of, as
almost a similar data point which is, just giving you…. A lot,
particularly if someone’s been in their career for a decade or more,
the education may or may not be super relevant but it gives you
some more of that background in the particular role that they’re in
within the organization. What’s their starting point? How did they
get there? Does the education map? Someone’s whose in a
marketing role or business development role, that comes from a
legal background or technology background by education, is going
to have a different slant than someone that comes from a more
generic business degree or something like that. So, it just good
context to have when you’re figuring out how to approach a
potential prospect.
Then, you start getting into some interesting kind of -- lack of a
better a term -- widgets that LinkedIn has on these logged-in pages
along the right-end side of the screen. There’s a couple really cool

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bits of data wrapped-up in there. I don’t think that’s always
obvious, exactly how to use those things. As you work your way
down the right-end side of the page, you’ll see things like…. One of
the most interesting ones is LinkedIn will point out the profiles that
have been viewed by people who viewed the profile you’re looking
at. So, a little convoluted, but basically four people that viewed the
profile you’re looking at. What are the other profiles they’ve looked
at? Very often what you’ll find wrapped-up in there is other contacts
at that same company, other similar people. It’s almost like
Amazon recommendations or NetFlix recommendations. “If you’re
looking at this profile, these are the other ones you should be
checking out.” It’s really good to take note there and figure out,
“Are there potentially weeds wrapped-up in there, other contacts
within this organization?” These types of things.
The other really interesting side widget there that you’ll often see, is
just insight into the recommendations that this individual has
received. That could get you a pretty interesting point as well
because if you look at those, look at and see if they receive
recommendations, who are they receiving those recommendations
from. Are they’re receiving them from co-workers, subordinates,
their bosses? Are they receiving them from partners and vendors?
That can give you really interesting idea of not only who they’ve
worked with in the past but how they work with people, which
again…. A lot of this sort of cold calling, prospecting, trying to turn
kind of a social lead into a warm lead when you actually reach out
is about having a context. You understand how to make what
you’re pitching relevant to them and also prepositioning
appropriately.
Another really interesting area of the LinkedIn profile page is
looking at things like groups. Groups are -- feels like increasingly
popular over the past year or two on LinkedIn. One of the things I
find looking at groups is that you can discover a – not only groups
that indicate that this person may or may not be a good fit for your
product or service but the other thing that’s interesting is the group
actually act as sort of sign posts into other areas where you can
discover potentially other prospects. So, as we’ve been ramping up
high prospect, I find lots of people that are in marketing and sales
roles that are in various lead scoring or marketing segmentation
groups. If I find an interesting group, I’ll sign up and follow the
information flow from that group. A lot of times you’ll identify new
prospects or just get other interesting insights out of the groups
themselves.

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There’s also an interesting contact trick that LinkedIn allows you to
contact individuals that you share groups with. In some point in the
future, we’ll cover some of the strategy we’ve used to contact
people through LinkedIn. But that’s definitely one interesting area.
If you share a group, you can contact people more directly that
way.
The other stuff you’ll see, the other personalized stuff you’d see at
a LinkedIn profile as you get lower on the page, is things like that
individual’s Twitter handle if they’ve connected their Twitter account
at LinkedIn. We did a podcast last week talking about some of the
interesting ways you can use Twitter to develop relationships and
generate leads. LinkedIn can be a great way to discover
someone’s Twitter profile.
The other things you’ll see down there is links to any additional
links -- often company website. Sometimes people will also link to
things like their personal blog or side projects that they’re working
on; maybe even charities or organizations they’re involved with.
Again, it gets back to the same thing. It’s about context and getting
perspective on who this individual is and how to approach them.
Spending time looking and seeing the signal that someone gives
you by linking to a company website or some third-party websites is
pretty strong. In line, you’ll discover what things they’re interested
in or passionate about, which may be helpful in sort of positioning
your pitch to a potential prospect. Are there -- anything else that
jumps out to you, Kelly, on these pages that you found useful?
Kelly: No. I think that more than covers it.
Joe: Cool, awesome! The only other thing I’ll mention is there’s actually
a cool feature on the public pages -- public LinkedIn pages -- which
I actually, frankly, I hadn‘t noticed until we started preparing for this
podcast today. There’s actually, if you go to someone’s publicly
available page and you can find the public page from their logged-
in page, if you’re already there, it will show that the public LinkedIn
profile and the summary widget at the top of the LinkedIn profile. If
you click on that link, you’ll go to a public page and the public page
actually has widget on the right-hand side which shows you people
with similar names —similar or same names that may be the actual
contact you’re looking for.
The interesting thing there is, I’m assuming there’s some
intelligence that LinkedIn is using similar to “the people who viewed
this page” type logic, that shows popular profiles that share name

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with this individual. So, in the case where you’re searching
specifically for a user by name and you may click on the first
ranking profile, it may not be the one that you’re targeting. You can
use this widget as a way to potentially find the right version of John
Smith or whoever is it you’re searching for. Just something that –
frankly I’ve never actually done before. But, we discovered it as we
were preparing here and I thought I’d mentioned it as well.
The final thing we didn’t talked was just connections, in general.
Looking at who’s someone is connected to. You talked a little bit
about the volume of connections in trying to figure out, “Is it volume
or number of connections? Is this an active profile?” But the other
thing is obviously, the core value of LinkedIn is discovering the
connection points between a given profile and yourself by way of
your network. So, obviously spending time at profile to get the
context around the individual is great, but then also it could be a
great place to actually figure out a place to get a warm introduction
through someone you know or a friend of a friend, these type of
things.
I think that’s hopefully a good overview of how we analyze LinkedIn
profiles and potential prospects in our own work, once again at
hotprospect. We’d love to answer any questions and comments
you may have about specific strategies we’ve used beyond this.
LinkedIn is something we’ll focus a lot on in this podcast just
because it’s such a rich tool for up-on sales. You can expect us to
continue to the cover these types of tips and techniques. Certainly,
let us know if there are questions, or comments, or things we could
be doing better to help give more insight into using these tools for
social selling and identifying the right prospects for your products or
service. So, Kelly, you can find him at Kelhuffman on Twitter. I’m
JoeF on Twitter and our hotprospect Twitter handle is @hotpros on
Twitter. We’ve love to connect with you there and always feel free
to reach out with any questions about hotprospect or sales and
marketing using the social web. Thanks for your time and thanks
for sticking with us and we’ll talk to you soon.
Kelly: Thanks a lot.