---
tags: A2, Prospecting
---
# 2. How to generate outbound leads on LinkedIn

Remember the social selling process?

:::info
**The social selling process**
1. You craft a **compelling profile and regularly post and interact with interesting content** that's attractive to your target audience
2. Gradually, you become a **trusted expert** in the subject matter
3. This brings you **inbound** leads who directly approach you
4. It also makes your job easier when contacting **outbound** leads, as you have a strong profile and content they find interesting
:::

In the past lesson, we covered the first two points... it's now time to tie it all together to see how you can actually use social to generate some results by contacting outbound leads!

As a salesperson, you should have one priority front and center: generating leads. Investing long term in generating great content and becoming an expert is great, but it won't bring you inbound leads automatically.

You need to proactively contact leads through social channels for this to happen.

Below you will find a step-by-step guide on how to effectively generate leads via LinkedIn.

After this lesson, you will have individual practical guides for each of these steps, so read carefully! 🧐
 
## Steps to generate leads on LinkedIn

1. **Optimize your profile.**
When someone gets a connection request, they decide in a matter of seconds if they will accept or not depending on your profile and whether they think you will add value to their lives. A carefully crafted personal profile is key to boost your acceptance rate. It's also your first step towards building your own brand.

2. **Sending connection requests.**
The objective of the personal request is not to sell anything, it's to get them to accept you. Sending a personalized, short message is key to achieving this.

3. **Send your first message.**
Similar to the principles we saw for cold emails, the key here is not to sell your product. Make it about them, talk about their pain points, engage them early and then share how you can help and how you've helped others before. Only then do you try to close a meeting.

4. **Follow up. 1 to 3 times.**
Chances are your first message will not receive a reply. Make sure to follow up up to 3 times without being pushy.

5. **Post great content and engage with your connections.**
As we mentioned in the last lesson, a core aspect to building a great profile and providing value to your customers is producing great content. You want to share updates and content that is genuinely interesting and valuable for your target audience. This will keep them engaged, and position you as a subject-matter expert which will lead to easier prospecting down the line.

Before we dive right into it, let's hear Patrick explain each of these key points.

Let's hear it from Patrick 👇

:::warning
**Note:** At the end of this course, there is a lesson titled "Hack: Lead generation tools for LinkedIn". It shows you some cool software you can use to automate your outreach and be even more effective.

For the purpose of practice, we encourage you to go through the course first without using any automation tools so you can truly understand the process. Once you've done this, we highly recommend visiting the lesson and playing around with the tools mentioned there 😉
:::

{%youtube NoDjSbxkHAg %}

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