If you aren’t on LinkedIn as a business owner/professional you really should be.
It’s the social network for business and it can be used for more than just displaying your work history and resume.
You can actually use it as a sales tool.
A whole cottage industry surrounding using LinkedIn for sales has cropped up in recent years called LinkedIn prospecting.
But trawling searches and connections for people manually can be very time-consuming.
That’s where the following 3 LinkedIn prospecting tools can come in handy.
But I’m Looking For Wholesale Customers, How Can This Help Me?
Wholesale customers essentially are other store owners and LinkedIn can be a great way to find those people.
Remember that your wholesale customers are not companies. They’re people.
People are on social media networks. People make decisions.
LinkedIn can help you target the people in the companies that you want to do business with. It does this based on their job role, their history, their industry and many other factors.
Do you need LinkedIn premium?
Whether you have a LinkedIn premium subscription or not, the following tools can still come in handy.
They let you create lists, scrape, manage and auto-connect with custom connection messages. Some even let you send follow up emails to push people into a funnel.
Will they perform better with a LinkedIn premium account? Sure.
If you upgrade to the premium Sales version of LinkedIn, you get access to better searching capabilities, people filtering and unlimited people browsing.
It costs about $70 a month, but it’s worthwhile if you’re using it consistently to prospect for customers.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get started with just your normal LinkedIn account.
Check out this video which shows you the basics of searching for wholesale customer prospects by narrowing down your search audience based on attributes that define them.
This is the kind of searching you need to master if you want to use LinkedIn to find potential wholesale customers.
3 Tools That Will Speed Up & Automate Your LinkedIn Prospecting
The tools I’m about to cover are designed to take the process above (or similar) and enhance it by making parts of it automated.
You can imagine that if you search for a group of people you want to target and it comes back with 2000+ search results that it might take you quite some time to go through them all by hand, connect, write them a special message, etc.
This is where these automation tools come in to play.
1. Linked Helper
The first tool is a browser widget for Chrome called Linked Helper.
It shows a handy sidebar when you’re browsing LinkedIn which lets you capture information, put people onto lists and (my favourite) automatically connect with people.
It also has features which slow down and randomize the process while still keeping it automated so that you can make LinkedIn think it’s you driving the browser and not some automatic tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztLk9ZE8dFQ
It can work with both free LinkedIn accounts to help you automate the process of connecting with your prospects or you can use it alongside Sales Navigator (the premium LinkedIn sales tool) to enhance and automated it even further.
2. Dux Soup
Next is another little browser tool called Dux Soup. It’s a strange name but it is a very powerful tool as well.
There are two unique features that I like about Dux Soup.
- First is it’s “visit profiles” feature. Essentially this is like arbitrage of the LinkedIn feature that emails you to tell you about which people visited your profile. What you’re aiming to do is get yourself into those emails so that you get exposed to more and more people. By just visiting the profiles, you can get yourself in that email. So it stands to reason that if you visit 1000’s of those people’s profiles you’ll be in thousands of emails.
- Second is the Google searching and visiting feature they call XRay. This uses the power of Google to search for LinkedIn profiles that match certain criteria, then it starts visiting those profiles (like in #1).
3. JetBuzz
Next is a more all-inclusive tool called JetBuzz. This is what you would use for more hardcore follow up and prospecting because you can set up sequences of messages to go out automatically once you connect with someone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPy8CN9bsUQ
JetBuzz lets you create these campaigns, it will run the searches for you, and totally automate the process for you so that you don’t even have to be there while it’s doing its work.
A downside of the other two tools mentioned is they are just browser extensions and you need to have your computer on for them to work.
Get Out There And Find Your Target Market!
So if you’re looking to connect with more potential wholesale customers, LinkedIn is one place where you need to be.
Of course in wholesale marketing, there are a lot more options for connecting with retail stores and other buyers.
But LinkedIn is a very valuable resource and a great compliment to your sales strategy and the beauty is that with tools like these, much of the process can be automated.
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