Recruiting professionals know well the power of LinkedIn as a lead generation tool, but are you, as a professional sales rep or consultant, fully harnessing the power of this free tool to identify warm leads for your business?

I remember first being told by a friend about LinkedIn back in 2005, and I didn’t really buy into the site. It sounded like MySpace for business professionals (MySpace was the hot social network at the time) and I wasn’t interested in pimping myself out to people I didn’t know. I created a profile and didn’t think much of it.

Over time, I started getting (and sending out) connection requests, and my network slowly grew. Around later 2005 early 2006, I started tapping into the People search function on LinkedIn, and a whole new prospecting strategy opened up to me (a new Beta version of people search was recently launched, read the blog post about it from TechCrunch.)

Simply put, the more connections you have, the wider your network, and hence, the more results you’ll return when you do people searches. You can use a wide array of criteria for your searches: name, keywords, location, company, etc.Any or all combinations of the criteria can be used to return results. Gone are the days of trying to get past a gatekeeper without a name. If you know who your target customers are, all you need to do is run searches for those companies, and look at who returns in the results. You’ll get their name (depending on whether or not they are “in your network”), position, and in most cases, their previous company history. What more do you need for a warm phone call?

A lot of people I know use the “get introduced to this person through an existing connection” feature. It has worked for me in the past, but generally the turnaround is too long, and I don’t like putting my friends/colleagues on the spot to make introductions for me when there is nothing in it for them, but that’s just me. I find that it is much quicker to just contact the person directly myself, and even though I loose on the warm introduction opportunity, I make up for it with speed.

Even better now is the ability to “scrape” the data you get from search results to create Excel spreadsheets for yourself (or your team, if you are a manager.) The best tool out there to accomplish this is Mozenda, which costs $49/month, but comes with a free 15 day trial. The company will even set up your first search agent for you, free of charge. With this tool, you’ll be able to identify the criteria you want to run through the people search, and have those results exported as a CSV or Excel file. **Note: Free LinkedIn Accounts only return 100 name results per search. Upgrade to one of the premium accounts and you’ll get 300, 500, or 700 results per search, depending on which account type you upgrade to.

A few notes about connection requests – In your search results, you’ll have the ability to send connection requests to anybody that returns in your search. You’ll have to identify yourself as either a colleague from a previous or current employer (I usually use this option), fellow college alumni, friend (you’ll need their email address), and a few others. You can then type a short intro note, but this is a tricky option, because you really don’t work with this person (or haven’t), don’t know them from college, etc. They can also report you as “spam” and you’ll get notified by LinkedIn to stop doing it after you’ve been called out a few times. You’ll probably get a 5-10% return rate using this strategy.

Any user that has opted-in for OpenLink can receive messages from anyone that wants to mail them, regardless of whether or not you are connected to them. Very few users have this feature.

The best way to connect directly with LinkedIn users through the system is by joining Groups in your target market. There are groups for just about every category, and the best kept secret of LinkedIn is that any member of any group can mail any other member of that group — with unlimited messages. The LinkedIn team puts a TON of value on the ability to message users you are not connected to – you can only send 3 per month if you are Business member, 10 if you are BusinessPlus, and 50 if you are Pro. Not sure how long until they figure out this little glitch in their plan, but I am certainly taking advantage of it before they do!

You can also use Groups to generate leads for your business, but it’s hit and miss. Every group has a “discussions” board, and any group member can post on the board. In your post, you can include HTML links to your site, and depending on how compelling your discussion post is, you may get a lot of traffic. Either way, you should certainly join Groups on LinkedIn if you are not already a member.

Of course, you can just get the names of the people you are interested in connecting with and calling them on the phone. Most likely you’ll get voice mail and what are you going to say other then, “I saw your profile on LinkedIn?” There are some creative ideas here (”I’ve been reading about/researching your company”, etc.) but the power of contacting them through LinkedIn is that they get to see your profile — how many of us have received connection requests or messages from names we are unfamiliar with and gone right to the profile? By connecting your message to your profile, they’ll get an idea of who you are, what you do, and how your business may be relevant to them, all before they speak to you.

However you decide to contact a sales prospect through LinkedIn, worst case scenario, they don’t respond. Best case, they respond, send you a connection request back, buy your product/service, and become a friend/customer for life.

Whatever the case, it certainly beats using those old Dunn and Bradstreet lists for prospecting, and doing the gate keeper dance with the receptionist!