The Definitive Guide On How To Use LinkedIn To Get Clients

In this post I’m going to outlay a couple of actionable steps on how to use LinkedIn to get clients.

I usually get so many entrepreneurs in the B2B industry asking me how they can get more clients using LinkedIn and I decided to create this post to act as a guideline on how to do so.

This way I won’t have to keep repeating over and over every time someone asks me how to use LinkedIn to get clients – rather, I’ll just share with them this post 🙂 

How To Use Linkedin To Get Clients: What You Need To Know About Linkedin

LinkedIn is without a doubt the world’s largest professional network with more than 830 million members from more than 200 countries around the world.

According to Similarweb, the site gets more than 1.631 billion visits per month! 

It’s a great place for those in B2B and B2G as well as those in the professional services industry to connect with decision-makers and grow their businesses.

Before we go on, let me mention that I’ve been using LinkedIn to grow my business and client businesses for the past 6 years, so I’ll be sharing with you what actually works – not some rehearsed theoretical stuff (there’s enough of that on YouTube).

Prerequisites

1. You MUST be able to deliver results.

I believe in being ethical and honest and as such, make sure you are able to deliver results for your clients before proceeding with this post.

It’s sad how everyone online claims to be a guru in their field yet most can’t produce even average results at best.

No wonder there is so much distrust everywhere!

Please make sure you can genuinely provide results before learning how to use LinkedIn to get clients. 

Don’t be a scammer!

2. Love what you do

There’s no point in torturing yourself by being in an industry that you hate working in.

If you don’t look forward to waking up in the morning to work, then I’d honestly advise you to rethink your line of business.

Figuratively speaking, so many people climb buildings only to reach the top and find they climbed the wrong one – don’t make that mistake!

3. You must commit to making it work

There’s no such thing as a push-button solution in business or in life.

It takes work to make it work.

The problem is that so many people try something once and then give up when it doesn’t work. 

If you want to really use LinkedIn to get clients, then you have to commit to doing the work.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s take a look at how to use LinkedIn to get clients 🙂

Actionable Steps on How To Use LinkedIn To Get Clients

We’ll start by working backwards i.e. asking ourselves what it is that we want to accomplish then working backwards on what we need to do to make it happen.

Given we’re looking at how to use LinkedIn to get clients, our end goal is how to land clients, high paying clients from LinkedIn.

So let’s start working backwards:

5. They say yes to your offer and pay you for your product(s)/service(s).

4. You had a call or meeting with them where you shared your offer

3. They booked an appointment with you

2. They saw you as a real and trustworthy expert

1. You got connected on LinkedIn

Now that we have worked backwards on what needs to happen for someone to become your client, let’s dissect what needs to happen at each step.

This time we’ll work from the first step to the last step i.e. from step 1 to step 5.

1. Connect with Your Dream Clients on LinkedIn

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, LinkedIn is a great place for those in B2B, B2G and professional services industry to connect with decision-makers.

To better drive the point home, let us assume Sarah is a financial adviser (meaning she is in the professional services industry)

I like this description of a financial advisor from Investopedia:

A financial advisor is a professional who provides expertise for clients’ decisions around money matters, personal finances, and investments.

Now, one of the first things that Sarah has to do before doing any form of marketing is to fill out her avatar/prospect profile/client persona.

This is basically a 360-degree view of who her dream clients are.

She’ll look at what their goals are, values, fears, pain points, challenges, sources of information, etc.

The name you give it doesn’t really matter, what matters most is the information.

Now let’s assume that Sarah has already done this and from her research, she has concluded that lawyers would be an ideal fit for her.

She has discovered:

1. They have the funds to not just invest but pay someone to help them navigate through the confusing world of investing.

2. They want to focus on their practice and find money matters too boring to deal with. 

3. They prefer to have someone else qualified and trustworthy to help them with making informed investment decisions so they can retire wealthy.

In fact, from her research, she found the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed the 2021 median pay for lawyers was $127,990 per year ($61.54 per hour)

Here’s an image from her laptop while she was doing this research 🙂

Now, because Sarah did her homework well and filled out her avatar (prospect profile), she narrowed it down to the high-paying fields in law.

She went through several websites like Indeed and PayScale noting down the high-paying fields in law.

Among all the high-paying fields she noted down, she decided to start connecting with “Chief Legal Officers”. 

Here’s a screenshot of her laptop from PayScale where she read that the average salary for a Chief Legal Officer is $206,003 as of August 20th 2022.

So armed with this information, Sarah logs into her LinkedIn account to connect with lawyers

But wait! There’s one big problem – she’s not sure that her LinkedIn profile is properly optimized.

She knows that she only has 1 chance to make a first impression when she connects with the Chief Legal Officers and she wants to make it count!

So she researches online on how to optimize her LinkedIn profile and by the grace of God, she comes across our post here 🙂  

She follows the steps we’ve outlined and viola! She’s now ready to start connecting with Chief Legal Officers on LinkedIn.

One of the main changes she made to her profile was changing her headline from:

“Owner at Sarah Financial Advisors”

to

“I help legal professionals make profitable investment decisions so they can retire early and wealthy”

Now, as Sarah read the post on how to optimize her LinkedIn profile, she also came across a suggested post on why she should use Sales Navigator for effective lead generation.

So she upgrades her LinkedIn account from a basic one to a premium one as this will give her access to Sales Navigator.

And she does so at no cost for the first month since LinkedIn offers a 30-day free trial. She’s thrilled, to say the least 🙂

So now she’s on her brand new Sales Navigator account and after a bit of clicking here and there, she gets the hang of things.

She decides to use the following filters to hone in on her potential clients on LinkedIn i.e. Chief Legal Officers.

• Geography – US
• Years of experience – More than 10 years
• Company headcount – 51-200, 201-500, 501-1000, 1001-5000, 5001-10,000 and 10,000+
• Job title – Chief Legal Officer
• Activities and shared experiences – Posted on LinkedIn in 30 days

Let’s take a look at her screen:

At first, Sarah wonders why she only has 679 results…

She’s sure there has to be more people so she does some research concerning this and discovers the following regarding connections on LinkedIn:

1st-degree connections – People you’re directly connected to because you’ve accepted their invitation to connect, or they’ve accepted your invitation. 

You’ll see a 1st-degree icon next to their name in search results and on their profile. 

You can contact them by sending a message on LinkedIn.

2nd-degree connections – People who are connected to your 1st-degree connections. 

You’ll see a 2nd-degree icon next to their name in search results and on their profile. 

You can send them an invitation by clicking the Connect button on their profile page.

3rd-degree connections – People who are connected to your 2nd-degree connections. 

You’ll see a 3rd-degree icon next to their name in search results and on their profile.

Sarah also finds out that according to LinkedIn, members can have a maximum of 30,000 1st-degree connections.

Note: You can access this info on LinkedIn here

So now the number she got in her search results (i.e. 679) makes sense – her 2nd and 3rd-degree connections will increase once she starts to increase her first connections.

She can now rest easy knowing she’s on the right path.

Time To Connect!

Sarah is smart and knows that in order to have more people accept her invitation to connect, she needs to send them a personalized message.

So after some brainstorming, she comes up with the following script which she uses to connect with her potential clients (Chief Legal Officers):

Sarah decides to send just 25 connect requests per day, to begin with.

And because sending the requests manually seems to be a bit time-consuming (she wants to save time), she searches for a safe tool that can help her automate the task of sending requests without putting her account in jeopardy.

After a bit of research, she discovers Dux-Soup and after seeing that over 70,000 people are using it, she is convinced she had found the right solution.

It takes her a few minutes to get the hang of it and she’s thrilled that now she can simply add her connect script, adjust the throttling setting (so she doesn’t send too many requests too soon and get blocked) and start connecting with Chief Legal Officers.

Let’s take a look at her screen, shall we?

But wait, there’s just one problem!

If she runs the software, it will send requests to connect to the 679 people in the search results…

So Sarah thinks quickly on her feet and an idea comes to her – why not create a list for people to connect with?

So she heads over to the lead lists page to create her first list – man is she excited!

Let’s take a look at her screen:

As you can see, Sarah has decided to name the list “Connect with Them”.

So now she heads back to her search results and hand-picks those she wants to connect with today – 25 will do for now, per day. 

Then she saves them in her new list called “Connect with Them”.

Let’s take a look at her screen.

So now she can run Dux-Soup since it will only connect with the 25 she has in her “Connect with Them” list.

She also saves her original search URL so she can pick 25 more to connect with tomorrow.

At this point Sarah is feeling like a million bucks!

She decides to call it a day and continue tomorrow.

2. Build Trust And Credibility So That They See You As A Real And Trustworthy Expert

The next day Sarah logs into her LinkedIn account and is thrilled to see several of the Chief Legal Officers she sent requests to connect with have accepted to connect with her.

She just can’t help but be amazed at how everything is coming together. 

Her dream of getting more clients is drawing nearer and nearer by the minute.

But now she doesn’t know exactly what to do…

She keeps staring at her Sales Navigator inbox which now looks something like this:

She just doesn’t know what to say to her new connections. 

She wants to lead them into a conversation on how she can help them make better-informed investment decisions but she doesn’t know exactly how to go about it.

And she doesn’t want to sound “salesy” like some of the people who have been sending her messages.

In fact, here are some of the annoying “salesy” messages she gets from time to time.

She just doesn’t want to sound like them! 

She knows there’s a better way to go about it but she just can’t figure out how to do it.

Then Sarah remembers that when she read about how to optimize her LinkedIn profile on our awesome blog, we invited her for a free no strings attached appointment on how to use LinkedIn to get clients.

So she heads back to our website and books a time to talk with us HERE.

On the call, we realize that Sarah is a serious entrepreneur who really cares about her clients more than her paycheck.

She is committed to truly helping them.

So we share with her our highly effective “thanks for connecting script” that she then customizes to suit her personality and proceeds to send it to her new connections.

Sarah is pleasantly surprised to see the following replies from people who were complete strangers.

And others are even begging her for an appointment – how cool is that! She doesn’t have to wait for weeks or months!

3. They Book An Appointment With You

Sarah is now convinced that we indeed know how to use LinkedIn to get clients, so she decides to come on board as one of our amazing clients.

We work together with Sarah to help her build a client attraction system using a combination of LinkedIn and email.

She’s now easily building trust, authority and credibility with her potential clients on LinkedIn (Chief Legal Officers) and in so doing, she’s having a steady flow of appointments each month.

(Sorry but we can’t share our internal scripts – we wouldn’t want untrustworthy people to use them to take advantage of others. I’m sure you understand 🙂)

Note: Your dream clients will only accept to talk with you (in person, via phone or online) ONLY if they feel you can add value to them.

You should therefore phrase your request to talk with them in a way that it’s about them benefiting and not you! 

Think of something highly valuable that you can offer them for free that they just can’t resist.

4. You Have A Call Or Meeting With Them Where You Share Your Offer

Among the many things we help Sarah with is how to properly craft her offer and how to create a script she will be using when meeting potential clients either in person, via phone or online.

We teach her something called the Sales Mountain and help her create scripts for each part.

Here’s an image of the sales mountain.

At first, Sarah is a bit cautious and skeptical about using scripts because she wants to sound natural and not like a robot.

So we let her in on a little secret:

Everyone uses scripts! 

We teach her the true meaning of a script which is this – a series of words that have a meaning and that people use frequently.

We show her that even her 8-year-old son uses a script on her whenever he wants to eat pizza and that she also uses a script to answer him.

We show her how she also uses a script whenever she wants her husband to mow the lawn.

So Sarah is now convinced that indeed we all use scripts and she decides to give it a try.

And to lay her fears aside that she will sound like a robot, we tell her that the script we’ll share with her will be more of a guideline on what to say – she doesn’t have to read it word for word.

She can change what she wants so long as it doesn’t dilute the goal of the script e.g. the Trust and Rapport building script is meant to build trust and rapport. 

So she can come up with her own questions so long as the main goal of building trust and rapport is achieved.

Because Sarah is now our client, she’s getting 10+ calls with her dream clients (Chief Legal Officers) every month and she’s using scripts to take the calls.

5. They Say Yes To Your Offer And Pay You For Your Product(S)/Service(S)

Her first calls are a bit awkward but she starts growing into it after her 5th call.

What’s more surprising is that she has already enrolled a couple of clients! 

She just can’t believe it!

And because we like to overdeliver, we teach Sarah the Growth Formula to grow and scale her business i.e.:

Leads x Customers X Margin X Frequency = Growth Potential

We teach her that an increase in just one of these factors would lead to enormous growth e.g. if she was to increase the number of calls she had then she would automatically increase the number of clients she had and in so doing increase her revenue.

Obvious isn’t it? 🙂

But ironically, so many people just don’t implement it.

Though I made-up someone called Sarah, the strategy I’ve just shared with you is highly effective and the results are very real i.e. the message screenshots of people wanting to talk or meet.

Unlike the so-called “gurus” out there (just go to YouTube and you’ll see how everyone is claiming to be one), we use proven salesmanship techniques that have not changed since the beginning of time.

They were used centuries ago by merchants, princes and even kings, and they will continue to be used for years to come, way long after you and I are long gone.

You see, these salesmanship techniques are more like laws and one thing about laws is that they don’t change.

Don’t believe me? 

Good!

Here’s an example:

I want you to throw something up in the air e.g. a pen, a key, etc.

What happens?

“Let me guess” – It falls down.

So why does it fall down and how did I know it would?

Because of gravity!

Now, does it matter what height, weight, sex, race or age you are?

Of course not! The result will be the same i.e. the item you throw up will always fall down so long as you are on earth.

Let’s take another example of relationships:

Imagine talking with someone who was constantly looking at their phone – they don’t even bother looking at you but rather just say hmm, yes, or worse still, they just nod.

What would you think and how would you feel?

Most likely you would think they weren’t interested in talking with you and you would feel taken for granted.

But what if the person you were talking with looked at you attentively and even nodded their head in the affirmative as you spoke with them?

This would indicate they were interested in having a conversation with you and you would feel like you mattered and were important.

And the same applies to the principles and laws of salesmanship.

Once you know how to build trust and credibility, then people will naturally want to hear you out or even reach out for your help.

Don’t let anyone ever lie to you that they have discovered a new strategy, method or technique for doing something – most of the time it’s just a big lie!

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

What Will You Do?

The late Myles Munroe is quoted as having once said:

Our life is the sum total of all the decisions we make every day, and those decisions are determined by our priorities.

My question to you now is: 

What decisions are you now going to make to achieve the goals you want in your business?

I’ve just shared with you a highly effective strategy on how to use LinkedIn to get clients, and the way I see it, you have 2 choices:

1. Implement what I’ve just shown you and use LinkedIn to get clients

2. Do nothing and stay exactly where you are with the frustrations you have.

It’s my hope that you make the first choice and implement what I’ve just shown you.

And if you need help setting things up or just want someone who knows what they are doing to help you, then pick a time to talk with us here.

We’ll have a frank discussion about your business, where you are right now and what needs to be done to get you the results you want.

We’ll then let you make a decision as to whether you believe we can help you. 

And if this is the case, then we’ll welcome you onboard… 

…and if not, then we’ll part ways as friends 🙂

The ball is now in your court.

I do hope you make the right choice.

To your success,

Brian.