The Secret to Building Lead Lists with LinkedIn

Posted on May 10, 2012 by

If you’re in charge of business development, identifying qualified leads is a core component of your success. There are a plethora of mailing list companies where you can purchase lists. Unfortunately, the quality varies and they can be very expensive. The good news is there are numerous ways you can find and/or build lists using free Web tools, LinkedIn being one of the better free resources. The answer to the “how do you do it” question is using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search (the small link next to the main search button).

Looking for someone at a specific company? Enter the company name in the Company field, and using the pull-down menu, choose if you want only current employees or if you want past employees included. Want people with job titles within a specific geographic area? Enter in the appropriate job titles in the Title field, and in the Location field, specify a mile radius around a zip code. Looking for experts in a specific task within a specific industry, enter words and phrases in the Keywords field. Of course you can conduct a search using a combination of all of the fields.

LinkedIn allows you to also limit your search by keywords and by industry. So for example, let’s say I was looking for marketing decision makers in the computer software industry within 50 miles of my zip code. In LinkedIn’s Advanced Search, I enter the query “marketing” OR “advertising” in the keyword field (by entering OR in all uppercase, I’m telling LinkedIn that one or both of those words or phrases must appear in my search results). In the job title field, I’ll choose “current” and then enter “vice president” OR “director” OR “manager” OR “president” OR “vp.”  I then choose “50 miles” and enter in my zip code. In the industry selection field, I click the “computer software” check box.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I conducted this search in my LinkedIn account, I returned more than 1,000 results that met my search criteria. When I removed the geographic limitation, I returned more than 64,000 people!

Unfortunately, LinkedIn only allows you to see 100 results at one time. To see more, you need to subscribe to LinkedIn’s premium service, which is a good idea if your company has a great need for lead lists.

What I recommend, however, is to try and refine your searches to get the result list to fewer than 100, as that is about the number of leads one can manage as an individual salesperson at one time anyhow. The easiest way to refine is, on the left side of the results page, add additional keyword terms, reduce the number of job titles, and/or refine your geographic scope. For example, using the previous search, on the results page, if I limit my search to just “VP” OR “vice president” within 10 miles of my house I receive 64 results. That’s a sales lead list I can easily manage.

Of course the other advantage is, now, prior to every sales call, I can also click on the individual’s LinkedIn profile and learn about the person’s work background, educational history, awards won, recommendations, interests, etc. I can then use this information to connect on a personal level and ensure relevancy during my call or in-person meeting. I can even use the “Get Introduced through a Connection” feature to find out who I know that knows the vice president I’m interested in meeting, and ask if my contact would make a virtual connection.

What if I’m not connected on the first, second, or third level with some of the 64 contacts? Again, you can purchase a premium LinkedIn subscription to access the name. There are other work-arounds as well to that problem that are free, however, that’s for another blog post (or read my book … hey, I can’t give away all of  my secrets).

LinkedIn is an amazingly powerful tool for salespeople, job hunters, or anyone interested in finding individuals with specific backgrounds and talents. It’s even more powerful when you truly know how to use LinkedIn’s Advanced Search features, which now you do, now that you Know More!

BONUS: Get a FREE eBook! 
Learning LinkedIn From the Experts: How to Build a Powerful Business Presence on LinkedIn.
In HubSpot’s newest eBook, five LinkedIn specialists provide key insight into how you can use LinkedIn to successfully grow your network and business. CLICK TO DOWNLOAD

Posted in Lead Lists, LinkedIn, Prospecting | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Apple Avoids Billions in Taxes; Will it Impact the Brand?

Posted on April 30, 2012 by

If you haven’t seen the story yet, Apple is using a strategy to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes every year (read the story). While perfectly legal, it may become a classic case study on the power of the brand. Can a powerful brand overcome a corporate strategy that seems inconsistent with many of its advocate’s–or core customer’s–personal values (read the comments)?

It will be interesting to see how the social media world reacts to this story. When it’s “big oil” or a Wall Street company, there is a lot of writing and ranting about the “evil empire.” But this one is Apple, a company that so many see as “can do no wrong.”

In my Know More! Reputations presentation, I discuss the “power of brand” and what the true essence of brand really is. I believe that brand is so much more than an image, logo, or color scheme. It is so much more than a company’s products or even how a company treats its customers.

Rather, brand can be summed up in one word: Trust. Are the company’s actions in all areas consistent? Does the firm’s activities mirror what is promised in messaging and in stated values?

Apple is such a powerful brand because we trust that the products will be innovative, user friendly, and that they change the world (or, at the very least, change our personal world). That brand promise has held true for Apple as they have radically changed the music business, the cell phone business, and even how customers experience service at retail stores. Because of this consistency of product and service, Apple has grown to have more cash on hand than most countries, including the United States.

Now we come to learn that part of the reason they have so much cash is because they do not pay what some would consider their fair share in taxes. Again, while perfectly legal, I believe that this may have violated Apple’s brand promise with some. The question is, will it matter to Apple’s bottom line or is the Apple product and service brand so strong that it can overcome what some may perceive as a violation of brand when it comes to community?

Will Apple’s advocates turn on the company, or will they make excuses, or will this story be ignored? How strong is their brand? Will people who boycott other companies for the exact same tax-avoidance strategy give up their Ipads and Iphones? Or, is Apple’s brand so strong that it can overcome a violation of the core values of many in its advocacy base?

How this story gets covered by the mainstream media and the social media certainly will be interesting to watch, and it will be a great case study for my next Reputations program. What do you think, now that you Know More!

Posted in Company Information, Reputation, Social Networks, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments Off

What can Google’s Account Activity feature tell you?

Posted on April 14, 2012 by

Much has been made of recent changes to Google’s privacy policy that allows for sharing your information across all Google platforms. In the aftermath of these changes, Google has also announced that it will be sharing some information back with you, the user.

Google’s Account Activity feature allows you to sign up for monthly updates that will tell you exactly what you’ve been up to online over the course of the last month. Of course, you would need to remain signed in during your daily browsing in order to allow Google to track this information. You’re “signed in” if you have a Gmail, YouTube, Google+, Android phone, or other Google product and you’re logged into your online account.

Since privacy advocates have voiced concerns over Google’s new sharing policy, the company is offering an olive branch of sorts, sharing some of the information they gather about your activity with you. Privacy politics aside, what useful information can you glean from your monthly report?

First and foremost, monitoring your account activity can tell you if you might have been hacked. The very first item mentioned on the report is the locations where you’ve signed in. If you haven’t traveled to one of the locations that show up, you’ll probably want to change your password and keep an extra close eye on your accounts for a while.

Your account activity will also show you how many emails you’ve sent and received in the last month when compared to the past month and who you’ve contacted most often. If you use your Gmail account for business purposes, this may be useful, and if nothing else, it’s worth checking out for curiosity’s sake.

Google’s Dashboard feature also allows you to view most of the things you’ll receive in your monthly Account Activity report, except the month-over-month comparisons. While Google isn’t necessarily opening their books for you with this new feature, it’s a good monthly reminder to monitor your activity, especially from a security standpoint.

Learn more and how to access your Dashboard from Google’s official blog. Now you can track your own Google activity, now that you Know More!

Posted in Google | Tagged , , | Comments Off

What Happened to Google Advanced?

Posted on March 18, 2012 by

If you’re ever attended a Know More! program or have read Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, you know about the power of Boolean searches. Minus signs, quotation marks, searching for synonyms, searching for types of documents, searching within date ranges and within geographic regions, and many more options are available once you know how to look. The problem for most people is, who has time to remember all of those fancy techniques?

For most search engines, you don’t have to. Just click on the Advanced Search link offered on just about every search engine and let the engine do the work for you. You will usually find the Advanced Search link next to the main search button.

On the world’s most popular search engine, Google, the Advanced Search used to be prominently featured on the main page. Then Google removed it off of the main search page but it still could be found on the Google results page. Recently, however, the Advanced Search link disappeared altogether. Huh?

Well, the good news is, Google still allows you to conduct an Advanced Search. They’ve just made it a bit more difficult.

To access Google’s Advanced Search, first conduct a search. On the results page, you’ll see a gear icon, usually on the upper right corner. Click on it and choose “Advanced Search” from the pull-down menu. Once inside Google’s Advanced Search, you can easily conduct a search by entering words or phrases into the various search fields.

Click the + button to see all of the search options. Add or remove words and/or phrases from your searches. You can limit your results by file format (e.g., PowerPoint, Excel document, PDF file) and/or Web domain, specify geographic regions for your results, specify date ranges and more.

My favorite part of Google Advanced is as you type in words, you can watch Google automatically create the Boolean query. This is very helpful as you can watch as Google builds the advanced Boolean query in real time, making it easy to learn how to conduct more complex searches, which typically deliver more relevant results.

My promise to you: Use the Google Advanced Search for one week. Watch as Google creates the query and within a few days, you’ll have Boolean searching memorized. You’ll never search the same way again, now that you Know More!

Posted in Boolean, Google | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Half of Fortune 500 Companies Weren’t Protected. Are You?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by

You might think that Fortune 500 companies and government agencies are bulletproof when it comes to protecting their information. But the recent revelation that at least 250 Fortune 500 companies and 27 of 55 government agencies had at least one computer infected with DNS Changer shows that even the biggest organizations are vulnerable to information theft.

DNS Changer is a type of malware that widely affected computers in the U.S. and around the world. It allows criminals to redirect users from a safe website to an insecure webpage, leaving the user’s information exposed. As you can imagine, stories like this become even more troubling for business owners, who are also charged with protecting clients’ information, as well as their own.

The lesson here is that if the world’s largest organizations can be attacked by these types of malware, so can yours. It’s just another reminder that regularly running security updates to make sure all of your organization’s computers are protected is essential.

It’s important to note that protecting your computers doesn’t have to be expensive. You might have your programs of choice that you are already using, but there are several free programs that can help keep you secure:

Qualys BrowserCheck: This program can help you identify any security issues related to your browser and lead you through the steps to remedy the issue.

DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG): This nonprofit group as put together a site to help you identify whether you’ve been affected by the DNS Charger or other malware, and will help you remedy the problem if you have.

CCleaner: This program for PCs will help you clean your computer of corrupted files to protect your privacy online.

Microsoft Security Essentials is an easy-to-use free product that guards against viruses, spyware, and other evil software.

Those are just a few of the tools available that can help you prevent criminals from accessing sensitive information. Whether you’re a business owner, in finance, or even in sales, if you keep client information on your computer it’s imperative that you protect are aware of the potential dangers, and keep your PC secure. Remember, it’s your reputation.

Posted in Security | Tagged , , , | Comments Off