In this video, we provide part 3 of our Cold Email Workshop, which focuses on using LinkedIn to find prospects. When you are launching a cold email campaign, you will need to find prospects to add to that campaign, and there are two main options that we discussed in this video.

 

Buying a List of Prospects

Your first option for finding prospects is to buy a list from a contact list database service or a list broker. One of the good things about this approach is that it will usually be your quickest option, as you will end up with a long list of contacts after submitting the details for the prospects you need. But the main downside to this option is that there are guaranteed to be quality issues in the data you get regardless of where you buy your list from.

This is because people move around a lot, and it is very likely that between the time that the contact was added to the list provider’s database and you getting your list, the contact has moved to a new role or company. This means that before you have even sent out an email for your cold email campaign, issues are working against your probability of success.

 

Finding Prospects on LinkedIn

The second option we discussed in his video is to use LinkedIn to find prospects for your cold email campaign. I personally believe LinkedIn is one of the best places to find contacts and prospects because it has some of the most up-to-date data in terms of where the contacts are currently working.

This is because the contact is responsible for updating their information when they move to a new job or company. And in my opinion, people are usually motivated to update their LinkedIn profile because when they get a new job, they often want to let other people know, so one of the first things they do is update their LinkedIn profile.

One downside to using LinkedIn to find prospects is that it is a little slower than buying a list because you cannot just download a list of contacts after running a search. So, while the data quality is better, it can take a little more time to find prospects for your cold email campaign.

 

Getting the Contact’s Email Address

Another factor with using LinkedIn is that getting the contact’s email address is not as straightforward. The standard process that most salespeople use is to invite the prospect to become LinkedIn connections to have visibility to the contact’s email address.

There are two issues with this approach. First, that adds an additional step to your sales process and slows everything down because you are now sending an invite to connect and waiting for the prospects to accept your invitations.

The second issue with this is that about 50% of the time, you will get the contact’s personal email address instead of their business email address, which is much less valuable for your cold email campaign.

And actually, a third downside with becoming connections is that I believe it becomes a little inappropriate or delicate to directly sell to contacts right after they accept your invitation to become LinkedIn Connections.

In this video, we actually show you a process for getting the email addresses of the contacts you find on LinkedIn without becoming connections, and that involves using our Email Guesser tool to guess their email address using their first name, last name, and company website address.