Social media has drastically evolved from sharing overly filtered pictures to a powerful marketing platform.

While every social media platform has its own set of benefits, LinkedIn has emerged as a popular tool for social selling.

15 Things You Should Never Do When Prospecting Via LinkedIn

Rather than disrupting your prospect’s day with aggressive cold calls, LinkedIn allows businesses to nurture and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Are you struggling to generate leads and win over prospects on LinkedIn? The conventional prospecting strategies are not going to drive results on this platform.

In this post, we’re discussing common prospecting mistakes costing your business valuable connections. Let’s dive in!

1. Incomplete Professional Profile

When you approach a prospect, they are likely to check your profile and business page on LinkedIn. And you can imagine what kind of impression an incomplete profile will create.

To avoid the first bad impression, you should follow all the best practices to create a great LinkedIn profile. Include a professional headshot along with your resume, headline, and summary to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

2. Failing to Offer Any Value

Why should a prospect pay attention to your product or service?

Unless you are offering value to a prospective client, they won’t be eager to engage with you. You should focus on providing value from the very first interaction to capture the prospect’s interest.

3. Not Researching the Prospect

There is so much information available in the digital space, especially on LinkedIn. It would be foolish to go in blind without learning anything about your prospects.

By knowing all the key details about the prospect, you can save your time and avoid the embarrassment of sending irrelevant messages.

4. Product-Centric Approach

Trying to sell on LinkedIn is one of the major blunders businesses make. Sounds bizarre, right? Hear us out.

Approaching a prospect with a product-centric approach isn’t the best idea. Social selling is an art of subtlety. Rather than directly pitching your product, you should do research to find out what the prospect needs. Use this information to present a solution-focused pitch.

5. Generic Connection Request

The default connection request is not good enough to catch the eye of prospects. They are probably receiving hundreds of such requests every day. If you want your connection requests to stand out and have a better chance of being accepted, make sure you personalize them.

Moreover, if your generic requests are reported as spam by too many people, you risk getting your account restricted.

At all costs, avoid trying to sell via connection request. This is your opportunity to nurture a valuable relationship, not make a sale.

6. Not Looking Into Competitor’s Network

If you’re new to LinkedIn prospecting, then searching from scratch can be difficult. One way to find relevant prospects for your business is going through your competitor’s network.

It’s important to prepare a compelling pitch before you approach such prospects. You have to not only present your offer but also persuade them that it’s better than the competitor.

7. Sending Impersonal Messages

Just like personalizing connection requests, you also should pay attention to personalized messages. Just addressing prospects by name is not enough to impress them.

You should customize the entirety of your message to match the unique needs of the prospective client. Use this opportunity to show that you’ve done your research.

8. Moving Too Fast

If you are hyper-focused on making a sale as soon as you connect with a client, then your LinkedIn prospecting strategy is majorly flawed.

You cannot lay all your cards on the first interaction. It’s imperative to invest time and effort into nurturing and valuable relationships.

9. Not Utilizing Paid Tools

There is only so much you can achieve with the free version of LinkedIn. But upgrading to LinkedIn Premium can be beneficial for your business in many ways.

10. Sharing Irrelevant or Promotional Content

Exclusively sharing content promoting your product or brand is not going to interest your prospects. Instead of talking about yourself, think about what your target audience wants.

Create well-researched and relevant content that your prospects will find useful. You should also apply best SEO practices to make your content easily discoverable.

11. Not Growing Your Pool of Prospects

Prospecting on LinkedIn is for the long haul. In addition to building relationships with current prospects, you also need to constantly work on growing your pool of prospects.

There are several ways to find new prospects. If you already have an ideal prospect, go to the “People Also Viewed” section to find other professionals with a similar profile. You can also use Alumni Search to find and connect with people who went to the same school as you.

12. Underutilizing Groups

Are you not a part of any groups on LinkedIn? You’re missing out! Joining groups is a reliable way to network with other professionals in your field and a great way to discover prospects.

Make sure you follow the rules and guidelines set by the group and interact in a respectful manner.

13. Failure to Engage

Like any other social media, LinkedIn is driven by engagement. Whether someone has commented on your post or liked your content, you should respond. It is also a good practice to comment, share, and like other content published.

14. Sharing Personal Content

Unlike Instagram or Facebook, LinkedIn is a much more professional space. Therefore, it’s not appropriate to share too many photos of your family vacation or other personal content.

15. Inconsistent Efforts

Don’t make the mistake of connecting with a prospect and forgetting to follow up. Making consistent efforts is essential to keep your prospects interested and feel valued.

You should open LinkedIn every day to accept requests, respond to messages, and network.

In Conclusion

If you’re not utilizing LinkedIn to prospect new clients in today’s digital age, you are missing out on a major opportunity. While it may seem overwhelming at first, selling on LinkedIn is not that difficult to figure out.

LinkedIn has a whopping 740 million members, and building authority on this platform is necessary to find new buyers.

Stefan Smulders is a SaaS Entrepreneur | Bootstrapped to €3M ARR in just 1year | Founder of Worlds safest software for LinkedIn Automation Expandi.io | Vegan | Father