LinkedIn is a giant network, with over 830 million members in more than 200 countries worldwide. It’s where professionals go to make connections, expand their network, share content and develop a reputation within their field. Consequently, it can be a great way to establish partnerships.
In this guide, we share best practices and actionable tips for searching for partners on LinkedIn. Read on to learn how to search for contacts on the world’s leading business-themed social media platform.
Table of Contents:
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- Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
- Get Clear on Your Ideal Business Partner
- Leverage LinkedIn’s Search Capabilities
- Analyze Profiles of Potential Partners
- Find Email Addresses
- Join Relevant LinkedIn Groups
- Publish Relevant Content
- Engage with Potential Partners’ Content
- Personalize Your Outreach
- Leverage LinkedIn Ads
- Conclusion
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Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile
It’s important to look professional. A strong profile will entice potential partners. An underdeveloped or poorly executed one might repulse them. A good profile will tell potential partners who you are. It will demonstrate your value. Emphasize your experience. Highlight your perspective. To build a great profile, focus on:
- Writing a compelling copy that tells your story.
- Summarizing your background in a skimmable but engaging fashion.
- Including a professional headshot.
- Highlighting experience relevant to the partnerships you hope to achieve.
- Sharing content that keeps your profile active and establishes your knowledge.
A good profile will make you more visible—and more trustworthy. No one will mistake you for a bot if you contribute regularly. They’ll also just find it more enticing to work with someone whose ideas they respect.
Get Clear on Your Ideal Business Partner
LinkedIn is a big place. You can’t wade in aimlessly. Identify key qualities that you need in a collaborator. Ask yourself:
- What skills, experience, and resources do I need in a business partner?
- What industry or niche should they be in?
- What size company would be the best fit?
- What geographic location(s) am I targeting?
The clearer you are, the easier it will be to find a good match. Without a profile, you may find lots of leads, but they won’t necessarily match your interests. The more you know about what you want, the easier it will be to recognize when you’ve found it.
Leverage LinkedIn’s Search Capabilities
On the search bar at the top, you can search for people, jobs, companies, groups, and more. Use filters to refine your people searches by location, company, industry, profile language, school, and current/past companies. This is a very simple way to narrow the scope of your search for a partner.
Use tailored LinkedIn search terms to improve your odds of success. The more specific you are, the better your results will be. You may also consider looking not for individuals, but businesses. You can interact with company profiles the same way you would with a personal profile.
Analyze Profiles of Potential Partners
As you develop a list of potential partners, the next step is to thoroughly analyze and vet each person/organization. This analysis will further eliminate candidates. It will also serve as a bridge to the next step — outreach.
As you look at their profile, think about how you can connect with this person. Do you have commonalities in your backgrounds? Maybe you have mutual connections. These points of connection could provide deeper insights into who the candidate is. They could also help as you try to introduce yourself.
Find Email Addresses with SignalHire
It’s great when you can make connections on LinkedIn. Eventually, however, off-platform communications will be necessary. Email is a more direct — and ultimately more professional way to interact with potential partners.
SignalHire makes email outreach easy. It’s a powerful tool that helps you find contact information for people you find on LinkedIn.
The email finder feature is an easy way to make connections. You can enter your preferences and develop a list of qualified leads ready to be uploaded into your CRM.
SignalHire also has a browser extension that makes it easy to find email addresses as you browse LinkedIn profiles. This tool automatically generates contact information for any profile you visit. This makes it even easier to develop your list of contacts.
In addition to email addresses, SignalHire offers a variety of other helpful features for partnership prospecting like its companies directory, where you can find contacts of employees of any company, making it a very valuable tool to add to your business development tech stack.
Join Relevant LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups are subchannels within the platform. You can go there to connect with people in your niche of interests. It’s a great place to establish more cultivated connections. For example, if your industry is communications consultancy, you may find groups about relevant business tech, recent news developments, market shifts, etc.
Within the LinkedIn network, you can share your perspective and acquire clout within your business community. The key, of course, is to choose your groups wisely. Where would your ideal business partner be? That’s where you want to go.
Good news? There are more than one million groups on the platform. You won’t struggle to find virtual spaces that reflect what you are looking for.
Publish Relevant Content
Publishing content makes your profile more visible. You’ll establish new connections and carve out a place for yourself within your niche. This is a great way to bring leads/collaborative partners in. A visible profile creates inbound leads that can result in new customers just as surely as it does potential partners.
The key is to keep things interesting. Publish useful information that will appeal to your potential partners. For example:
- Industry news and trends
- Tips and advice
- Case studies and success stories
- Thought-provoking questions to spark discussion
- Updates about your company’s recent achievements or partnerships
It’s important to do more than just post. When people comment, try to engage. By contributing to ongoing conversations, you’ll make a more significant impression on the community.
Engage with Potential Partners’ Content
Sometimes, you may want to pace your communications slowly. Build trust by engaging with your potential partner’s content. Like their posts. Comment with insightful insights. Contribute to the conversations they engage in.
This will put you on their radar. It will also establish you as a like-minded source of authority within the other person’s professional niche. They will be much more likely to respond to your eventual email/connection request if they have interacted with you before.
Personalize Your Outreach
Your first point of contact with a potential partner needs to be strong. Having an excellent profile will help you make the right impression, but the first message you send still needs to be on point. People get so many emails and any misstep at all will get you sent right to the spam.
If you are reaching out directly through the platform, state your business upfront. A generic connection request may be ignored. Even if they accept, they may forget about you. Instead, write a personal note, explain who you are and why you want to connect.
The same technique should be applied to email outreach. Cold calls are hard. A clear, personal message will separate your message from the ten others this person gets per hour. Write a grabbing subject line. Keep your message short — but use every word well.
Leverage LinkedIn Ads
Ads are a great way to reach large numbers of people. LinkedIn’s advertising platform allows you to get very specific in who you target. Remember that profile we recommended making earlier? This is where it gets its time to shine.
Using the ad platform, you can target partners based on their titles, where they work, and what skills they list. This is an awesome way to get your message to the right people. For example, if you’re looking to form partnerships with SaaS companies, you could run a LinkedIn ad campaign targeting VPs of Business Development at SaaS companies. You could then follow up with the people who engaged with your ad and start a conversation about potential partnership opportunities.
Measure & Refine Your Efforts
We live in a digital world. Gone are the days when you throw ads or content against the wall and wait to see what sticks. LinkedIn provides users with analytic tools. Use them. Find out what posts are working. Emphasize the qualities in your content/profile that generate the most attention.
That said, it’s important to remember that connections and comments are not the entire picture. You want qualified leads. Connections with people who match your partner criteria. Quality beats quantity every time when it comes to connecting on LinkedIn.
Conclusion
LinkedIn is fantastic for finding B2B networking opportunities. You just need to go about it the right way. The steps may sound extravagant or highly involved but they are actually pretty intuitive. There are two basic ingredients.
The first is you. You want to make yourself look legitimate and appealing. Your profile should reflect qualities similar to those you are looking for in a partner. The internet is full of random people phishing for dubious connections. A great profile ensures that you will never be mistaken for one of them.
The other ingredient? Know who you are looking for. By creating a clear partner profile, you’ll radically increase your odds of meeting the right people.