A Light at the End of the LinkedIn Funnel
Squeezing B2B networking value out of an aging and increasingly restrictive platform
Audience: B2B Marketers, Entrepreneurs, Leadership
Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Building a Bridge
The Business Bridge
· Stranger Danger
· Cold Contacts
· Retail vs. B2B
Prerequisites
· Definition of Ideal Clients
· Entrepreneur Optics
· Research is Fundamental
Getting New Customers
Closing the Deal
Conclusions
Executive Summary
This article, the first in a series, describes one of several strategies remaining to use LinkedIn for successful B2B business marketing, without paying LinkedIn. Recent changes to the LinkedIn algorithm, especially since June 2023, have made this proposition increasingly more difficult.
As of this writing, marketing on LinkedIn, sans payment, is still possible, and as we find, research and test such actionable strategies, we’ll publish subsequent articles behind the paywall. These articles qualify under our paywall policies and will not be available free of charge.
Readers wondering about why we emphasize marketing on LinkedIn and not paying them can, at their leisure, contemplate these points:
LinkedIn is a virtual monopoly with over a billion users, approximately one-eighth of humanity. This makes ignoring LinkedIn as a necessary marketing tool somewhere between problematic and impossible. Put another way, LinkedIn is the only game in town, and they know it.
Long ago, LinkedIn stealthily converted its users into its primary product, whom it sells, without paying those members. They are using us, why shouldn’t we use them?
The only commodity LinkedIn sells, beyond expensive direct advertising, is impressions, defined as a post appearing on a user’s screen for at least 300 milliseconds, or 0.3 seconds. Right away, one can guess that each impression is close to worthless by itself. An undated, but supposedly 2024 article, gives pricing data and user satisfaction levels. This brief post gives some notion of the cost of impressions, not their value. The author does point out that 3000 impressions targeting ideal customers is far more valuable than 3000 random impressions. More on this topic in a later article.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, a corporation not exactly known for flawless ethical behavior, fairness nor philanthropy. They’re in it for the money, and they’re not kidding around about it. No entrepreneur should ever fool themselves that large corporations care about them. Large corporations care about their largest customers, unsurprisingly, and policy is very likely to reflect this reality.
LinkedIn’s algorithm changes almost constantly, complicating usage. Additionally, since LinkedIn does not publish actionable, computable details of its algorithm, keeping up with those changes, even if only to follow the rules, requires constant time spent reading up on the platform and watching YouTube videos about it. This amounts to betting one’s business on Internet rumors, and cannot be taken seriously as a productive nor viable business activity. Worse, the need for keeping up with platform changes directly competes with time spent developing business. Not good!
The only large-scale business value we see to the platform, as users of LinkedIn, beside a visible, public place to present a business profile, is our ability to connect with other LinkedIn users, and talk with them via the platform, and possibly develop lasting business relationships. Indeed, that is the basic point of the present article. This is the last remaining remnant of LinkedIn’s once formidable business networking capability, and, as we noted elsewhere, the company appears from the outside to be closing up such opportunities for business networking almost as fast as they discover them.
We can see the day coming when only wealthy companies with considerable advertising and marketing budgets can use LinkedIn profitably. When that day comes, the very masses of users LinkedIn depends upon for a considerable fraction of its business value will begin to leave the platform, at first a few at a time, but later, in droves. Unless LinkedIn has one hell of an epiphany, and soon, a crash of the platform is on its way. Once started, such a crash will become an avalanche.
We examine the issues with LinkedIn in detail in another article. Astute readers are invited to examine the issues we (and many others) raise in detail, and apply their own critical thinking. Our conclusion is that Linkedin resembles a lottery more and more, with every passing week.
Over the more than 20 years we have been members of LinkedIn, we have observed changes to the platform which, in our opinion, have first diluted, then compromised, and now are slowly corrupting the original core purposes that gave LinkedIn its business value and current billion user monopoly. These changes, forming an unsteady, almost drunken, meander towards advertising as LinkedIn’s primary revenue source, fundamentally compromise LinkedIn’s value to business users.
Moreover, ordinary, non-entrepreneur LinkedIn users, who use the platform as one of several ways to find employment, are facing increasing difficulties finding jobs. This appears to us to be the consequence of promiscuous over-application on the part of job seekers, coupled with aggressive filtering of incoming applications via applicant tracking systems, discussed in detail in another article. What happens to LinkedIn when people realize it’s no longer any good for job hunting?
This article is the inaugural foray into remaining ways to take advantage of LinkedIn, while those opportunities last. We continue to do active research into the matter. Readers familiar with out history and writings on LinkedIn will take note of the fact we have moved our primary content production right here on Substack, for reasons we make clear.
Introduction
Trying to make business sense, and extract marketing utility, out of LinkedIn appears to be an arduous and increasingly difficult task. Algorithm changes since June 2023 have made viral posts largely a thing of the past. Recent changes to the algorithm are significantly more restrictive.
We believe LinkedIn is trying to close every possible avenue to market a business for free on the platform, and “incentivize” marketers to pay them, up front. That this is an exquisitely poor idea should be obvious, and we debunk some of the nonsense in another article.
Conventional wisdom regarding LinkedIn marketing is just plain ineffective. If it works at all, we estimate it would take on the order of ten years of consistent, daily posting to harvest enough business from the platform to pay the bills, but never to get wealthy.
Googling for actionable LinkedIn advice yields page after page of largely outdated, ineffective, useless and even counterproductive conventional advice, the vast majority of which is thinly-veiled hawking of various, vacuous “magical solutions” to the perceived problems of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn’s own, dated, voluminous documentation appears to be the source of most of the conventional talking points, and, to us, is equally unhelpful. LinkedIn wants to sell advertising, and appears to be slowly, but steadily, prioritizing advertising sales, so their documentation is largely supportive of this agenda.
We’ve collected most of the commonly cited conventional “wisdom” in a previous article, and explained our perception of the issues with LinkedIn in another. Months of consistent and detailed experiments have yielded scant results, a finding echoed by many posters to LinkedIn and elsewhere.
The biggest problems with LinkedIn, beyond its secretive algorithmic hurdles, are its scale and the resulting noise that has increasingly overtaken the platform. Users of LinkedIn have been morphed over the years into the product LinkedIn sells. Successful LinkedIn marketers increasingly appear to have figured out how to grab a piece of this action for themselves, and appear to be more and more predatory.
From coursework that never results in increased marketability, to useless job hunting advice, “look at how smart I am” cheat sheets, sales posts that go nowhere, to silly motivational posts and trainings, desperate appeals for gainful employment, and finally, completely inappropriate political content, cute baby animal videos and emotional feel-good and shaming material, LinkedIn’s original business purposes have been diluted into a sea of noisy spam, innocent of any conceivable business value. We’ve taken in recent years to ignoring our feed, and long ago gave up trying to prune it or tune it. It’s too much work for too little value.
Largely speaking, we believe most of the conventional advice concerning LinkedIn to be a waste of time. Ditto the LinkedIn feed. Ditto LinkedIn as a job hunting platform. Ditto trying to find talent worth hiring.
Posting to LinkedIn might still be a little useful, if done consistently, to establish credibility and authority, and develop a following. Likewise relevant and meaningful comments on other’s posts, same purpose, again of limited utility. Both are time-consuming, and take attention away from marketing one’s business.
What’s left after these items have been subtracted is direct person-to-person business networking and eventual harvesting of qualified leads. Both have to be handled very carefully; it is easy to put the few readers the algorithm still allows off, and even easier to appear needy or desperate. If the algorithms that run LinkedIn are ignored and deliberately avoided, in short, if a marketer is willing to research and use only methodologies that do not depend on LinkedIn’s fussy robot(s), there is still some utility to be found, harvested, marketed and taken to the bank.
Building a Bridge
Imagine one was tasked with building a rope bridge over a deep canyon. Rope that can take the weight is long and heavy, gravity is dangerous, the job difficult. But the job can be done, and has been done for a long time.
The bridge builder must somehow get the first rope across the canyon. He fixes one end of the rope to a stout tree on his side of the canyon. He ties a stout, but lightweight cord to the end of the rope, and an even lighter string to the end of the cord. The other end of the string he ties to an arrow. The string is light, won’t change the trajectory of the arrow much, and is long enough to cross the canyon. He grabs his bow, shoots the arrow over the canyon, where it buries itself in the opposite side.
Then he crosses the canyon by some long, inconvenient, but safe path, gets to the other side, gently and carefully tugs on the string until the end tied to the cord can be reached, then uses the cord to pull the rope across, finally tying the end of the rope to another tree on the opposite side.
Now, he can use the rope to pull more ropes across the canyon, and slowly and methodically build his bridge. The bridge makes crossing the canyon much easier, safer, and faster. He cannot speed up the laborious initial steps.
This rope bridge story is an analog to the bridge-building process that must happen between people in order for business to happen. Just as the rope bridge builder does not want to fall and injure himself, and so does not depend on gravity to help him, the business bridge-builder avoids depending on anything he cannot control.
In the case of LinkedIn, the algorithm plays the role of gravity. The business bridge-builder uses it when he has no other choice (as in the trajectory of the arrow he shot across the canyon), but does not depend on it otherwise. He takes the safe, but slow, path across the canyon until his bridge is built, and builds it in stages, each depending on the previous steps, until he can use the bridge itself to get to the other side quickly.
The Business Bridge
We’ll take this bridge analogy and apply it, step-by-step, in detail, to the problem of building profitable business relationships. Note that any marketing activity undertaken where the marketer is not in control of the outcome will almost certainly fail. We have in mind advertising in particular, but LinkedIn connections play a more interesting and fundamental role.
Stranger Danger
Cold-contact stupidity No one in business should expect to get business simply by asking for it, once, from a person they don’t already know well. Almost all users on LinkedIn, for example, have been cold-approached, likely multiple times a week, by persons with business propositions asking for either money up front or nearly immediate business in the form of products to be sold, or services to be rendered.
No effort is ever expended to get to know the person approached, nor to develop a business relationship, prior to asking for money. The fact that this method has a near 100% failure rate doesn’t stop people from doing it.
No customer in their right mind would view such an approach as anything other than a transparent attempt to grab some money and disappear. Yet, hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn users do this, sometimes for years, in the vain hope they can somehow “close a deal” with large numbers of cold approaches alone. We have now been cold-approached in this way hundreds of times.
Research? What Research? We have no time for that! In nearly all cases, the person doing the approach has done next to zero research, and displays a shocking lack of who they are approaching, why, or even basic understanding about how business works in the real world. They are just asking complete strangers for money, like beggars outside a grocery store or a train station. Pity selling has never been a good career choice and never will; the product is worthless, and very few will pay for it.
Worse, the overwhelming number of such cold approaches aren’t even in the same zip code as appropriate, and are childish and wholly unprofessional attempts to sell people something they don’t want or need, in fact, that no one wants. It’s madness, ineffective, and, in fact, counter-productive.
Cold Contacts
What we do with cold contacts When someone approaches us with a cold proposition, showing no empathy, uncaring about wasting our time, having done no research, has no idea of who we are, what we do, nor what we might need, the standard response is to ignore the approach, decline the contact, and block the user permanently. This is now policy, and has been for years. We suspect very nearly all decision-makers on LinkedIn do exactly the same thing. It’s the business equivalent of swatting a mosquito.
Retail vs. B2B
From this, we can extract two pretty simple and basic business theorems:
Direct, person-to-person business networking, such as might result from connections on LinkedIn, only works for long-term business relationships that demand the parties know each other well before doing any business with each other at all.
One-time only businesses, such as coursework, single equipment purchases, etc., i.e. retail business, is best left to outfits that specialize in that activity and are specifically set up to do business in that manner. Person-to-person networking is not appropriate nor effective for this type of business.
As a simple, well-known example, Amazon is a retailer. People who buy from Amazon may or may not buy from Amazon again; hence, the highly automated Amazon robot website is appropriate for doing retail. On the other hand, Amazon Web Services is a long-term business partner with their customers. The two business relationships are wildly different.
As a corollary to item (1) above, asking strangers for any kind of value, up front, is tone-deaf and extremely unlikely to be successful. Serious business people rightly view the requester as a pest, likely desperate and parasitic, unworthy of help, and certainly unworthy of a business relationship. Permanent rejection is very likely.
This reality implies that the initial contact, immediately after a connection has been accepted, needs to be very simple, casual, subtle, un-pressured, non-demanding, non-threatening, something like: “Nice to connect with you. I look forward to learning about <insert researched mutual interest here>.” This opens the door a crack and prepares the way for later interactions, each progressively inching closer to a potential sale. The process is gradual and safe for both participants.
We’ll reiterate that long-term business relationship must be developed with care and strong empathy for the other, stronger party, lest immediate, strong distrust and rejection result. The beginning of a business relationship is the crucial time, fraught with peril for the applicant. This is a time to tread lightly, and avoid unearned requests. Trust must come first. Retail tactics just don’t work for B2B.
Prerequisites
Definition of Ideal Clients
Who to approach? Long before any attempts to contact prospective customers, the beginning entrepreneur must write down a profile of their ideal customer. This should be viewed as elementary and necessary initial business planning.
The process for doing this needn’t be sophisticated. A simple, bulleted list of characteristics, both positive and negative, can usually be developed in a matter of minutes, and then input to an AI for processing into a coherent prose description that can then be used to find such customers.
Perhaps more important, defining one’s ideal customer simultaneously narrows the range of people to contact down to a manageable number, and even offers a scheme for prioritization of those contacts. Clearly, the closer a given prospect is to the ideal customer, the higher the priority of contact.
The ideal customer description also significantly simplifies research time and costs. Because the entrepreneur knows what his customers look like, he has a much better chance of recognizing them when he finds them.
Last, the ideal customer criteria can be stepwise improved and sharpened over time, allowing the entrepreneur to progressively zero in on their most likely prospects. Like most business activities, refining the likely market is a trial and error process, and so should be done deliberately and slowly, with several refinement steps, prior to contacting anyone. This allows entrepreneurs time to understand their market well enough to have confidence in the results.
That confidence, born of careful and thorough research, can be felt by prospects come contact negotiation time. The entrepreneur has developed dossiers on likely clients; knows something about them, understands the likely range of problems they face, problems which might motivate the customer to spend money on solutions. Sales based on real needs are solid; relief of pain points is far better than vague, future capabilities.
Natural sources of new business Competitive pressures often motivate businesses to take on so-called tech debt, wherein short-term, expedient solution decisions are made at the cost of complicating future integration. Briefly, doing it quickly, to satisfy timeliness, also might mean doing it wrong, in the sense the work will have to be re-done later, at greater cost.
In the software world, for example, tech debt decisions are an almost constant feature of day to day work. Management is likely to favor incurring tech debt, while low level managers and individual contributors are likely to disdain it, knowing they will be the ones who have to clean up the mess later. Clean-up of messes is unpleasant work, and they dread it.
Tech debt eventually comes back to bite the debtor, creating opportunities for entrepreneurs. One excellent criteria for an ideal customer list should be accumulation of past tech debt on the part of the customer. Caution is advised here; companies tend to hide their problems, and one can find genuine disasters only after signing a contract, creating a no-win situation for both the entrepreneur and the customer. Lawyers routinely enrich themselves on disputes that arise from such situations.
Tech debt provides entrepreneurs with opportunities and challenges. In doing initial business planning, including the characterization of one’s ideal customer, serious thought should be expended on what kinds of tech debt can be reasonably handled and how to go about mitigating it.
Turnover, aggressive development schedules and poor documentation practices, all too common, can cause accumulations of truly massive levels of technical debt. The decision making customers might well not know how difficult their situation has become, and experience shock when they find out.
A mom and pop software operation, for example, typically has neither the staff nor expertise to fix a seriously compromised, large enterprise application. There might well be millions of lines of uncommented code and a huge, complicated database, too large by far for a tiny organization to take on.
Conversely, a large organization usually won’t be interested in small problems, as there isn’t enough money on the table to make it worth their time. Both of these examples are extremes, but point to the cultivation of partnerships with other businesses.
The mom and pop shop might develop relationships with larger companies and hand over contracts too big for them to handle, while the larger outfit can benefit from smaller enterprises, likewise handing them contracts too small for their organizations to work profitably.
In this way, realistic businesses can abandon the notion of competitors and cultivate instead partnerships. Properly done, strategic networking can turn competitors into either customers themselves or sources of new business. This phenomena, rarely practiced but highly advisable, constitutes yet another face of the search for ideal customers and is recommended as part of business planning.
Entrepreneur Optics
Profiles: The first and only chance to make an impression One of the few functions of the LinkedIn website we still find valuable is the public place to hang a business shingle (ours is here) and a personal profile (Overlogix founder profile). We’ll assume the overwhelming majority of our readers have only a personal profile.
An extremely important point: As mentioned above, we get cold-approached several times a week on LinkedIn. Those approaches quickly get dumped into one of the following buckets:
obvious honeybots , scammers, spammers or other trolls, immediately ignored, blocked and reported,
low-quality job or business seekers, a.k.a. amateurs, most often simply ignored, occasionally blocked if offensively aggressive, or
high-quality contacts, that might result later in employment (contractors) or business (customers), connection accepted.
The nature of the approach is the first decision point. Someone who contacts us, out of the blue, and asks for business right away, especially if obvious they did next to zero research about us, gets dumped into the SPAM or amateur category immediately. Doing this is the business equivalent of clumsy, inexperienced, young men trying to get attractive women to have sex with them on the first date. The success rate is tiny, and even if successful, the quality is poor.
After that, the next decision point is the evaluation of the LinkedIn profile of the approaching person. That profile is typically 90% of the next decision making process.
These habits, acquired naturally from 20+ years on the platform, underscore the critical importance of LinkedIn profiles. We make almost all our initial judgements based only on the profile of the approaching person. What’s more, we strongly suspect every other decision-maker on LinkedIn does the exact same thing.
Our system is similar to the one used by LinkedIn for automatically judging incoming user content. That part of the LinkedIn algorithm automatically dumps incoming content into one of three buckets: SPAM, low-quality posting and high-quality posting. One can guess how the robot uses these categories for choosing how often to serve up the post in people’s feed.
Care and maintenance of LinkedIn profiles For these reasons, LinkedIn profiles needs to be improved and then maintained: re-read and updated from time to time. One veteran job hunter we know recommended getting onto LinkedIn every Sunday evening and changing at least something, even punctuation, so the algorithm gave higher ranking to the profile for the next week’s searches by recruiters.
We don’t know if this bit of lore is true or not, but we do believe that progressive self-education regarding LinkedIn profiles, to improve one’s own profile, even if merely watching YouTube videos on the subject, and then implementing the more interesting and sound of the advice found, is time well-spent.
Artificial intelligence bots such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini tend to be pretty good at writing advertising copy, and should be at least tried. If the copy looks good, it can be easily implemented.
There are services that will review LinkedIn profiles and make suggestions. We have no idea about the quality of such services; a list of supposedly free profile reviews can be found from this article on LinkedIn.
General structure of a LinkedIn profile As to the general structure of a LinkedIn profile, something like the following should be done:
Here's a general structure for the "About" section:
1. Headline: A concise and engaging statement that clearly communicates your professional identity.
2. Summary: A brief overview of your career, highlighting your key skills, achievements, and goals.
3. Positioning Statement: A concise and compelling statement that differentiates you from others and showcases your unique value proposition.
4. Professional Experience: A detailed breakdown of your work history, including job titles, companies, and key responsibilities.
5. Skills: A list of your technical and soft skills, along with endorsements from your connections.
6. Education: A summary of your educational background, including degrees, certifications, and institutions.
AIs such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Claude are usually very good at writing ad copy, and should be used. We have done some writing on jazzing up a resume so it will be noticed, and recommend the same, perhaps on steroids, for one’s LinkedIn profile. Multiple experiments with prompting these AIs will give more options, one or more of which is likely to work.
Of the above features, the positioning statement is probably the most important. It needs to be short, right to the point, and hit readers where they live.
A high-quality, professional profile photo is recommended, since people process visual information such as pictures much faster than written text. Photos can be checked for reactions from other people, for example, by posting the photo to Photofeeler.
Research is Fundamental
Quality over quantity Newbie marketers usually go for numbers rather than quality, and so rarely do enough research on potential connections to make the exercise worthwhile. We propose an alternative: go for quality first, develop a tested and working methodology for quality contacts, and then gradually ramp up the numbers, possibly with the (lightweight) help of automation. This strategy is nothing new; other, successful marketers almost always recommend it.
Never contact any stranger on LinkedIn until you have exhausted every possible avenue to research that person. The following questions need to be answered prior to contact: Who are they? Where have they worked? What do they do? Are they individual contributors or decision makers? What are their likely pain points, hence needs? Are they likely customers? Are there any serious impediments to doing business with them?
Separating business from the personal LinkedIn is for business, not casual connections. Business means either paying someone for goods or services, or selling someone goods or services. That’s it. It’s all about creation of value for the ultimate purpose of banking money, to pay for life, loved ones, maybe leisure, and eventually, retirement on one’s own terms. No other purpose really matters.
Who cares if you have 500+ connections on LinkedIn if you never talk to more than a tiny fraction of them? Why do it at all? It’s far better to have only 50 connections that are all active business partners than 500 or even 50,000 with only a tiny fraction active. The rest is noise, and noise is bad for business.
The only exception we can see to this rule is former colleagues and friends. However, the right places for friend only connections is Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord and WhatsApp, not LinkedIn.
If no business is possible with one of these connections, now or in the future, we suggest friending them on Facebook, and then, later and quietly, dropping the business connection. The amount of voluntary, unpaid, real business brokering that happens in LinkedIn is small. If it does happen, it’s just dumb luck, not something that can be deliberately repeated.
Customer searches One of the better and interesting functions of LinkedIn lies in its search capability, so far, not compromised by algorithm changes. This allows a marketer who has completed his profile of the ideal customer to search for prospects, list them, and begin the research process for each one.
A further, and even more interesting notion concerning LinkedIn, is using their search function on one’s existing connections to possibly mine new business. The same caveat regarding research applies: do the homework first, make sure there is a reasonable possibility for a deal before trying to make a deal. This notion is especially valuable for entrepreneurs who have accumulated a large cohort of connections from the past.
One could, for example, go through every existing connection and determine, with a little effort, whether any future business is likely or not. If not, then perhaps moving that contact to other social media might be a good idea. Perhaps simply dropping the contact permanently is the best plan, as this thins the herd and allows better and more thorough care of the remaining connections. This idea has some attractions, but is also time-consuming. If done, it might be best to do it gradually over time, with the goal of pruning LinkedIn connections down to real business prospects only.
Getting New Customers
Qualifying leads Once a list of potential customers have been developed and researched, a second round of qualifications comes into play. Let’s assume for the purposes of discussion that one has decided on a list of 100 customers, all reasonable possible prospects.
The next step is deciding who to contact first. Given that LinkedIn is a very noisy platform, we can assume that a low fraction of contacts will respond. Per this article, the average rate of connection request acceptance varies between 30% (USA) to 40% (Europe) up to about 60% (Latin America).
Let’s choose 20% as a safe lower bound on connection request acceptance. Out of the 100 people invited for a connection, 20 will accept. There’s no telling which 20, and it is safe to assume that these will essentially be random from the point of view of the requester.
These 20 acceptors need to be gently contacted, as suggested above. This first contact is just an ice-breaker, not an ask. “I look forward to …” begins the conversation. As part of preparations, one might come up with a few additional contact prompts to get a conversation going, for a total of three tries. People who connect and don’t respond after three attempts to start a conversation are likely too busy, too distracted, or merely connection collectors, and are unlikely new customers.
Closing the Deal
Stats on the likely responses are unavailable, but we can guess that a low fraction, perhaps 25%, will respond, leaving 5 potential customers out of the original 100 chosen. It is now up to our entrepreneur to keep those conversations going, and avoid asking for anything of value. The purpose here is to build up a business relationship, and, if possible, entice the contacted people to nudge the conversation around to business, usually, by asking a question like, “Do you do X?”. The answer had better be “Yes, I do.”
Letting the prospective customer lead the conversation means it is their idea, and they’ll be much more likely to hire under those circumstances. Then, our entrepreneur has already answered the customer’s most important questions: “What’s in it for me?”, “How does this benefit me?”, etc.
Nobody cares what anyone else can do. They only care about what others can do for them. This is the heart and soul of harvesting qualified leads. Keeping these conversations going with busy and likely distracted potential customers, without putting them off, is the key skill, one that likely needs development on the part of the entrepreneur.
That being said, experienced entrepreneurs from the working world have had many conversations with other people throughout the years and can anticipate likely avenues such conversations can take. Writing down a list of likely interactions from experience, and quality responses, might help quite a bit.
We might well be able to anticipate 80% of such conversations for our business niche, and prepare with reasonable answers. Additionally, we can also draw boundaries, outside of which we mustn’t go.
As an example, Overlogix has plenty of production-level Oracle database experience, and can confidently face messy customer problems in that space. On the other hand, we have essentially zero IBM DB2 experience, and would know not to try it, since the chances are, we’d fall on our face.
If a customer we knew well begged us to try anyway, because they can’t find anyone else and are in a bind, we might try, after warning that we’d be applying Oracle knowledge, and then consulting DB2 documentation, to solve the customer’s problems, at a higher cost. Sometimes, that works; close fits between entrepreneur skills and customer needs tend to be rare.
Conclusions
Here, we’ve sketched out a reasonable and eminently do-able method of harvesting qualified leads using LinkedIn as a person-to-person networking tool. The process described above, while laborious, does not require making oneself nor strangers feel uncomfortable, gives people time to get used to each other, and most importantly, incentivizes customers to think about possible scenarios where they might be willing to buy what the entrepreneur sells.
However one chooses to batch potential customers, this plan does work, and is repeatable. It actually lends itself to continuous customer gathering activity, once all the steps have been practiced until successful. Entrepreneurs who take this process as seriously as they might, say, for dating, are most likely to go carefully and patiently, and get higher conversion ratios as a direct result.
The secret to making the process work is doing all the necessary homework in advance. Mapping out the likely steps taken with an ideal customer then allows more detailed examination of how it might go with less than ideal customers allowing a broader market and more opportunities.
If done with subtlety and empathy, the most difficult part of making the deal happen, closing the customer, is done by the customer him/herself, rather than by the entrepreneur. This goes a long way towards easing the path on both sides towards good business.
Our company is Overlogix; our LinkedIn page is here. Our Welcome to Overlogix! article introduces us and what we do. Links to our Substack articles can be found at our index page, the Overlogix Table of Context. Our LinkedIn Master Index links to multiple articles written for LinkedIn.