If you’re in sales you then you’re looking for leads.  It’s a given.  With technology today it can be a lot easier to find leads, but as sales people we often make it more difficult than we need to generate leads.

If you’re like me and many of the sales people that I know then you have collected hundreds connections on LinkedIn.  One of the ways to uncover leads that are going to be much more warm than getting a name off of a list is to revisit your connections on LinkedIn.  While this method will be more useful if you have a product or service to sell to a broad spectrum of customers, it still can help you uncover some leads that you didn’t know were so close to you.

A quick way to find the “low hanging fruit” is to do a search on keywords that relate to they position that you typically sell to, or the type of company that you sell to.  Search for a position if you’re looking to find the decision maker or someone in the department that purchases what you sell.  Look for a type of company or a specific company for contacts within that organization that you can leverage for either a deal or a referral.

This is a good exercise to do every 6 months to a year as people are often changing roles within organizations or even moving over to new organizations.  What I like to do is keep a list of people that have purchased from me in the past so that I can see if they’ve moved organizations I can reach out to see if my current product or service fits their needs.

Put it on your calendar to check your LinkedIn connections every 6 months or so and you’re likely to uncover a deal or two…or at least a referral or two.