LinkedIn is a powerful prospecting tool. So if you're going to use LinkedIn for research, you've got to understand how to do it. I love LinkedIn research. I do not do prospecting. I do research. It's my very deliberate thought process and what I'm doing using LinkedIn.

So I'm researching to find companies in industries and regions, and then find the people in those companies that have roles that I want to talk to, or have a conversation with, or get connected to. Searching for influencers, searching for my peers, so I can pay attention to them, searching for knowledge and ideas and perspectives, content, different companies doing things differently, different people and in the same roles, doing things differently. It's how we learn is we search for people who are doing things then similar to what I'm doing or what we're doing, and how are they doing it differently. I referred to it as this look for people who play In your sandbox with your toys, or look for people who play in your sandbox with slightly different toys, or they're playing with the same toys, but they're using them differently. Oh, this is really cool. This whole model of research on LinkedIn, searching for companies, groups, organizations, associations, schools, search, and when you can figure out how to use search, to find all this richness that's out there, you can grow from this richness.

Find people who can introduce you to other people, not just for business, maybe just for ideation, maybe just a new friend, maybe a new collaborator, maybe a new business partner, maybe a new employee. I don't know. I often use these words. You never know until you start. So you've got to start. You never know the value of connection.

Do you make it You never know the value of a conversation to get into it. So start finding ways to get into conversations with different people. If you're going to use LinkedIn for prospecting, you've got to master the search tools and you've got to set up save searches save so much time when you create save searches, very focused, purposeful in the areas that you want to do business in, have LinkedIn send you new people and meet those criteria. Really cool way of using LinkedIn. Pretty much anything in life was the value from it will happen when we do what we need to do when we do what we know we need to do. So I use this phrase, do the work consistently, and reap the rewards of the researching the connecting and getting into meaningful conversations, by way minimize cold calls.

I don't cold call anybody. I asked for introductions. I bumped into people that I then I get into conversations, no cold calling for me anymore is only because I've achieved some level of a LinkedIn network that has helped me pretty much eliminate cold calls