How To Generate B2B Leads On LinkedIn (2024)

There are two ways to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn.

The first method is called “inbound marketing”, which involves creating content (videos, articles etc) and then receiving inbound inquiries.

The second method is called “outbound sales”, which involves making a list of relevant leads and contacting them.

In this article, I will be focusing on the second method (outbound sales).

Below is my 5-step process for generating B2B leads on LinkedIn:

Step 1: Sign up for a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account
Step 2: Search for leads
Step 3: Export your leads with their email addresses
Step 4: Contact your leads by sending personalized cold emails
Step 5: Manage responses in a sales CRM

Step 1: Sign up for a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a lead database from LinkedIn.

It is the best source of B2B leads in the world.

Other tools, such as Apollo and ZoomInfo, are worse versions of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Only LinkedIn Sales Navigator has up to date and accurate lead information, since LinkedIn is the only platform where people actively update their business profiles.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Core Plan costs $99 USD / month.

Once you sign up, you will gain access to hundreds of millions of potential leads that you can reach out to.

Step 2: Search for leads

Once you are logged into your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, you can search for B2B leads.

You can search using more than 25 advanced lead and company search filters. These include things such as location, industry, job title, company type and more.

When doing outbound sales, it’s important to understand who your ideal customer is, and to search for leads that match your exact customer profile.

It’s better to have a smaller list of highly relevant leads, than a large list of people that won’t convert.

You can also segment your lead lists by location, job type & industry to make your outreach even more personalized.

In most cases, I recommend that you search for Founders & CEOs, as these are the key decision makers. You can also try searching for other executive types, such as CMO, CFO, CTO, COO and so on, depending on what you are selling.

Step 3: Export your leads with their email addresses

The problem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that they don’t give you the email addresses of their leads.

This information is not publicly available.

Instead, LinkedIn allows you to directly message leads through Sales Navigator.

This is ok in theory, until you realize that they only allow you to message 50 leads per month via their “InMail” feature.

The idea that you are going to limit yourself to contacting just 50 people per month is insane. Also, not everyone checks their LinkedIn account frequently, so doing outreach via InMail messages isn't as effective compared to email.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem.

Emailchaser has a “LinkedIn Email Finder” Google Chrome extension that allows you to export your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator with their email addresses.

What this means is that you can search for leads in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and then you can export all of the leads that appear in the results with their email addresses.

You can export thousands of leads with their email addresses, and then contact them directly via email.

You may be wondering how this works, since I just told you that LinkedIn doesn’t provide the email addresses of their leads.

We built a special email finding software which we use in our LinkedIn Email Finder extension. We take the publicly available information from each leads’ LinkedIn profile, such as their name and company website, and we then find their email addresses (even if their emails aren't publicly available).

When you export your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator using our extension, we give you a .csv file, which you can then upload to your Sales CRM.

Step 4: Contact your leads by sending personalized cold emails

Now that you have exported your leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s time to contact them.

I recommend that you use a specialized cold email software (like Emailchaser) to send your emails.

Emailchaser has a lot of features that ensure that your emails land in the primary inbox (not spam).

Also, if you want to send a high volume of cold emails, then Emailchaser allows you to connect an unlimited number of sender email accounts to a single campaign, which allows you to scale.

You can learn more about scaling cold email outreach in my article How To Safely Scale Up Your Cold Email Outreach With Inbox Rotation.

I also recommend that you read my article How To Write A Cold Email.

Step 5: Manage responses in a sales CRM

An important part of any outbound sales campaign is to track and manage the status of your leads during the sales process.

The best way to do this is to use a sales CRM.

A good sales CRM will allow you to see which stage in the sales journey each lead is. It also will allow you to make notes about each lead, create custom columns, assign leads to specific team members and more.

Emailchaser has a sales CRM that allows you to do all of this. When you create cold email campaigns in Emailchaser, it automatically adds your leads to your Sales CRM.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The best way to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn is to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Emailchaser's LinkedIn Email Finder extension.

Once you have your leads, you can then use Emailchaser to contact them by sending personalized cold emails.

If you want to learn how to send cold emails, then check out my article How To Send Cold Emails Without Landing In Spam.