Generate Leads Through LinkedIn in 3 Simple Steps

Finding high quality leads is tough! In the hope of getting through to the right decision makers to sell your new cool product to, you find yourself spending hours browsing LinkedIn.🕵️‍♀️
You’re also already using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to refine the LinkedIn database into your ideal target list, however still need to view the profiles of your prospects one by one. What a manual process!

Automate your prospecting efforts in a spreadsheet

Getting results on LinkedIn doesn’t have to be a time-consuming endeavor. With dashdash, you can leverage online services like Google Custom Search to create lists of prospects based on their function or job title in 3 simple steps! 🙌 Here’s how:

Step 1: Connect to the Google Search integration 🔗

To start using Google Search in dashdash, you first need to connect it to your dashdash account. Head to the Integrations Marketplace, find the Google Search — Top Sites integration, and hit connect!

If you haven’t already, add a payment method to top up your dashdash Wallet. The prices of each function (which make a request to the Google Custom Search API) are documented on the integration page. You’ll only pay for the data/API calls you use.

Since Google Custom Search is part of our Instant Integrations, you can access their data using only your dashdash account — no need to go through the hassle of getting your own API key via the Google Cloud Platform. However, if you want to use your own API key, you can still do so. Simply click on Use your own keys on the integration page.

Step 2: Find people on LinkedIn 🔎

Let’s create your custom LinkedIn lead generation app in dashdash! With the Google Custom Search — Site Restricted integration, you can search LinkedIn profiles by using the following functions:

• SEARCH_LINKEDIN_COMPANY_GOOGLE
  This function searches for company profiles on LinkedIn using Google. Data includes link to profile, snippet, and more.
• SEARCH_LINKEDIN_PERSON_GOOGLE
This function searches for personal profiles on LinkedIn using Google. Data includes job title, company, link to profile, snippet, and more.

Create an app in dashdash. Set up two columns for a) the function and b) the organization you’re looking for. In this example, we've also added a column for the organization's URL. Use the next column to make your request:

A2 = Marketing
B2 = Spotify
D2 = SEARCH_LINKEDIN_PERSON_GOOGLE(A2&" "&B2)

Find people on LinkedIn based on function and organization

You will obtain {data}in D2 — an object that contains data on the top 10 search results from your request. If you click on the window toggle next to {data}, you can crawl the information directly from within the data explorer and parse any data objects you need. Simply click copy next to the data object, and paste the copied formula into the desired cell.

Here, we’d like to parse

• Full Name,
• Job Title (as displayed on LinkedIn),
• LinkedIn Profile Link

for each of the 10 search results.

Step 3: Get their Name, Title, and Profile Link 💁🏼‍♀️💁🏽‍♂️

3.1. Get the Full Name

Let’s parse the full name of all 10 results:

E2=PARSE(D2,"['items'][*].['pagemap'].['hcard'][0].['fn']")

In E2, you will also obtain {data}— a data object that contains the full name of all your 10 search results.

To populate those full names in a table, we’ll use the INSERT_DATA()function. This function matches data objects (here: E2) with table headers (here: A8) and automatically populates a table with your desired data objects:

A7=INSERT_DATA(E2,A8)

Get all names

If you’d like to overwrite the names each time you execute a new profile search instead of creating a data log, simply replace the INSERT_DATA function in cell A7 with OVERWRITE_DATA. This will insert new names below the output header each time you execute a new search.

Caution: With every new search, you would lose the data of your previous search.

3.2. Get the Job Title

Now, parse the job title of all 10 results:

F2=PARSE(D2,"['items'][*].['pagemap'].['hcard'][0].['title']")

{data}in F2 contains the job title of all your 10 search results. Populate those job titles into the “Title” column of your data table:

B7=INSERT_DATA(F2,B8)

3.3 Get the LinkedIn Profile Link

Lastly, let’s also get the LinkedIn profile link for all 10 results:

G2=PARSE(D2,"['items'][*].['link']")

{data}in G2 contains the profile links of all your 10 search results. Populate those links in the “Profile Link” column of your data table:

C7=INSERT_DATA(G2,C8)

Get all job titles and LinkedIn profile links

Now try to change either Function — this can also be a role like "CEO" or "VP of Sales"— or Organization of your query. New search results will be appended to your table automatically.

Again, feel free to use theOVERWRITE_DATA function in A7:C7 instead if you prefer to update the table content each time you execute a new profile search.

Bravo! 👏👏 You just generated your custom lead generation tool in a spreadsheet!

Ready to enrich your new leads with their email address? Connect to our Hunter.io integration and get email addresses of any professional in a few seconds! Learn how here.

We hope you enjoyed this how-to guide. For more, check out our forum, create your own guide and share it with the community, or let us know which use case you’d like to see featured next! ✌