How to get leads
from LinkedIn.

Your profile and posts: free, slow, and they compound. Someone reads three of your posts over two months, checks your profile, then messages you. It takes patience, and it's the route most B2B owners underuse.

Conversations: free, and only as good as the reason to start them. A comment on their post, a mutual connection, a question about something they wrote. Not a pitch to a stranger.

Ads: fast, measurable and dear. They suit businesses where a customer is worth a lot. See what LinkedIn ads cost before you start.

Your headline is the line people see next to every comment you make. 'Director at Smith & Co' tells them nothing. 'I help Hunter Valley wineries sell more direct' tells the right people to click.

The About section should answer the questions a buyer has before they'll talk to you: what you do, who it's for, how you work and what to do next. The Featured section is the place for the one thing you most want them to see, like a guide, or a short explainer of how you work.

Do the same for the company page. Buyers often check both before they reply.

The easy trap is writing for other people in your industry, because they're the ones who like and comment. Your buyers are quieter. Write about the problems they bring you, in their words, with the answer.

Consistency beats volume. One useful post a week, every week, does more than a burst of five and then nothing for a month.

Comments count as much as posts. A thoughtful comment on a post your buyers read puts your name and headline in front of them, without asking for anything.

The Spam Act covers commercial electronic messages sent to an email, instant messaging, telephone or 'similar' account. No court or regulator guidance has named LinkedIn, but a LinkedIn inbox looks a lot like a similar account. I'd treat any message that sells as if the Act applies.

That means three things, the same three the ACMA lists for email: consent, your name and contact details, and a way to opt out that you honour within 5 working days. Consent can be inferred from an existing business relationship, or where someone's work address is conspicuously published, the message relates to their job, and nothing says they don't want marketing. Having a public profile doesn't mean they've agreed to be pitched.

The ACMA reads 'commercial' broadly. Ticketek paid a $515,040 penalty, and part of the reason was that social media links in a banner made otherwise factual emails count as marketing.

Then there's LinkedIn's own rulebook. Its help centre says it doesn't permit third-party software, including crawlers, browser plug-ins and extensions, that scrapes, changes the look of or automates activity on the site. Its User Agreement covers bots and scraping too. Accounts that break the rules can be restricted.

Five questions about one message: whether it sells, why they'd expect to hear from you, whether it names you, whether they can opt out, and how it's sent. Nothing you click leaves your browser.

If you advertise, Lead Gen Forms are the usual starting point for leads. LinkedIn says they come pre-filled with profile data and connect to CRM and marketing tools, so the person can send their details in a couple of taps instead of typing them on a phone.

That ease cuts both ways. Leads arrive faster, and some people tap without much intent. Add one question that a serious buyer answers easily and a casual one skips, and call new leads quickly while they still remember the ad.

Someone who fills in your form has given you their details for a reason. Follow up on that reason. Adding them to a general newsletter needs its own consent.

Profile views and post likes are signals, not leads. Track every LinkedIn conversation and form lead into your CRM, then record what happened: meeting, proposal, deal or no.

After a quarter you'll know which route actually brings business. For many service firms it's the slow one. The B2B CRM tracking page shows how to set the stages up.