Using Base CRM for Easy Lead Generation from LinkedIn

A business without leads for the sales or business development people is a tough place to be. 


Leads from your ideal, target customers are the essence of all businesses and you need to find them quickly and efficiently.


As a start up business, lead generation often starts with a handful of customers you already know who can help you get your business going. Thereafter, lead generation relies on your marketing campaigns and your sales efforts to find new prospects.

Lead generation from social networking sites

Fortunately, for business development professionals, lead generation is a lot easier because of social media and social networking sites than it was ten or fifteen years ago. The best one for finding new prospects for my business is LinkedIn. You can easily find your ideal customers by using a simple search term on the site and it will bring up anyone who matches those keywords.


Having a paid for account on LinkedIn is even better for lead generation because it allows you to set up some 'Saved Searches' which will do a weekly crawl for you to bring up any new prospects who match your criteria. Business development becomes a whole lot easier when you are not having to trawl through paper directories or Rolodex files to find customers.

No more copy and paste

The only challenge with this highly efficient business development and lead generation activity on LinkedIn is recording the details of your new prospects into your CRM software (if you have any). This can take time when you have to copy and paste people's details into your CRM (customer relationship management) software. In fact, it's a chore.


Fortunately, there is a great solution at hand to help you make the most of your business development activities on LinkedIn which can save you hours of dull work.

Base CRM Contact Clipper

My business uses Base CRM to handle our account management for prospects and customers because it is very simple to use and easy to learn, as well as being powerful. But, one of its best functions is the extension designed to be used in Google's web browser, Chrome, which copies an individuals details from LinkedIn into Base CRM with the click of a button. It's brilliantly simple and has saved me hours of typing and copying which I can spend on providing useful, relevant content to these prospects through other social media activities to convert them into customers.


Without the Base CRM extension to connect to LinkedIn, the sites were great in isolation but presented a significant challenge in the time needed to identify prospects and record them into the CRM. Now, I can do this work in a fraction of the time which makes me more competitive and helps me fill my pipeline more quickly.


Base CRM is free to use and LinkedIn costs me less then £20 a month for a 'Pro' account. This is a tiny amount to pay relative to the information I can gather about ideal customers. I could several hundreds of pounds to attend conferences to achieve the same amount of lead generation for the business.


To find out more about Base CRM, go to the CRM Consulting page on Digital Business.