The Sales Agent's Guide to LinkedIn Prospecting in 2025

Summary:

• LinkedIn is an essential prospecting tool for sales teams in 2025. It offers credibility and visibility that cold email and texting can’t match—especially when you use it to warm up leads for phone conversations.
• A high-converting profile should focus on the prospect’s needs, not just your credentials. Use the right keywords, images, and language to attract and engage your target audience.
• Prospecting effectively on LinkedIn means using filters, search, and social signals to identify high-intent leads—not just blasting out generic connection requests.
• Messaging strategies should be personalized, relevant, and low-pressure to spark real engagement and move conversations beyond LinkedIn.
• PhoneBurner makes it easy to convert those conversations into sales by integrating LinkedIn leads into your workflow and helping you follow up at scale with voice, email, and automation.

If you still think LinkedIn is just for networking, you’re only scratching the surface. Mastering the world’s largest business-oriented social network isn’t just about the connections you make—it’s about the relationships you build.

Competitive sales professionals can—and should—be using LinkedIn to source, engage, and close new business. With more decision-makers spending time on the platform, LinkedIn prospecting is now essential for building every part of your sales pipeline.

Here’s your field-tested guide from our pros at PhoneBurner to help you use LinkedIn to prospect smarter, faster, and more effectively. We’ll also show you how to take the conversations you start there to the next level with our industry-leading power dialer that streamlines follow-ups and countless other tasks for reps.

Why LinkedIn Is Still Essential for Sales Reps

Cold outreach is harder than it’s ever been. Not only do sales reps need to be careful to call prospects who have opted in to receive their communications, but potential customers are tuning out other kinds of cold outreach as well. Emails go unopened. Texts get deleted. You get the idea.

Set against that bleak background, LinkedIn offers an opportunity that those other channels can’t: credibility. That’s because it allows you to build familiarity, establish thought leadership, and warm up leads long before you ever call them with a power dialer like PhoneBurner. In short, it sets the stage for more productive conversations.

And the numbers back this up:

• 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make buying decisions
• Sales reps who regularly engage with prospects on LinkedIn are 51% more likely to hit quota

So how can you use LinkedIn to your advantage? We’re glad you asked.

Building a Profile That Attracts Prospects

When you reach out to someone on LinkedIn, you need to be prepared for them to look you up. Because assuming you’ve sent a compelling-enough message to pique their interest (more on that later), that’s probably the first thing they’re going to do.

So before you start prospecting, make sure your profile is more than just a resume. It should speak directly to the pain points and goals of your ideal customer. That means you should lookthem up as well.

Look at the keywords they use in their headlines, the language they use in their content, the people and topics they’re engaging with on the platform—and use this to inform the profile you create.

Remember: your profile is as much (or more) about the person you’re trying to reach as it is about you

Tips for a Profile that Converts:

• Use a professional headshot and banner image (this one should go without saying)
• Craft a specific headline that communicates value (e.g., "Helping SaaS teams scale outbound without spamming buyers")
• Turn your About section into a mini sales page—highlight who you help, how, and the results you get
• Include social proof, client wins, and strong CTAs in your Featured section
• Regularly post content that establishes you as an authority in your industry. The content you create is just as (or even more) important than your profile itself.

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Content

As Chelsea Olsen points out on an episode of our Unblocked podcast, you’ll also want to make sure that you create content for your profile that’s optimized for the platform.  LinkedIn has its own specific algorithm that it uses to determine what posts and profiles to show users.

https://www.phoneburner.com/unblocked/eps-03

Figuring it out can be a bit of a rabbit hole, but here are the main elements to help guide what you create:

• Your activity: what accounts do you follow, who do you engage with, and how?
• Your public prominence: how many people are engaging with you, and who are they?
• Search similarity: LinkedIn wants to see what other users like you are searching for, and uses this data to gauge how relevant your content will be to their interests and audiences.
• Page name: Include keywords you want to show up in search results. This applies to both your profile headline and any content you share via your profile.
• Followers and connections: members who are connected to the same page or person are more likely to show up for each other.
• Volume and quality of engagement: the more people discuss or react to what you post, the more momentum it gets.

Prospecting Techniques to Find & Connect With the Right Leads

The beauty of LinkedIn is the ability to laser-target the right people. But most reps are still using generic search and spraying connection requests.

If that’s what your team is doing, you’re not even tapping the platform’s potential. Here’s how to level up:

• Look for people engaging with competitor content or posting about pain points you solve
• Leverage 2nd-degree connections with warm intros when possible
• Consider options like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to filter by role, industry, company size, and geography
• Save leads to custom lists so you can organize follow-up outreach around segments or campaigns

Messaging Strategies That Actually Get Responses

Once you've identified your target and set up your profile to welcome them—and only then—it’s time to reach out.

It’s tempting to start sending messages right away, but don’t overlook the power of commenting on the content of people you’re trying to reach. Engaging with their content in thoughtful ways that add to the conversation shows off your expertise and lets them know you respect theirs.

When you finally do send a message to their inbox, you’ll want to be careful. What you say in that first message (and beyond) matters. Generic messages go straight to the archive.

One reason for this has to do with AI. You never want to give your prospect a reason to think you’re taking a low-effort approach when you try to connect with them. So you need to make it clear right off the bat that you’re a real person making a real effort to reach them for a real reason.

Better Ways to Message:

• Try messaging people who view your profile. LinkedIn actually lets you see this, which allows you to send out more targeted messages.
• Use their name—but try shortening it or using a common nickname (like “John” instead of “Johnathan”)
• Personalize your opening based on their recent activity: “Saw your post on [topic]…”
• Lead with a shared problem: "A lot of RevOps teams I talk to are struggling with [issue]—is that on your radar too?"
• Make it low-commitment: "Are you open to a 2-minute chat next week to swap ideas?"

Move the Conversation Forward

Once you’ve built momentum on LinkedIn, don’t let it die in the DMs. Your next step is to bring the prospect to a point where you can show them exactly how valuable you are.

As Morgan J. Ingram, CEO of Amp Creative, says on another episode of Unblocked, a big part of this is about finding your “superpower” as a salesperson. What do you do (or what asset do you have) that gives you a unique edge when you move the prospect further into your pipeline?

For him, it’s video—but for many of us, it’s the phone. And when you trust PhoneBurner to facilitate your sales calls, you can maximize the quality of those conversations so that you’re giving yourself the best possible chance to convert.

View the full video here.

How PhoneBurner Helps You Turn LinkedIn Connections into Conversions

• Import qualified LinkedIn leads into your PhoneBurner CRM or integrate with tools like Zapier
• Segment LinkedIn-sourced leads with custom tags
• Use PhoneBurner’s power dialer to call leads you’ve already engaged on LinkedIn and connect on a deeper level
• Drop a voicemail or send an email follow-up to move leads through to the end of your pipeline and ultimately close more deals

See Also: The Beginner's Guide to Relationship Selling

Use the Right Tools to Maximize Prospecting Efficiency

The sales game has changed. Reps who build relationships on LinkedIn and follow up with tools like PhoneBurner are converting at higher rates, building stronger pipelines, and standing out in crowded inboxes.

Ready to bring your social prospecting and phone outreach together? Try PhoneBurner for free today and close more deals from your LinkedIn efforts.