How to get clients on LinkedIn comes down to five building blocks: positioning, profile, content,prospecting, closing. Everyone knows the list. What far fewer people know is that the five sit in afixed order, and that out of order, each one quietly damages the work of the others.
Everything has already been written about how to get clients on LinkedIn
Type how to get clients on LinkedIn into Google and you'll get several thorough guides, oftenfree, often correct. The About section, the headline, connection degrees, how often to post, howto send requests. Everything on how to use LinkedIn to get clients is out there, and it's good.
What's never in any of them
None of them tells you where to start. Each one hands you a list of levers, and the unspokenassumption is that you can pull them in any order, or all at once. That's exactly where it breaksdown, because these levers aren't independent. They feed each other, and they only feed inone direction.
These five levers aren't a shopping list. They're a chain. A link put in too early won't hold,however good the work behind it.
The five building blocks of how to get clients on LinkedIn
Positioning. Profile. Content. Prospecting. Closing. Nothing secret about that list, you'll find itelsewhere. What matters is that it reads left to right and never any other way.
Why each one depends on the one before it
The profile translates the positioning. With no decision upstream, there's nothing to translate.The content extends the profile, and sends people back to it to have their impression confirmed.Prospecting leans on what the content has already established, and without it, every messagestarts from zero. Closing picks up what the prospecting implied. Each block consumes the onebefore it, and works badly when that one doesn't exist yet.
Posting before you've decided who you're talking to is real work, done in a direction nobody haspicked yet.
The most common case by far
When someone sets out to work out how to get clients on LinkedIn, the usual point of entry iscontent. That makes sense. It's the visible part, the part you watch other people do, the part thatlooks available right now. It also looks like the fastest way to attract clients on LinkedIn. So youstart posting.
What happens next
You write without having decided who you're talking to, so you talk to everyone, so you interestyour peers and not your buyers. The view counts sometimes go up, the comments come in, andnothing converts. From there you conclude the problem is the format, the frequency or thealgorithm, and you change those settings. It's one of the most demoralizing situations I run into,because the work is real and it can't produce a result in that configuration
Posting before you've decided who you're talking to is real work, done in a direction nobody haspicked yet.
The other entry point, rarer and more expensive
Some people start with prospecting, usually when the calendar empties out and the pressurebuilds. You send requests, you write messages, you follow up. It's the step that feels most liketaking action.
Why it costs so much out of sequence
Prospecting launched with no clear positioning and no profile behind it sends every prospect toa page that confirms nothing. They look, they can't work out precisely what you sell, they don'treply. And unlike content, prospecting burns through a finite list. Those people have beencontacted. They won't be contacted again on the same terms. It's the one block where mistakesdon't come back.
Badly targeted content costs you time. Badly targeted prospecting costs you prospects, andthose don't come back.
Why nobody gives you the orderBecause an order
doesn't transfer in an article. A tactic reads in three minutes and gets appliedthat evening. A sequence requires looking at one specific situation, deciding what's missing, andaccepting that you won't do the visible part first. That doesn't fit in a guide.
Where it actually gets built
It's the first thing we settle in the system, before a single line of profile gets written. The methodbehind it is the one I built for my own business and then taught to more than 120 independentsand service companies, so we already know the sequence works. The difference is that here, Irun it. We start again from the first block, and everything after it gets much simpler to build.
Key takeaways
- Everything on how to get clients on LinkedIn is free, widely available and mostly good.The order isn't.
- Five blocks, one sequence: positioning, profile, content, prospecting, closing.
- Starting with content is the most common case, and the most demoralizing.
- Starting with prospecting is rarer, and it's the one that costs the most.
The question worth asking
Of the five blocks, which one have you actually settled, and which one are you compensating for
Working in parallel is fine for the last three, once the foundation is set.Content, prospecting and closing can move together and feed each other. Positioning andprofile, though, come first, and in that order. They're what give the other three something to workwith. Moving ahead on content while you're still undecided about your target client meansproducing material you'll have to redo once the decision is made.
Positioning usually gets settled in a few daysof thinking, provided you accept giving up clients you could have taken. It's the giving up thattakes the time, not the analysis. The profile follows quickly once the decision is made, becauseat that point you're only translating. Most of the time what blocks people isn't technical difficulty,it's the reluctance to narrow down
Not much about the sequence itself, which stays thesame. What changes is who executes what. Positioning can't be delegated, it's an owner'sdecision. The profile and the content can be produced by somebody else, provided the decisionhas been made upstream. Otherwise you're delegating an ambiguity and you get it backamplified. Closing stays with whoever sells, almost every time.
No, nothing requires it.The question is purely commercial. If your prospects check that the company exists before committing, the missing page leaves a gap that gets noticed. If you sell to owners who decide on their own and already know you through your profile or a referral, nobody will go looking for it. The test isn't your legal structure, it's whether a verification step exists in your clients' buying
Would you rather just talk it through?
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LinkedIn marketing agency and B2B marketing in New York. From your LinkedIn profile to client acquisition: profile optimization, done-for-you prospecting, brand, website and search. Muriel Touati, LinkedIn coach and digital strategist.
