Table

of Contents
Why Hack LinkedIn? ............................................................................................... 3
Overview ............................................................................................................... 4
Prerequisites ........................................................................................................................................................ 4
Step 1: Construct LinkedIn Advanced Search .......................................................... 5
Boolean Examples ............................................................................................................................................. 5
Keywords ................................................................................................................................................................ 5
Company ................................................................................................................................................................. 5
Title .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6
Industry .................................................................................................................................................................. 6
Relevance .............................................................................................................................................................. 6
Step 2: Extract Results into CSV Files ...................................................................... 7
LinkedIns Terms of Service .......................................................................................................................... 8
LinkedIn vs. Sales Navigator ......................................................................................................................... 8
Saving the Results .............................................................................................................................................. 8
Step 3: Merge & Cleanup CSV Files ......................................................................... 9
Merging Multiple CSV Files ............................................................................................................................ 9
Delete Unwanted Records .............................................................................................................................. 9
Remove Unnecessary Data from Full Name ........................................................................................... 9
Get Correct Company Name ........................................................................................................................ 10
Convert Non-Printing Characters ............................................................................................................. 10
Step 4: Prepare for Email Search .......................................................................... 11
Find Provided Email Addresses & Domains ......................................................................................... 11
Split Full Name into First and Last ........................................................................................................... 11
Find Company Email Domain ..................................................................................................................... 11
Step 5: Address Collection .................................................................................... 13
Most Common Work Email Formats ....................................................................................................... 13
Hunter.io Process ............................................................................................................................................. 14
Conversion Rates ............................................................................................................................................. 15
Done for You Service ............................................................................................ 15
Appendix 1: Additional Prospecting & Business Generation Tools ........................ 16
Recommended Third Party Products ...................................................................................................... 16


Prepared by Michael Haupt & Associates
Cape Town, South Africa
November 2016
Version 1.0

W: https://michaelhaupt.com
LI: https://za.linkedin.com/in/michaelhaupt
E: hello@michaelhaupt.com
T: +27 21 813 6206

Why Hack LinkedIn?

Response rates from traditional LinkedIn messaging methods have plummeted
to less than 2% (and thats if youre lucky). If youre getting great response rates
from LinkedIn, this document is not for you. If youve given up on LinkedIn, this
document is for you, because LinkedIn is still the largest and most useful B2B
lead database in the world, provided you know how to use it to best effect.
Were going to explain the process to gather company email addresses (the most
important, but missing data point) from highly qualified prospects sourced via
LinkedIn.
Why?
So that you can communicate directly with prospects when and where it matters:
at their place of work. Forget social media, content/inbound marketing or paid
advertising. These methods make others rich and you frustrated with sub-
standard and expensive non-results. But we dont need to tell you that youve
experienced these silver bullets (which turn out to be nothing more than
empty promises) yourself.
This process is simple and easy to understand, but not
necessarily easy. The results are, however, spectacular.
You can, of course, choose to take the lazy route and message prospects directly
via LinkedIn (like everyone else does). If you do, your message will be filtered
out 99% of the time.
Why do we say that?
LinkedIn calls itself the worlds largest professional network, omitting to point
out that the only way you can contact these professionals (including using
LinkedIns paid solutions) is via throw-away, heavily filtered personal email
addresses like Gmail. The reason is simple: many unscrupulous marketers
jumped on the bandwagon early on and flooded LinkedIn with promotional
messages. Users very quickly learned to filter any message originating from
LinkedIn. As a result, 99% of messages sent via LinkedIn (including very
expensive InMails) are routed to personal email addresses. Im willing to bet that
your primary email address in your LinkedIn account is not your work address.
On the rare occasion when a LinkedIn users primary email is their work
address, these messages are usually filtered to an email folder.
Translation: LinkedIn messages are seldom if ever seen.
The alternative is to put in a little more effort than the masses do and reap
spectacular rewards. Im talking about the difference between 1 and 2%
response rates to response rates as high as 73%. Were not talking about small
differences here. Bear this in mind as you work though the process.

How to Hack LinkedIn

Overview
The process consists of 5 simple steps, which well explain in further detail. If
you need help with any of the steps, or you dont have the necessary
prerequisites, youll find a Done for You Service introduced on page 15.
Briefly, the steps are:

Step 1 Identification: Use LinkedIns powerful Boolean search features

to identify highly qualified prospects.
Step 2 Extraction: LinkedIns data is valuable, but only as far as it can be
extracted and worked with. This step uses LinkedIns API and third party
tools to suck the data out of LinkedIn into a spreadsheet where we can
manipulate and enrich the data to our hearts content.
Step 3 Sanitisation: LinkedIns data is only as good as the effort each
user puts into perfecting their profile, and how much they choose to make
public. This step uses data sorting and filtering to remove the crud.
Step 4 Data Manipulation: In this step we perform a few minor data
manipulation processes in preparation for automagically sourcing
company email addresses.
Step 5 Email Collection: This step uses LinkedIns API and third party
tools to match a LinkedIn profile to known company email addresses.
This is the core (and most valuable) part of the entire process.

Side Note: You will notice that this document is written for a South African
audience, but the principles can be applied in any country except Canada, since
they have strict laws regarding email communication.

Prerequisites
You (or the person who will do this on your behalf) will need the following in
order to get the most value from this process.

A LinkedIn account, preferably a paid option. We recommend Sales

Navigator (R700 per month) but Business Plus (R750 per month) or
Executive (R1260 per month) are valid options too. To upgrade go to
https://premium.linkedin.com.
A basic ability to navigate around LinkedIn.
A basic understanding of data manipulation in Excel.
A Google account to use Google spreadsheets and associated Add-Ons for
data manipulation.

Lets dive in.

How to Hack LinkedIn

Step 1: Construct LinkedIn Advanced Search

If you already have a good idea of your ideal prospects, youre good to go with
building an advanced LinkedIn search using their Boolean operators. If you
havent yet defined your client avatar, we recommend Hubspots Persona
Template: http://offers.hubspot.com/free-template-creating-buyer-personas.
You will need to enter an email address to get it, but its worth it.
When running LinkedIn Boolean searches, the overall precedence is:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Quotes []
Parentheses [( )]
NOT
AND
OR

If youre not familiar with exactly how LinkedIns Boolean search works, we
recommend reading this LinkedIn article.
Your advanced search should ideally return 1k-2k results for each batch. Since
LinkedIn returns results ranked by relevance, results more than 2,000 tend to be
less relevant and therefore less responsive to your emails. Dont be fooled by
large numbers of results.
Save your advanced search and set the reporting frequency to Weekly so that
youll be notified of new people who match your criteria.

Boolean Examples
Keywords
We generally avoid using Keyword searches, however this search is useful if
youre looking for people who have been recommended for specific skills. An
example would be:
("web development" OR "search engine optimisation" OR "wordpress") NOT
("social media" OR "content marketing")
Note that the case of the query is irrelevant we simply like to capitalise Boolean
operators to make them easier to identify in long search terms.
Company
If you enter any value in Company, you will be asked whether you want to search
only in Current Company, Past Company or Both. We generally use Current
Company to exclude people from companies we already have a relationship with.
An example would be:

How to Hack LinkedIn


NOT ("Standard Bank" OR "Absa" OR "Nedbank" OR "FNB" OR "Vodacom" OR
"Liberty" OR "Discovery" OR "Sasol" OR "Barclays" OR "Dimension Data" OR
"MTN" OR "South African Breweries" OR "Unilever" OR "EOH" OR "IBM" OR
"Old Mutual" OR "Sanlam" OR "Edcon" OR "Woolworths" OR "Investec" OR
"Eskom" OR "Business Connexion" OR "Accenture" OR "Microsoft" OR "Telkom"
OR "Internet Solutions" OR "University of Johannesburg" OR "Distell" OR
"SABC")
Title
We find Title to be the most useful filter for an advanced LinkedIn search,
because it allows you to target the precise level of decision maker you need. Here
is an example to find senior business development people:
("sales" OR "marketing" OR "business development" OR "growth") AND
("manager" OR "director" OR "head" OR "lead" OR "VP" OR "president" OR
"managing") NOT ("self employed" OR "consultant" OR "independent" OR
"coordinator" OR "co-ordinator" OR "secretary" OR "account manager" OR
"accounts manager" OR "account director" OR "account executive" OR "account
management" OR "branch manager" OR "brand manager" OR "creative director"
OR "copywriter" OR "art director" OR "CEO" OR "chief executive" OR "CFO" OR
"chief financial" OR "COO" OR "chief operations" OR "chief operating" OR "CTO"
OR "chief technology" OR "client service" OR "partner" OR "trainee" OR "social
media" OR "email" OR "CRM" OR "retail" OR "assistant")
Industry
We generally ignore LinkedIns industry classification because there is no
consistency in how its used. For example, the CFO of a retail group sometimes
selects Financial Services and sometimes Retail as their industry. One refers to
the individuals industry and the other to the organisations industry. Both are
correct, but neither is helpful when trying to narrow search results.
You can find the official list of industries here:
https://developer.linkedin.com/docs/reference/industry-codes

Relevance
The key in this step is to ruthlessly narrow the search to exclude anyone who
doesnt match your ideal client avatar. Spend a fair chunk of time browsing
through individual profiles in the results and use what you find to continue
refining the search. When we do this for our clients, we usually go through ten or
more iterations before were ready to progress to Step 2.

How to Hack LinkedIn

Step 2: Extract Results into CSV Files

Now that we have a highly refined list of prospects, its time to get the data out of
LinkedIn so that we can manipulate it.
There are a number of third party applications that scrape publicly available data
from LinkedIn into extract files. Here are the most recommended:
aeroleads.com

Find Contact Details of any Company and Person with email

and phone number.

data-miner.io

Data Miner is an add-on for Google chrome browser that helps

you extract data from web pages and into an Excel
spreadsheet or CSV file.

dexi.io

Web data processing tool for professionals

diffbot.com

Web Data Extraction Using Artificial Intelligence

import.io

Simple, Quick Data Extraction. Import.io combines the benefit

of automatic list extraction and flexible point and click
interface all on the web.

lix-it.com

Export search results from LinkedIn

octatools.com

Start Scraping Email Addresses and Social Media Profiles Today

octoparse.com

Automated Web Scraping Software. No Programming Needed

parsehub.com

Easily extract data from any website. ParseHub works with

single-page apps, multi-page apps and just about any other
modern web technology.

profilehopper.com Automatically find new leads, research email addresses and

more.

salestools.io

Salestools extracts data through social networks and connects

you to your potential customers via their actual Emails and
Phone numbers.

skrapp.io

Smart and productive B2B prospecting on Linkedin.

We generally prefer data-miner.io because of its superior price/performance

ratio and the relative ease of setup, since they provide access to recipes their
community has developed.

How to Hack LinkedIn

LinkedIns Terms of Service

Strictly speaking, LinkedIns ToS forbid the scraping of their site. Personally, we
believe that the act of scraping shouldnt be in question, but rather what the
results are used for. If you have a service or product that genuinely helps people
and you ethically want to help more people, there is nothing wrong with
scraping LinkedIn. You will have to make this decision for yourself.
Be aware that LinkedIn monitors the number of page hits per account and can
ban users for excessive hits. The ban sometimes last for 24 hours, sometimes for
a week and sometimes for a month. We have also heard of lifetime bans, but
these are rare. For this reason, we recommend setting the auto-pagination
feature of DataMiner to 60 seconds or higher. If you use a different tool, look for
ways of slowing down the number of page requests.

LinkedIn vs. Sales Navigator

Most of the scraping tools listed have the ability to mine standard LinkedIn
results as well as Sales Navigator results and the available data is very different
depending on which option you choose. Here is a quick summary:

Pros

Cons

LinkedIn

Sales Navigator

Can auto-paginate through

results, making data
collection relatively
painless

Higher level of accuracy in Titles than

LI Basic

Company has to be
extracted from Title and
often refers to a previous
position

Cannot auto-paginate through results,

so you will need to manually click
Next Page and re-scrape each page of
results

Lists Company in separate column

Title is found in any one of 3 columns

so a bit of data manipulation is
required
In general, we prefer Sales Navigator to LinkedIn Basic.

Saving the Results

We generally save a number of smaller files, for example, different files for
different regions or company sizes. Save these files in CSV format so that they
can be easily merged into a single file.

How to Hack LinkedIn

Step 3: Merge & Cleanup CSV Files

Merging Multiple CSV Files
If youd like to merge all of your resulting extract files into one, this is a good
time to do so.
On Mac, use Terminal; on Windows use Command:

Change directory to the correct file location

Windows: type file1.csv file2.csv > outputfile.csv
Linux, MacOS: cat file1.csv file2.csv > outputfile.csv

Delete Unwanted Records

There will be a number of results that wont be useful and these should be
deleted to save unnecessary email lookups later on.
1. Sort by Full Name and remove immediate errors e.g. (account closed)
and LinkedIn Member (this will appear when an individual doesnt want
their details publicly displayed).
2. Remove Duplicates. If Excel doesnt play ball, add 3 columns called Dup
Name Dup Title, Dup Company with the following formulas: =A2=A3;
=B2=B3; =C2=C3. If the result is TRUE then the row is a duplicate. Insert 3
rows and Copy, Paste Special as Values Dup Name Dup Title, Dup
Company. Delete the original Dup Name Dup Title, Dup Company
columns. Filter all FALSEs out, starting with Dup Company, then Dup
Title, then Dup Name. All rows in the resulting filter view can be deleted.
Delete the 3 Dup columns.
3. Remove Unwanted Titles. LinkedIn results are sometimes not as relevant
as you would like, particularly when working with more than 2,000
results or when including Keywords in your search. Delete any unwanted
Titles that might have slipped through by filtering the Title column and
deleting any Titles you originally excluded in your Title Boolean search.

Remove Unnecessary Data from Full Name

Search for (, -, _, MBA, MBL, BSc, Ph.D., nee, formerly, LION, connections, " CA "
(space CA space), " SA ", "." (fullstop) and "," (comma) in Full Name and edit as
required. You will have to make your best guess as far as nicknames and maiden
names are concerned, since this will impact whether the email address can be
found. Where required, reverse Last Name and First Name sequence (when
searching for commas).
If you happen to spot first names that consist of two words e.g. Jo Anne,
hyphenate or combine these into one e.g. Joanne or Jo-Anne. This is because two-
word first names are usually combined into one in email addresses. Again, best
guess this is not an exact science.

How to Hack LinkedIn


Once complete, each cell should contain only First and Last Name with a single
space between each.

Get Correct Company Name

If youve retrieved your results from Sales Navigator, Headline, Headline2 and
Headline3 are all possible columns for Company Name. Filter Headline to show
only blanks. Replace blanks with values from Headline2 (Formula: =D2). Filter
Headline to show only 0s. Replace 0s with values from Headline3 (Formula:
=E2). You now have a fully populated Headline column. Insert new column called
Company. Copy Headline and Paste Special as Values into Company. Delete
Headline, Headline2 and Headline3 columns.
If youve retrieved your results from LinkedIn Basic, you will need to extract the
Company name from the Current Job field. Insert 4 columns to the right of
Current Job with the following values:
Heading Formula

Explanation

Count

=FIND(" at ",A2)

Finds the start of the Company Name

Length

=LEN(A2)

Counts the number of letters in Current

Job

Company =RIGHT(A2,C2-B2 - 3)

Extracts Company Name

Copy and paste the Company Name column into a new column as Values and
delete the 3 calculation columns.

Convert Non-Printing Characters

You will notice that names with non-standard letters (e.g. Krger) appear in
Excel with non-printing characters. You can either look up each LinkedIn profile
to replace the non-standard letter with a standard letter, or use the following
table to search and replace.
LinkedIn

Excel

Replace With
Delete

or

How to Hack LinkedIn

10


Now that weve cleaned up our search results, save this master file in XLS format.

Step 4: Prepare for Email Search

Find Provided Email Addresses & Domains
Some people are open networkers and provide a company email address or
company domain for you. Some companies list their domain as their company
name e.g. takealot.com.
Add a column called OpenNet and search for "@", ".com", ".co.uk" and ".co.za"
(or your countrys TLD). Extract email addresses and domains (without www or
http://) into this new column when found. Remove the data from the original
column.

Split Full Name into First and Last

In order to find company email addresses, we need First and Last names in
separate fields since LinkedIn provides only Full Name.
Insert 4 columns to the right of Full Name with the following values:
Heading

Formula

Explanation

Count

=FIND(" ",A2)

Finds the end of the First Name

Length

=LEN(A2)

Counts the number of letters in name

First Name =LEFT(A2,B2-1)

Extracts First Name

Last Name =RIGHT(A2,C2-B2) Extracts Last Name

Copy and paste the First Name and Last Name columns into 2 new columns as
Values and delete the 4 calculation columns.

Find Company Email Domain

In the next step well use third party tools to find any company email addresses,
but these tools work best when we can provide the correct website address, or
more specifically the correct email domain. For example, Adcock Ingrams
website is adcockingram.com but their email domain is adcock.com.
For each record, visit their LinkedIn profile, hover over their current title and
click on the company name that appears. This sill take you to their company
website. Check their Contact page for any obvious clues as to their email domain
and copy and paste into a new column called Domain.
This is admittedly the most time-consuming part of the process, so you might
want to outsource this to a temp agency or Amazons Mechanical Turk.

How to Hack LinkedIn

11


You might also be interested in a database of over 6,000 of South Africas largest
companies together with their email formats, which we built from scratch and
add to on a daily basis. Ping us a quick email to hello@michaelhaupt.com and
lets chat.
Now that you have company email domains, you have everything you need to
start automagically finding company email addresses.

How to Hack LinkedIn

12

Step 5: Address Collection

There are a number of third party applications that can provide email addresses
given first and last names and company name. Results are never 100% accurate,
but you can generally find 80-90%, even with non-US companies. Here are the
most recommended:
Hunter

Direct access to all the web's email addresses. No longer waste your
time looking for contact information.

Rapportive

Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside

Gmail.

Email
Format

Save time and energy - find the email address formats in use at
thousands of companies.

FullContact

FullContact pulls in all your contacts, automatically updates them with

social profile information and photos, then syncs them back to the
places you need them - so you always have a complete view of your
connections.

SellHack

Sell Hack is a browser extension to help you build targeted lists so you
can send cold emails to your leads.

LiveHive

LiveHive improves your teams productivity, email effectiveness, and

follow-updelivering a 4x increase in connect ratethrough
automation and engagement analytics.

Toofr

Toofr figures out business email addresses using only the first and last
names, and the website domain.

We prefer Hunter, because of the powerful Google Sheets Add-on.

Most Common Work Email Formats

Many of the tools provide email verifiers, which allow you to guess an email
address using the most common email formats and then to ping their email
servers to see whether the address is valid. The following email formats cover
about 93% of corporate addresses:
first@domain.com
flast@domain.com
first.last@domain.com
firstlast@domain.com
firstl@domain.com
fl@domain.com

last@domain.com
lastf@domain.com
f.last@domain.com

How to Hack LinkedIn

13

Hunter.io Process
1. Install the Chrome Add-on: https://hunter.io/help/articles/2
2. Install the Google Sheets Add-on: https://hunter.io/help/articles/10
3. Upload your final spreadsheet to Google Sheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/
4. Use Hunters Email Finder in the Sheets Add-on to find low-hanging fruit
using only First Name, Last Name and Company Name. (Hit rate will be
low, but its worth performing this step.)
5. Using either a third party tool or a manual process, find the email
domains for each search result that doesnt yet have an email address.
This will require finding each companys website and checking their
Contact page for their email domain.
6. Once you have all the email domains, repeat the process using Hunters
Email Finder and tell Hunter which column contains the Domain.
And thats the process complete!
You now have a list of highly qualified prospects, together with their company
email addresses. Upload these into your CRM or create a mail merge with your
desktop mail program.
Next well discuss how to achieve the best possible conversion rates.

How to Hack LinkedIn

14

Conversion Rates
Naturally, the conversion rate youll achieve depends on the type of email you
send, so keep these basic principles in mind:
1. The message must appear like a personal, one-to-one message. If
youre going to go to the effort of gathering email addresses, dont blow
your chances by sending yet another of the million canned emails sent
every day. Just like you can, others can spot a canned email very quickly.
2. The message must create the expectation of a response. Never expect
to close business or set a meeting date and time on the first outreach. The
objective in the first cold email is to simply get a reply. The most effective
way to achieve this is to ask a question pertinent to the recipient.
3. The message must start a conversation about something the reader
has top of mind. Its definitely not about you or your company. How many
chest-beating emails have you received that you simply deleted because
the sender didnt demonstrate that they understood you or your
business? Put yourself in your recipients shoes before writing a single
email.
4. Keep it brief (usually less than 5 lines). The majority of these emails will
be read on a mobile device while the recipient is on the go. Whatever you
do, never start the email with Its Joe Soap from XYZ Corporation. This is
an open invitation to have your email immediately deleted.
Enjoy the extra business youll generate as a result of starting conversations with
these new leads!
Youre welcome.

Michael Haupt
The Authentic Business Growth Strategist &
Resultist
Cape Town, South Africa
November 2016

Done for You Service

By the way, if you dont have the time or the resources to implement the process
weve described, our team would be delighted to help. Pricing starts as low as
R10 per lead if you book in November 2016. Why not start 2017 ready to hit the
ground running with a red-hot list of prospects and an email sequence ready to
go?
Contact me via LinkedIn or email me directly at hello@michaelhaupt.com and Ill
send the details.

How to Hack LinkedIn

15

Appendix 1: Additional Prospecting & Business Generation

Tools
The 6 Most Effective B2B Marketing Strategies
The 6 Most Effective Start-up Marketing Strategies
How to do a mail merge email with Office for Mac
How to use Blockspring to find company domains

Recommended Third Party Products

Category

Product

Description

Lead
Generation

Capture

Capture is a Google Chrome plugin that makes

prospect research a breeze. With a few clicks you can
capture company and contact information from web
pages, social profiles and search engine result pages
and then auto-magically append additional contact
information from all across the web.

Lead
Generation

Bant.io

Get Hot B2B leads straight to your inbox

Lead
Generation

Data.com

For when you need instant access to complete

business contact and company profiles.

Lead
Generation

LeadFuze

An automated sales rep for B2B service companies.

Lead
Generation

LinkedIn Sales Find the right prospects quickly with LinkedIn Sales
Navigator
Navigator. This sales tool features sophisticated
algorithm to give you lead recommendations that are
tailored to you. Easily save leads and create a sales
lead list.

Lead
Generation

Salesloft

Lead
Generation

ZoomInfo

Your Sales Stack, Integrated

Lead
Hubspot
Intelligence Persona
Template

The ZoomInfo Growth Acceleration Platform

combines the world's most comprehensive B2B
database with sales & marketing solutions that fuel
growth.
It's important to establish buyer personas for your
business so you can segment your audience and
create stronger marketing campaigns.

How to Hack LinkedIn

16


Lead
DataFox
Intelligence

A modern approach to prospecting, tracking, and

pipeline management. DataFox uses algorithms and
natural language processing to gather, organize, and
derive insights on companies.

Lead
Datanyze
Intelligence

Choose the technology providers you want us to

track, and well show you which websites have
started or stopped using their solution each day.
Track the providers you compete or work closely with
to uncover a new list of high-potential websites every
morning.

Lead
DiscoverOrg
Intelligence

The leading sales & marketing intelligence solution.

100% human-verified data.

Lead
Inside View
Intelligence

InsideView is a market intelligence platform. We

aggregate, curate and deliver inside information and
intelligence about your target market and present it
to you when and where you need it.

Lead
TermScout
Intelligence

Transforming data into intelligence. We are intensely

focused on sourcing immense quantities of data,
putting it through our proprietary refinement process
and providing valuable sales intelligence for our
customers.

How to Hack LinkedIn

17