As a social media for business people, Linkedin can be a great place to build sales funnel, opening doors to many opportunities.

To some, it can even be the primary source to grow their businesses.

LinkedIn that has been acquired by Microsoft, has combined LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamic 364 and Office 365. This integration of social and sales data, can make things easier for sales representatives to find the right prospects and engage them throughout the entire sales cycle.

Even without spending on marketing budget, you can use your free LinkedIn account. and follow the following tips to generate sales leads.

Optimizing Your Profile For Sales

If you have a job, your LinkedIn Profile should be used as a sales tool instead of a resume. Instead of focusing on your past experiences, you should create a profile that demonstrates how you can add value to your current role.

• Always have a professional profile photo.
• Have a customized branded banner photo with your company's logo and slogan.
• Connect with the right people.
• Include attention-grabbing keywords in your headline.
• Show how you add value to your clients.
• Post links to your company's contents.

You can then use LinkedIn's search feature to get in touch with the teams of a company you're targeting. View their profile to see if the two of you share any common connections, interests, or other commonalities you can mention in your invite.

Send them a personalized connection request stating your intentions.

And once you two are connected, you can then brainstorm the ways to begin a mutual relationship with them.

Posting Contents That Can Start Conversations

LinkedIn is not like Facebook, Twitter and others. Dedicated to professionals and businesses alike, LinkedIn is like a place where users are challenging their intellects. This is why people there don't like to see nonsense.

For this reason, only post business-related contents that can add value to the industry's knowledge.

Because it all comes down to business, always keep your posts with buyers in mind. Once you see that your prospects have seen and engaged with your content, this will ease you in pitching them your marketing ideas to them, in a much natural way.

Posts that are engaging on LinkedIn, are either text-only posts or native videos.

Text-only posts should demonstrate your knowledge, and have the ability to start conversations. And as for native video, you can use this feature to reach a wide audience in their network and even beyond that. Just like with the text-only posts, if your network responds to the video, LinkedIn's algorithm will begin to show it to a larger audience.

One another thing that you should keep in mind is that you need to create on-platform discussions. You don't have to send external links because it may repel people rather than attracting them.

Remember that selling on LinkedIn is all about creating relationships. LinkedIn is not a place where you can generate leads with people randomly clicking on links.

When you approach LinkedIn the right way, it can become a powerful funnel that will be a consistent lead generator for your business.