Find out what technology a competitor or target client uses with LinkedIn

Why do this?

Whether you are a freelancer pitching for work, a software startup looking to scale or a professional services provider after your next big account in many cases you will find it useful to know the technologies that a competitor or a target client is using.

From a merely competitive standpoint: just think how interesting would it be for you to know what technology a rival company in your industry is using for their marketing or their sales outreach or their accounting. You would know whether you need to adapt or change to beat them.

Or, from a lead generation and business growth perspective, think about how useful this is for:

• A software startup that integrates with Salesforce CRM that needs to find companies that use Salesforce
• A demand gen agency that teaches Financial Services orgs how to improve their use of Hubspot or Marketo
• An accountant that only wants to work with local SMEs that use Xero or Freshbooks

On LinkedIn, it’s very easy to use the filters to create lead lists based on external parameters such as company size, geography, industry, etc. But what about something that might not be initially obvious such as what technology a company uses?

Uncovering LinkedIn’s “Technologies used” feature

I first encountered this trick from Dylan Hey at LeadFeeder, but a big shout out to Juraj Zamborský who heads up Sales & Business Development over at social media software co. Kontentino for bringing it back to my attention.

Scenario: Imagine that you are a B2B SOFTWARE COMPANY that sells a product which enables small/medium-sized businesses to send text messages to their clients. Your rival is the customer SMS messaging service, INTERCOM. You want to find INTERCOM customers that are small/medium businesses, so that you can contact them and sell them your software (“We’re much better than Intercom – try us instead!”).

Step 1: Open your LinkedIn Sales Navigator (if you’re not already a subscriber, get a free LinkedIn Sales Navigator trial for one month here) and pick the Accounts option. If you’re new to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, “accounts” is their way of saying individual companies.

Step 2: You can start filling the fields with the desired parameters of your ideal company or account profile. You can input ‘geography’, ‘company headcount’, the exact company names if you know them, ‘industry’, etc.

In this example, the parameters used are: “geography: US” + “headcount; 11-200”.

Step 3: And now here comes the magic. Scroll down. You can see that there’s an option to add “Technologies Used” filter.

If you’re asking yourself how come you didn’t see this before, well no worries – everyone seems to miss it! I’ve even Googled it and seen no articles or videos on the “Technologies Used” function.

Step 4: Now you have this pretty decent list of companies (578, to be exact) which are US based with headcount from 11-200 and use the technology Intercom (see the red circle above).

Naturally, you can go down into more detailed filtering and use more sophisticated parameters to find even better targeted accounts/companies (and the employees who work there that you should contact), but the above is a great start to understand how to find the perfect companies to go after if it useful for you to know their technologies used.

Uncovering and using the “Technologies used” filter alone can save yourself and your business hours and hours of time wasted trying to work out which client accounts you should try and sell to in a large or new market.

You’ve mastered LinkedIn “Technologies used”: What next?

So, in the above scenario, you are the sales leader at a software company and you have just used LinkedIn’s “Technologies Used” filter to discover 578 target client companies that are using a rival software (in this case, Intercom).

REMEMBER: The above is just a B2B software example. Adapt the above scenario to YOUR CONTEXT; maybe you’re marketer at a PR firm, a director of an accountancy business, or a junior sales rep at a pharmaceuticals company, etc etc and you’re searching for target clients that use a software that complements your service or product. Don’t think that this is just to find the current customers of technology rivals!

Step 5: How do you start booking sales appointments at the companies your “Technologies Used” search has found for you? Well, this is exactly what I teach my Win At LinkedIn students.

Some strategies that I coach my students to use so that they can start generating 5-20 more sales appointments a month, include:

• You could manually find and message the right people (key decision-makers) at each of those companies
• You could automate the process by using Linkedin automation tools such as Meet Leonard, Dux Soup and Linked Helper
• You could set up a LinkedIn ad campaign which will only be seen by people at those 578 companies to advertise your software
• And much, much more!

Generate new business, quickly

My name is Jonny Rose and I’m the founder of Win At LinkedIn, a LinkedIn coaching service that trains B2B professionals to find leads, nurture prospects and close deals in a GDPR compliant way.

Let’s turn you into a Sales MACHINE, go here.