Making phone calls to prospects is an effective prospecting strategy that can help you gather plenty of leads. But did you know that, when cold calling, only about 1% of calls lead to an appointment? As a result, it takes many of these calls to make a single sale.

Now, what would happen if you had some sort of connection with the lead? You’d see a much higher conversion rate! And when it comes to relationships, being alumni of the same school is one of the best.

With that in mind, let’s look at how you can find alumni on LinkedIn, reach out to them, and grow your network to gather more leads.

3 Ways to Find Alumni on LinkedIn

How to Find Allumni on Linkedin

Unless you know the name of the alumni you’re looking for, you have three simple methods to find alumni on the platform:

  • The LinkedIn Alumni too
  • LinkedIn Groups
  • Sales Navigator

How to Find Leads with the LinkedIn Alumni Tool

As the name implies, the LinkedIn Alumni Tool lets you search for alumni quickly and easily using filters like job title, company, functions, and more.

Besides making finding alumni easier, the tool also gives insights into an institution’s alumni. So, you can see where alumni work, what they do, where they live, and more.

Let’s look at a simple example using Harvard University. To find the school, we’ll enter Harvard University in the LinkedIn search box and click on See all results. In the results, we’ll then click on View page under Harvard University.

On the school’s page, we can click on the Alumni tab.

Clicking on the tab will take us to a page where we’ll get some insights on the Harvard Alumni who are registered on LinkedIn. We’ll see information on their location, workplaces, and more.

On this page, we can also search for alumni based on their job title, the company they work for, or by using a specific keyword.

Suppose you sell medical equipment. You’d want to find alumni who are medical doctors. To do this, you’d just enter Doctor in the search box and press enter. LinkedIn would quickly filter your results and show you the relevant alumni.

How to Find Leads with Alumni LinkedIn Groups

An alternative to using the Alumni tool to find alumni is by searching and joining alumni groups on LinkedIn.

To do this, you’ll enter the school’s name, followed by “alumni,” in the search box. So, using the example above, you’ll enter Harvard University alumni in the search box. The results page will display a few results under every subcategory.

To see only the groups, we can click on See all group results or select the Groups tab in the search bar. Once done, we’ll see a list of all the LinkedIn alumni groups, which we can browse to find groups to join.  

How to Find LinkedIn Alumni with Sales Navigator

Finally, you can also use Sales Navigator to find alumni.

You’ll open Sales Navigator and enter your query. Going with our example above, we’ll enter Doctor in the search box. On the results page, we’ll find the School filter. (You might need to click See all filters if you don’t see it at first.)

Once found, we can expand the filter by clicking + and searching for Harvard University in the search box.

We can then include the schools we would like to include in our search results. With this filter selected, Sales Navigator will provide us with a list of alumni who are, in our example, doctors.

How to Reach out to LinkedIn Alumni

If you want to use finding alumni on LinkedIn as a lead generation strategy, the search is only one part of the equation. You’ll also need to reach out to them.

Firstly, you can send alumni a message on LinkedIn. However, as you probably know, you can only do this if you’re connected on the platform. You’ll first need to send a connection request, and once the alumni accept, you’ll be able to message them because they’re now 1st-degree connections.

If you, however, would like to send messages to alumni who are 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-degree connections, you’ll need to use LinkedIn’s InMail. You can send these messages to almost anyone on LinkedIn, and they could even have higher response and conversion rates.

The main drawback of InMail is that it’s a paid feature. So, you’ll only be able to send these messages if you subscribe to one of LinkedIn’s premium plans. Also, even if you subscribe, you’ll get a limited number of InMail credits monthly.

Is There Another Solution for Messaging LinkedIn Alumni?

Fortunately, you don’t need to be bogged down by LinkedIn’s messaging limitations described above. Instead, you can use plain old email to reach out to any alumni you find on the platform. But, if you’ve read some of our earlier posts, you would’ve noticed that it could be somewhat challenging to find leads’ email addresses on LinkedIn.

That’s where Findymail comes in. With our tool, finding a LinkedIn lead’s email address is as simple as: