Who among us hasn’t noticed the current deluge of ads and LinkedIn messages promising to “fill your calendar” with sales calls or show you how to do it yourself?

To those of us responsible for generating relationship-based new business – whether for ourselves or our companies – getting the first conversation with a prospect is often a gigantic, headache-producing challenge.

What do you do when a substantial source of your new business pipeline dries up? With conferences and networking events of all sizes cancelled around the globe, travel curtailed, and prospects reassessing spending, new business pipelines are already suffering.

Using a 3rd party application to automate mundane LinkedIn activities has been around nearly forever. Who doesn’t use something like Buffer or Hootsuite to line up a week or so worth of posts in advance?

If you want to use LinkedIn to generate conversations with people you’d like to do business with, there are three important bits of information you should look at.

If you’re spending any length of time using LinkedIn for business development, you’ve probably been tempted to use one of the ever-increasing apps that log onto your account, visit member’s profiles, and send connection invitations and messages on your behalf – all while you’re doing something presumably more productive.

The goal of a LinkedIn business development program (or social selling, if you want to call it that) is to drive conversations with ideal prospects who ultimately turn into new clients or customers. From prospect identification and initial outreach to closing the sale, there are a number of places where these efforts can go off the rails; and if you’re not paying attention you won’t know how to fix it. You may not even know it’s happening.

You are not imagining it. With every month that goes by, it gets harder to connect with your ideal prospects on LinkedIn. Strategies and tactics that worked beautifully last year seem to go nowhere now. Business owners new to using LinkedIn as a business development tool are finding the so-called best practices don’t get you many conversations with qualified prospects.

I’m writing this article for those of you who are using LinkedIn – or want to use it – as a strategic business development tool, meaning you want to generate conversations with qualified prospects.

I wouldn’t normally have read Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. If not for my friend Andy Parkinson repeatedly asking for my opinion, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought – mainly because I wrongly assumed a book about the $100 million best practices of a SaaS software company (Salesforce.com) would have little relevance for leaders of professional services firms.