LinkedIn intentionally makes it difficult to use "their" data with any type of automation. Yeah they think of it as their data. Read the terms! If you've exported your contacts from LinkedIn before, you realize there is all kinds of garbage you can't use in the name fields. Putting that into a message is a kiss of death to any marketing effort.

LIONs, & Titles, & Maiden names, Oh My!

There is so much crap that people put into the name fields that doesn't make sense anywhere but on LinkedIn. Often times you can't escape it by simply using their first name. When your contact sees something included with or instead of their first name (that might have made sense in context with what they had in the last name field but not here) in your message, at the very least you've made a terrible impression.

But that's not the worst case. They could unsubscribe, knock you with a spam complaint, or both. Of course that's the last thing you want.

So what can you do?​

You can manually export your contact list, clean it up by hand (or pay somebody to clean it by hand for you), import those contacts into your system, and then... repeat that process (including cleaning up ALL of the contacts' names) EVERY TIME you export the new contacts you've made since the last export. Or...

You can use a system that lets you clean the data once, and the only data you need to clean up is the short list of your latest contacts. You won't need to clean any name more than one time. Plus you can be certain that your hard work won't get overwritten and your messages won't go out with LinkedIn garbage making you look bad.

If you have MS Excel, & can copy and paste, this will work for you.

​The training videos walk you through the steps from exporting your contacts from LinkedIn, to cleaning them up, to having a clean CSV file ready for import. Once you've done it a couple times, it's a fast process.

**Yes, this requires Microsoft Excel**