LinkedIn has opened up Sales Navigator a world of possibilities for sales teams dealing with B2B buyers who avoid cold calls and, instead, depend on social media to make purchasing decisions.
Because LinkedIn has 756 million users, companies and organizations can find the right people and accounts to focus on. Every week, you get billions of member updates, so you will know what your prospects are talking about and what is going on with them.
This has allowed companies to build relationships with their prospects, revealing linkages between them and their target account that they can use to make a warm introduction.
Tapping into the real power of LinkedIn
However, to fully benefit from LinkedIn, you must limit your experience and filter the enormous amount of information you’re accessing to only the most relevant information, made possible through compelling event signals.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator can do just that. It is a tool that integrates LinkedIn’s network data, pertinent news resources, your accounts, prospects, and preferences to notify you on trigger signals and put you in touch (and create connections) with them.
Sales Navigator adapts from the searches and begins proactively sifting through LinkedIn data to provide prospect recommendations based on the search parameters. By removing non-essential LinkedIn data, your pipeline creation is assured of quality, which improves conversion and speeds up the sales process.
This service, which is available as a LinkedIn membership option, helps in lead prospecting by allowing you to track prospects’ activity and find similar individuals to contact. As you get to know Sales Navigator, you’ll be able to persuade your sales team to use it for social selling.
Sales Navigator allows your salespeople to be highly efficient and productive. It cuts down on the amount of time and effort they require to start selling. It’s the only LinkedIn license that allows you to save accounts and leads and receive proactive notifications, which can revolutionize your prospecting game, especially when partnered with compelling event signals.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator may be an extraordinarily effective tool for anyone trying to perfect the art of social selling, especially with so many organizations maintaining remote workforces. Sellers can communicate with prospects worldwide and start building the relationships that lead to sales.
The fundamentals of how we sell have remained unchanged. What has evolved is the quality and depth of the data we have on hand, and Sales Navigator can expedite and streamline the procedures of sifting through that data to find the best prospects.
Best practices to keep in mind
When it comes to lead prospecting and working on pipeline creation, the goal is to work smarter, not harder. Here are some LinkedIn Sales Navigator best practices to help you identify areas for opportunity and expand your customer base.
Maximize your LinkedIn profile
One of the most significant things you can do to improve your sales effectiveness on Sales Navigator doesn’t occur on the platform. Make sure your LinkedIn profile and the profiles of your sales team are optimized before signing up with Sales Navigator. Take note that your business and brand are reflected on your profile.
Make a profile checklist: starting with profile photos, a headline, contact information, work experience, accolades, education, and affiliations. Examine sample material for your sector that includes industry buzzwords.
Advanced Search
The most helpful tool of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the Advanced Search, which has a plethora of filters. It enables salespeople to hand-pick and personalize the prospects you’re looking for. You should play around with the criteria to improve the results of your searches.
For example, instead of just looking for Financial Managers, you’ll get more accurate results if you look for Financial Managers with more than five years of experience who speak English and German.
For sales reps trying to focus on specific parts of the country or industries critical to their organization, advanced search is essential.
Understand your market opportunities
Sales Navigator was designed primarily for prospecting, although it may also be used for research. You can use Sales Navigator to gauge market interest for your product or services before moving forward with development.
You may also use Sales Navigator to figure out which territories could be interested in your products or services. An added bonus is how the knowledge you gain from a deeper grasp of the market can help you with product development and marketing strategy.
Acquire potential business from your competitors
Poaching wildlife is a big no-no. But customer poaching? Not so awful. It’s something that big businesses do all the time. When it comes to snagging a customer, your organization may come in second or third.
In either instance, Sales Navigator allows you to sort through the network of your competition. If you have a clear picture of your competitors’ clients, you will have an advantage in building your sales strategy. You may make a better offer, for starters.
Familiarize yourself with the “View Similar” feature
Have you used LinkedIn to find leads that led to sales? Sales Navigator can assist you in discovering additional information about where they come from. You may use View Similar to find profiles with similar features as the ones you’re looking at. Finding prospects who are similar to your current accounts can help you fine-tune the efficiency of your sales plan while expanding your opportunities.
Keep track of prospects and accounts
You can store the profiles of individuals or companies in Sales Navigator. These leads will appear in your Sales Navigator news stream, which will help you stay up to date on crucial developments or news, allowing you to personalize your introduction, sales pitch, and overall strategy when contacting them.
Save your searches
It’s a hassle to enter all the search keywords again after your reps have performed a targeted search to identify their perfect prospects. On Sales Navigator, you can conveniently save your searches and revisit, modify, or continue them later.
Narrow your search via Sales Spotlights
After you do a search, Sales Spotlights appear at the top of your search results page, highlighting prospects who are more likely to engage with you. You might notice, for example, that 56 employees have moved employment in the last 120 days or that 150 new people follow your organization on LinkedIn.
Focus on selling, not doing research
While Sales Navigator is beneficial to sales teams of all sorts and sizes, you would want to have your personnel focus on selling rather than on the time-consuming and tedious chore of conducting prospecting and research.
This is where our team at PipelineSignals can help you.
Consider the case of a certain tech company we worked with. Although they used Sales Navigator frequently, 8% of their accounts have no leads saved. That indicates that in 8% of their accounts, no individuals are being watched in the business. 25% of their accounts have never been saved, and another 19% have never had a profile view. That means that 19% of the accounts that generated a Signal were not picked up at all by the sellers.
Sales For Life has helped this company become more efficient and productive by reducing the amount of “business calories” they require to thrive. We also gave best-practice advice so they can optimize their LinkedIn profiles. But most importantly, we provided them with relevant and timely Signals, reports, and leads that match their ideal client profile.
(Sales for Life is the parent company of PipelineSignals.)
The Bottomline
LinkedIn Sales Navigator holds a lot of power for modern selling. By knowing the different features of this tool, your sales team can take advantage of the entire LinkedIn platform to grow your pipeline, improve conversions, close more deals, and maintain existing accounts and relationships.