On LinkedIn, you have the ability to buy a subscription. You’ve got Free, you’ve got Premium, you’ve got Sales Navigator and Sales Navigator Teams. LinkedIn is changing those subscriptions a little bit but, fundamentally, Sales Navigator is the tool that every Sales Rep and every Business Development person should have.
If you’ve got a Sales Team or if you’re a Business Owner and you’re looking to use LinkedIn to sell, Sales Navigator gives you five distinct advantages. I’m going to walk you through them.
1. Targeting: Finding The Right People
Number one, Sales Navigator allows you to target and find people better. So, when you’re on Premium, you can search but the search criteria is so limited. It’s so limited. Whereas with Sales Navigator, I can search by; the size of the company, the location of the company or the individual. I can look at their experience or the history of the company. I can see whether it was the private sector or the public sector, if it’s growing or contracting in size and filter by the size of a company’s departments.
Say, for example, I’m looking for companies where they outsource most of their marketing. I can actually find companies where they have a very small marketing team but might have a huge headcount. They might have 500 employees but one marketing person. Or, I can find companies the other way around. I could find a company where they perhaps have a large proportion of salespeople.
The other thing I can do is find people who are new to the platform. Sales Navigator’s targeting and search facility are by far one of the biggest advantages that you can have when trying to sell on LinkedIn. If you’re on Premium, you get to search some stuff, but it’s just not detailed enough to be able to narrow down and find prospects.
With Sales Navigator, you can find the people who are most active on the platform more easily. I found lots of salespeople building their network on LinkedIn using Premium or Free and then they discover when they move to Sales Navigator that half of the people that they have built a network with are inactive or zombie accounts. It’s going to be very tough to outreach to them because they’re just not showing up enough on the platform. So, the first big advantage is the search in the targeting.
2. Mapping: Finding And Collating The Key Decision-Makers And Influencers Within An Organisation
Number two, and there is nothing like this on Premium or Free, is the Account Mapping. Now, most people see this but don’t know what to do with it. So, in what we teach about Priming and Market Priming, we talk about Content Priming, and we talk about Relational Priming. Whenever you’re approaching a company, if it’s a small business, you’re going to approach the business owner. If it’s a larger business, or you know a corporate company, there are going to be multiple stakeholders involved in your deal.
So, mapping out on LinkedIn, who are the people I need to build a relationship with to help our deal go through and to help build trust and credibility? You can go, ‘Okay, who are the tier one people that I need to know? Who are tier two? Tier three?’ and so on.
I like to think about it is as:
- Who are the people I’m going to meet with that’s going to be tier two?
- Who are the people who are going to sign it off? That’s tier one.
- Tier three are the influencers or the people who might have objections because they’re involved in the usage or your product or service has an implication on their work.
So, you can map some of the key decision-makers before you pitch or put a proposal in. You can start to map out and build some relationships with key stakeholders so that when you do get to your first meeting, or when they are brought in, you already have a degree of a relationship, awareness of each other and credibility.
You’re not going in blind and meeting complete strangers and having to build relationships with them. You get your first meeting underway with the right person and then they roll it up to other people. It’s like starting from scratch, and you got to work through those relationships. So, why not do it first by mapping accounts?
3. An Uncluttered Feed: You Can Collate A News Feed Of All Your Prospects’ News, Shares And Activity
Number 3 is a brilliant one. The LinkedIn algorithm will serve you stuff based on your activity and what it thinks is good for you in the feed. That isn’t always what you want. Sales Navigator has an uncluttered feed.
With a Sales Navigator profile, you can save people as Leads. So, in other words, put a stamp on their profile. Sales Navigator allows you to see just the stuff that’s coming from your prospects and your target audience instead of filling up your feed with colleagues and people you used to go to University with.
4. Tracking: Keeping On Top Of Your Prospects’ Activity So You Can Create Meaningful Opportunities To Build Relationships
When you can see activity on the homepage and through alerts – engage. It creates more opportunities to have a conversation.
If they’re sharing some news, you can be quick to engage, quick to interact and quick to build that relationship. Most salespeople will try to hunt down day-by-day, ‘What’s this person done today?’. They will visit all of your prospects’ profiles to figure out if there’s something there to do, or an opportunity to build a bridge. Sales Navigator presents it all to you.
So, this is a massive advantage and a massive time saver for a salesperson or business owner. The uncluttered feed in Sales Navigator you simply save people as a lead or save companies a lead and sales navigators home feed will just populate with what they’re up to. So massive advantage for a salesperson on Sales Navigator.
5. An Uncluttered Mailbox: A Mailbox Dedicated To Your Sales Activity
The final one I want to share with you is very similar to the previous one. It is the uncluttered mailbox. LinkedIn is a brilliant platform but some people who send you messages really shouldn’t.
We all get messages that are not targeted and not relevant. Just to be honest with you, some of them are just silly. That’s just the nature of the beast, it’s people hungry to get business. And sometimes they don’t do very well.
Something that a lot of people find with the main LinkedIn browser, whether that’s Free or Premium, is that they miss messages. It’s very easy to lose and miss messages. So, LinkedIn brought out some reminder features in the notifications. But you could get a lot of sales pitches or irrelevant messages from lots of people. That prospect’s message you’ve been waiting for gets lost in it all.
With Sales Navigator, if you save people as a lead, you not only get an uncluttered feed but you can also use it just for your prospect messaging. The replies stay there separate from LinkedIn messages, so you have an uncluttered or filtered mailbox. That means anytime you get notified of a message n Sales Navigator, it’s 99% likely that it’s going to be from one of your target prospects.
It’s not like losing people’s messages on LinkedIn and then coming back and going, ‘I missed that and I’ve left it five days and I look ignorant. I’ve probably missed the opportunity. You can filter down your mailbox in Sales Navigator and actually just have a mailbox for your target audience all in that one place.
A Game-Changer For Salespeople
So, Sales Navigator really is a game-changer for salespeople. If you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’m using Free and it’s money to spend’. I guarantee that the money you spend on Sales Navigator will save you time in prospecting. It will save you a lot of frustration, too.
If you’re sitting on the fence, you should not be sitting on the fence about £60-£70 a month because it will allow you to find people more easily. It will allow you to map your decision-makers and it’s highly likely that it’s going to shorten your deal cycle. It’s going to help you create more opportunities and help you close them more effectively. It’s that simple.
Sales Navigator is the advantage on LinkedIn for a salesperson. If you have not got it, you need to share this with your Sales Manager. If you’re a business owner and you’re reading this and you are unsure whether you should be doing Sales Navigator, you absolutely should.
Don’t waste your time trying to hunt people down on a platform. It wasn’t designed that way.
Sales Navigator was designed to help you find the right people and help you not lose track of them.
So my view is, my opinion is, my belief is (I’m that serious about it) that if you’re using Sales Navigator on LinkedIn, you do have an advantage.
