The LinkedIn platform has come a long way
LinkedIn has been the undisputed social media tool for building your professional network in the 21st century. Showcasing your professional attributes, connecting with like-minded professionals in your industry, and finding a job have all been ways that people have used the 1 billion person strong network over time.
Since being acquired by Microsoft in 2016, the platform has made huge steps to monetize and broaden the capabilities and benefits for not only job seekers and professionals wanting to connect, but also for sales teams. One of those key additions was creating LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales management tool designed to help sales teams tap into all of the data that LinkedIn holds, and essentially use it to further their selling capabilities. Tactics adopted from Sales Navigator like “social selling” have risen in popularity due to noise in channels, such as advertising and cold emails, as well as the recent disruption to more traditional B2B buyers working remotely. LinkedIn has quickly emerged as a key tool to compliment traditional prospecting methods, opening up a new channel with an extensive audience.
Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
There are some major benefits to get your sales team their own Sales Navigator licenses. For $79/month, they're able to gain valuable insights into your addressable market and buyer personas to get to know your prospect before even speaking to them one-on-one. It also allows them to reach out directly to individuals even if they're not already connected to them.
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Ways to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a Sales Rep
Niche Searches:
The Sales Navigator advanced search functionality gives your reps the ability to narrowly target your niche audience. CoPilot AI (an AI-powered sales enablement tool that connects directly with Sales Navigator) actually enhances this capability- read more on that here.
The benefit of having these search capabilities are plain, it allows your team to access an extremely qualified audience by searching based on:
- Keywords
- Geographic location (by region or state)
- Job title
- Company name
- Company size
- Company type (e.g., public, private, non-profit)
- Group membership
- School
- Years of experience
- Industry
- And more
It also allows them to exclude any of the above from your searches if there are certain industries, job titles you or regions you know aren’t a good fit, ensuring that they aren't wasting time on the wrong leads
Social Selling:
When it comes to lead generation on Sales Navigator, the idea of social selling or social prospecting is what comes to mind. Very different from social media marketing, social selling involves an initial relationship-building message from your reps to an individual that has been chosen based on predetermined qualifications (such as industry, company, job title, etc. - see above for niche targeting).
Social selling shows your target audience that your company is active and approachable. It’s a great way to interact directly with potential buyers on a one-to-one basis, and get immediate feedback by starting a conversation.
Accessing out-of-network connections is a huge benefit of Sales Navigator as it gives your team the opportunity to extend their sales reach outside of theirdirect network. Normally, you can only view the limited profiles of people outside your network. Sales Navigator lets members “unlock” that information (up to 25 profiles a month) so you can better understand your leads and make more meaningful connections.
Sales Insights:
As a sales leader, you know that the greatest tool you can go into a meeting with is knowledge of your prospect. Sales Navigator makes this step almost too easy. With the license, your reps can essentially gain all the knowledge they need to go into your discovery call. They can see where their prospect went to school, or where they used to live to find some common ground for conversation.
Most importantly, they can see if they’re connected to anyone that the prospect is connected to - allowing for a referral based sales relationship before the conversation even starts.
Not to mention, the more you use the tool the more it will help you find insights. As your team searches for prospects, saves leads, and makes connections, Sales Navigator will keep you posted on updates in their networks such as:
- Job or role changes
- Company updates
- Relevant connections and warm leads
Why Integrating AI with Sales Navigator Is Critical
While Sales Navigator is an incredibly effective tool for LinkedIn prospecting, it’s not perfect, therefore it’s important to seek out additional tools that maximize it’s effectiveness, that’s where AI comes in.
To better understand the ways in which CoPilot AI is a powerful ally for Sales Navigator, let's explore a few key functionalities that are beneficial for teams leveraging this powerful tool.
Building Search Lists That Prioritize High-Intent Leads
Sales Navigator's advanced search filters build a targeted list of prospects that align with your customer profile. With unlimited searches, you can filter your leads by a variety of options including company, geography, job title, seniority, etc. With so many filter options (and competitors going after the same prospects), this can get a bit overwhelming and it can take a bit of time to get the targeting right, leading to a loss in productivity and growing pains in getting started with the tool.
CoPilot AI’s Reply Prediction AI feature is designed to maximize your search list and ensure that your team is investing their time wisely. Reply Prediction AI prioritizes the leads in your search list based on their likelihood to accept your LinkedIn connection request, and brings your most promising leads to the forefront. This not only helps your team start using your search list right away, but also ensures that they are connecting with high-quality leads much quicker than with Sales Navigator alone.
Sending Prospect Messages With a Higher Chance of Getting a Reply
When reaching out to prospects through Sales Navigator, your initial outreach message exists to start the conversation and prove that you have something valuable to offer. Your first message should be personalized and tailored to their interests and needs. To meet this level of personalization, it’s important to do a bit of research on your prospect to ensure that your message will resonate with them.
Booking Meetings That Lead to Conversion
The ultimate goal of any prospecting tool is to secure meetings that turn into deals. With Sales Navigator. you’re able to track prospect engagement and identify optimal timing for outreach, ensuring that your prospects are primed for a meeting before you even send a connection message. Sales Navigator also provides key insights (such as Buyer Intent and Relationship Explorer) that help you tailor meeting requests and highlight your value proposition to the prospect, which increases the likelihood of securing a meeting.
However, where Sales Navigator falls short is tracking meetings. When using CoPilot AI and Sales Navigator together, you will likely increase your number of meetings booked, making it more challenging to track the outcomes of each meeting. CoPilot AI’s Meetings Booked AI feature streamlines this by scanning your messages with prospects and automatically detecting the intent to schedule a meeting. It then consolidates all of your team’s meetings into one central location, making it much easier to track your team’s progress and meeting outcomes.
Conclusion
The evidence of using a tool like Sales Navigator as a Sales Professional goes beyond this blog. The question then becomes if you will use it on its own or with added benefits like automation and AI. CoPilot AI allows you to do everything that’s been identified above, but at a scale that’s not possible when done manually.
See how this Agency Owner grew his business at scale by automating his manual outreach with CoPilot AI here.
Book a demo call now!
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