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 500-million 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 reps 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.
Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
There are some major benefits for a sales rep to buy a Sales Navigator license. For $79/month, you’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 you to reach out directly to individuals even if you’re not already connected to them.
Ways to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a Sales Professional
Niche Searches:
The Sales Navigator advanced search functionality gives you the ability to narrowly target your niche audience. CoPilot AI actually takes advantage of this capability - read more on that here.
The benefit of having these search capabilities are plain, it allows you to access an extremely qualified audience. You can search 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 you 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.
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 you 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 you the opportunity to extend your sales reach outside your direct 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 professional, 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, you can essentially gain all the knowledge you need to go into your discovery call. See where your prospect went to school, or where they used to live to find some common ground for conversation.
Most importantly, you can see if you’re connected to anyone your prospect is connected to - allowing for a referral based sales relationship before you’ve met.
Not to mention, the more you use the tool the more it will help you find insights. As you search for prospects, save leads, and make connections, Sales Navigator will keep you posted on updates in your network such as:
- Job or role changes
- Company updates
- Relevant connections and warm leads
Manual vs. Automated
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.
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