A Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Finding sales prospects for your business is now easier than ever with help from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This application helps business professionals connect, keep in touch, and build trusted relationships before an initial sales conversation.

What exactly is LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Well in short, a premium LinkedIn service, meaning that the user has to pay. Luckily, LinkedIn offers a 30 day free trial where you are able to try it out and see if it works for your business. This tool is geared towards sales and marketing professionals and helps them learn everything they need to about prospective leads.

Knowing your target inside and out and using a personal touch to connect is essential in succeeding during that first conversation.

With an innovative interface that allows the user advanced search and filtering options, this tool is creating a new avenue for sales professionals.

After the 30 day trial ends, you can choose from two options:

Professional Account: $79.99 per month

Team Account: $129.99 per month

The team account allows for a team of sales professionals at a company to use Sales Navigator together and connect using a team’s mutually connected leads. When a sales rep finally reaches out to InMail a prospect they will already have mutual connections, laying down a foundation of trust. Also with the team account there is an “out-of-network” feature where each rep has the capability to reach out to 25 individuals each month who are outside of their network.

If you find that this is not the path for your business you have the option to cancel the account before the 30 day trial is over so that your card does not get charged.

Setting Up

When you first start to use navigator it directs you to the Sales Navigator site (linkedin.com/sales/), which is a completely different website overall. This is helpful in the sense it will not affect your personal LinkedIn. After logging into your account you have to set up your preferences. This includes which job titles, locations, and other markets you directly want to target.

Adding and syncing contacts and if you choose to, your salesforce account, are the next steps and then you are ready to start saving companies. If you do decide to sync your Salesforce account you will immediately see LinkedIn updates from those accounts.

Saving companies is an important feature that helps you keep up to date on company and professional contacts news so you have all the information needed to make a potential sale. This feature also comes with updates on decision makers who work with your contacts and recommendations on leads based off your past history. You can always come back and add more companies later to this page.

Finding Leads

Sales Navigator enhances the buyer seller relationship to an unseen level. With the options available, following companies and connecting through contacts makes it easier to focus on the right people and stay updated on key accounts. Using the lead builder tool, you are able to filter by company size, location, industry, even seniority level.

There is always an advanced search setting as well that allows you to search for more in-depth filters such as years of experience, years at current company, and even profile language.

Once you start saving prospective people as leads, you will receive notifications on those specific people. From blog posts, to job changes, to common connections, you will gain valuable insights about the people you are trying to reach. You are also able to “tag” professionals as specific things such as a Decision Maker, High Priority, Follow up, Influencer, and Opportunity. You can create your own tags as well.

This is one of the great features with LinkedIn Sales Navigator; even though you are not connected with them you are still able to get updates on their professional life. Once these leads are in your lead builder and by looking at the notifications from these chosen leads, you really get a sense for what they care about. If you want to focus on just one kind of update, for example “Lead Updates” or “Company Shares”, you are able to do so using the filtering options that are available.

In the Team version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, when searching for leads you have the option to filter your results to see if anyone on your team has a bridged connection. If anyone does have a bridged connection you are able to use that as leverage if you decide to finally InMail that person.

You can also save notes on a prospective lead’s profile if you happen to find some important insights. The best part? The lead builder tool lets you save up to 3,000 different leads.

InMail Advantage:

One of the most important features on Sales Navigator is InMail. Even though you don’t have a prospects direct email address, using Navigator you are able to reach leads directly and credibly. With the personal Navigator account you get up to 20 InMails a month and with Team Navigator you get up to 30 a month. InMail has opened up the door to many opportunities for many sales professionals, so why not try it out for your business?

Conclusion

Overall, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool that helps you comfortably build relationships with prospects. Seeing if your connections are connected to people you are targeting is essential in reaching out and making a warm introduction, which could in turn minimize the need for cold calling.

You are now able to reach hidden decision makers at any size company and engage with them based off of their activity. In a world where engagement is becoming increasingly necessary, this is a great step in the right direction.