Want to start using LinkedIn for lead prospecting? Wondering if investing in Sales Navigator makes sense for you and your business? Today, we’ll walk you through how to determine if Sales Navigator is a fit for you how to get the most out of it. You’ll learn the two questions to ask when deciding if Sales Navigator is right for your business and a basic rundown of how it helps you find qualified prospects. You’ll also learn about the features to help you identify low-hanging fruit, automate lead list generation, and save time and energy prospecting!
What Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s premium sales prospecting tool. It allows you to find highly targeted prospects and then build out strategic lists of those prospects. You’re not gonna be able to find these features using the free version of LinkedIn, as you are severely limited in what types of lists you can build when it comes to prospecting.
Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator Right For You?
The first question you should ask yourself when it comes to determining if you should leverage Sales Navigator or not is what you are using LinkedIn for. Is your goal to build your brand and thought leadership on LinkedIn, or is it to grow your business by connecting with targeted prospects? If you answered it’s to grow your business with targeted prospects, then Sales Navigator is perfect for you.
The next question you need to ask yourself, are you crystal clear on your ideal customer, Because that is what Sales Navigator is for. You have to know exactly who your target market is and who you are going after and then you leverage Sales Navigator to build out those lists. But if you aren’t crystal clear on that, then this might not be the best investment for you.
3 Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator allows you to:
- Build highly targeted lists of prospects
- Nurture those prospects
- Organise all of your outreach efforts in one place
How to Build Lead Lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator
One feature that Sales Navigator allows you to do is refine those lists quickly inside your sales preferences. So when you are building out new lists, you will have the option to apply your sales preferences, which is going to make your list building activities that much faster and more efficient. Here’s how it works.
First, you will want to click on the All filters button in the search bar.
You will be able to see a bunch of different parameters. These include Industry, Job title, Company size, if they are connected to you as a first degree, second degree connections, if the company headcount is shrinking or increasing.
And our ultimate favourite parameter is the Spotlights feature. A couple of those are people who changed jobs in the past 90 days, people who have shared experiences with you, which ultimately mean who are in similar groups that you are in. What I love to do is target people who are active on LinkedIn and people who are following my company. Those are low-hanging fruit, because they are actually using LinkedIn, so your efforts are worthwhile and maximised and you don’t wanna waste time reaching out to people and engaging with people that only log into LinkedIn once a month. And so there’s all sorts of parameters that you can select when building out these highly targeted lists to find people that are more likely to be open to a conversation with you.
You cannot do any of this leveraging the free version of LinkedIn. Once you are satisfied with your search filters, you can then save that specific search for easy access later on.
And then, you can select individuals that show up from that search and put them into specific lead lists.
From there, it will auto-populate anyone in the future who fits those search criteria. You can then click through to individuals, scroll down on their Sales Navigator page, and it’s going to show you people who are similar to them and all sorts of other options for getting in front of them. This includes who you both know, mutual connections that you can then reach out to and ask for a name drop or an introduction. There’s just so many other features that Sales Navigator allows you to access from these highly targeted saved lead lists.
In addition to building targeted lead lists of individuals, Sales Navigator allows you to build out highly targeted lists of accounts. So these accounts would be companies that would be great fits for your business. And then from there, you can find the decision makers within those companies.
How to Filter Lead Alerts to See Updates From Your Lead Lists
One of the frustrations when leveraging the free version of LinkedIn is the lack of ability to filter and control anything. You’re going to see posts and updates from everyone, which gets pretty cluttered and hard to manage sometimes, whereas with Sales Navigator, you will be able to only see updates and news from people that are on your lead list.
An easy way to do this is by leveraging Sales Navigator alerts for your leads and accounts that you have saved. These alerts surface the hottest leads, whether they visited your profile, shared your content, accepted your connection request, shared something on LinkedIn recently, changed jobs recently, were mentioned in the news. These are all great opportunities for you to engage with right now.
Ultimately, Sales Navigator is all about saving time and energy when it comes to your sales prospecting. But all of these leads mean nothing if you don’t have a strategic plan in place to connect with them. So click on through to this post where we cover the exact strategy to use to grow your LinkedIn network.
