07.9.2024 Digital BIAS
Sales Navigator is the premium go-to tool for B2B sales professionals around the globe for prospecting and networking. The free version allows for some social selling activity, but sales teams can’t organise leads and accounts there.
This is why a premium LinkedIn account is a must for sales organisations, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, start with a free trial!
What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
Unlike the free version of LinkedIn, Sales Navigator has many more tools and filters. This premium toolkit allows you to narrow your search using real-time sales insights to find your ideal customer profile and build your list of priority business targets.
This ensures you significantly improve your chances of targeting decision-makers in your target market by sending timely messages and outreach. Advanced segmentation allows sales reps to identify the best leads for their product or service.
LinkedIn says, “Sales Navigator features a powerful set of search capabilities, improved visibility into extended networks, and personalized algorithms to help you reach the right decision-maker.”
Sales Navigator also provides actionable information and insights that make it easy to better understand leads and prospects. Now, you can engage with your prospects more personally by researching their account page, engaging with their posts and comments and offering personalised content, discounts, and offers. Our recent “LinkedIn for Business” blog post covered this well.
Understand LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s features
There are three levels of Sales Navigator subscriptions. These are super useful as the free version of LinkedIn doesn’t allow users to directly message people outside of their network. Learn more about this with LinkedIn training.
Professional
The Professional subscription allows members to:
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- 20 InMail messages per month
- 1,500 saved leads
- Advanced lead and company search
- Custom lists
- Lead and account alerts
- Notes and tags
InMail is a crucial feature for salespeople scouting for new business opportunities. With Sales Navigator, sales teams can now identify and reach out to previously unknown leads with whom they may not be directly connected. Add lead recommendations, a feature that gives salespeople more opportunities to discover and build relationships with leads outside their direct network, and the use case is piling up.
Additionally, the ability to use advanced searches, save leads, create custom account lists, and add notes or tags to leads and accounts makes it easier for sales reps to manage their pipeline and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. You can connect your contacts to your CRM with Zapier or PieSync; even enterprise sales teams can’t argue for its adoption.
Team
Speaking of teams, the Team subscription has everything the Professional plan offers plus:
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- 30 InMail messages per month
- 5,000 saved leads
- TeamLink
- CRM integrations
- 25 out-of-network unlocks per month
Note the increased InMail and saved lead limits. The Team plan gives users access to TeamLink, CRM integrations, and “out-of-network unlocks.”
TeamLink allows your sales teams to search and see their teammate's connections and identify any first-degree connections for a prospect in the pipeline. Colleagues can then reach out to their teammates for a warm introduction to the lead, giving them a more likely path to the sale.
Enterprise
The Enterprise sales navigator plan combines the best features from both the Professional and Team plans plus:
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- 50 InMail messages per month
- 10,000 saved leads
- TeamLink Extend
Suited for teams of 10 or more, expanded InMail and lead lists allow enterprise users to increase the size of their TeamLink networks even further through TeamLink Extend.
TeamLink Extend lets companies harness their full team network without giving everyone a full Sales Navigator license.
Prospecting with Sales Navigator
Earlier in the post, I mentioned the need to have already identified what your ideal client looks like. Clicking the hyperlinked text takes you to the Buyer Persona Ebook, which would help you define that. (Click here if you missed it)
Prospecting:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best tool on the market for prospecting. With over 600 million professionals available, the opportunities to generate business are seemingly endless. Start with sales preferences to narrow your parameters, then deep dive into advanced filters for a hyper-focused approach.
Sales Preferences:
Head to the settings page on your Sales Navigator profile, and in the middle of the page, you will see Sales Preferences. Narrow your ideal client profile based on geography, industry, company size, and function. These preferences will show up whenever you visit a prospect’s profile, and LinkedIn will show lead recommendations based on the criteria you set. In addition to this, companies that focus on account-based marketing and sales strategy have to have this tool.
Advanced Search
The most effective prospecting tool on Sales Navigator is the advanced search functionality. Perform an advanced search on leads or accounts. The leads option has more fields to focus your search with over 20 filters that you can apply to your search, including keywords, title, and company fields, allowing you to perform a Boolean search.
Food for thought
Sales Navigator has to be the go-to tool for B2B sales prospecting. I do not doubt that it is an essential tool for standard sales prospecting or account-based sales strategies.
It syncs to leading CRMs* and allows you to extract your contact lists, which you can use to fuel outbound campaigns. But don’t lose sight of the personal touch needed to do business. Don’t forget that people don’t always want to be interrupted despite how good your product or service is.
