Lead generation: how to use LinkedIn sales navigator

LinkedIn has revolutionized the way over 500 million business people from 200 plus countries connect with one another, making it an incredibly valuable resource for B2B businesses. Getting started with social selling can be a daunting task, but in today’s day and age, it is vital to the success of your B2B business.

While LinkedIn can be used for social selling to some degree of success, LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers many more filters and tools that will allow you to further narrow your search and find your ideal customer profile, build the perfect list of customers and greatly increase your chances of conversion. You can segment from millions down to the most relevant leads for your business making you into a social selling rockstar.  

If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you aren’t alone. And that’s why with a little bit of help from Jake Jorgovan and Clifton Lobo, we’ve put together this quick guide to help you in getting started. Needless to say, the first step is to optimize your LinkedIn profile for sales.

Related Resources: New Prospecting Strategies to Close Deals Virtually

What is LinkedIn sales navigator?

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.” It’s described as the best version of LinkedIn for sales professionals. It allows sales teams to engage with contacts and accounts within the LinkedIn platform.

In simpler terms, Sales Navigator is a social selling platform by LinkedIn that provides an array of features that focus on helping you find the right prospects to build trusted relationships. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can reach the right kind of prospects by using the search and filter features. Sales Navigator also provides actionable information and insights that can pave the way for a deeper understanding of leads and prospects. This way, you can engage with your prospects at a far more personal level by offering personalized content, customizations, discounts, and offers.

Who is LinkedIn sales navigator for?

If you’re a B2B salesperson, then LinkedIn Sales Navigator is for YOU.

Sales Navigator is a paid tool that is available for all users on LinkedIn. There are individual, team and enterprise subscriptions available, depending on your needs and the size of your team. A complete breakdown of what is available as a part of each subscription tier can be found on the LinkedIn website.

Here’s an example of how Jake Jorgovan uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator to generate leads for his B2B business:

Getting started with LinkedIn sales navigator:

Prospecting:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best tool on the market when it comes to prospecting. We’ve put together a replicable framework for using it to surface the best leads for your business. Start with sales preferences to narrow down your parameters, then deep dive into advanced filters for a hyper-focused approach.

Sales preferences:

Visit your settings page on your Sales Navigator profile and you will see Sales Preferences in the middle of the page. Here, you can narrow down 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.

Advanced search

This is by far THE MOST effective prospecting tool on Sales Navigator. You can perform an advanced search on either leads or accounts, with the leads option having more fields to focus your search. There are over 20 filters that you can apply to your search, with the keywords, title, and company fields allowing you to perform a Boolean search. Watch this video for segmenting hacks from Clifton Lobo. 

Handy tip: Use the “Save Search” button on the left side of the results page.  This will help you revisit your search later and have the option of tweaking some search criteria and saving it as a separate search.  

Prospect’s page

There are many useful tools while on a prospect’s page as well. You can use the “Add Tag” feature to leverage tags to organize your saved accounts and leads by grouping them together in a way that works best for you.

The “Add Notes” option allows you to store relevant information and action items on lead and account pages. For example, you can use the notes feature to regularly track your progress with an account or to document takeaways and next steps after meeting with a particular lead.

The right side of your screen has a “Recommended leads at” panel based on the sales preferences you set up at the beginning that is great to find other prospects within the company.

The bottom of the page has a “Leads similar to” section which allows you to find similar leads from other companies.

Contact building:

Now that you know who they are, how do you contact them?

According to Jake Jorgovan, the best way to do this would be via DuxSoup. While DuxSoup does not build your contacts, it is an invaluable tool to get the process started. This extension operates as a LinkedIn automation tool and will allow you to automatically scan a list you create in Sales Navigator and download it as a CSV file. The CSV contains prospects’ name, title, company, and a link back to their profile so that you can visit it individually later.

Here’s the low-down how you can use Sales Navigator and DuxSoup together.

The best strategy for staying in touch with your key accounts is to send timely and relevant messages. With Sales Navigator, you can keep up-to-date on your buyer’s LinkedIn activity to know when to reach out, send them InMails to make sure your messages go through, and craft messages that invite an extended dialog. That’s the kind of relationship-building that leads to social selling success.

Social selling and prospecting can be time-consuming tasks if you are not equipped with the right tools and best practices. Leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to build a large contact database quickly and with minimal effort.

Have more tips on how to effectively use Sales Navigator? Let us know in the comments section below.

Bonus:

Now that you’ve learned how to get started with Sales Navigator, here’s how you can nurture your leads using LinkedIn.