Episode 243: Sales Navigator Account IQ Review

Brynne Tillman  00:00

Hello, Hello and Welcome to Making Sales Social. This is sort of a pop up live. I know it’s our normal time, but it’s just me today. Brynne Tillman, I’m thrilled to be here.

Intro 00:37

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show.

Brynne Tillman  00:35

I’m talking about account IQ today, which is one of sales navigators newest AI features. It newly introduced this feature to LinkedIn Sales Navigator feature that is designed as an AI generated updated summary of accounts. What does that mean? It is literally, it aims to empower sellers, enabling them to act as trusted advisors for their customers through insights. So the AI is going out. And it’s capturing public information and serving it to Sales Navigator. It’s the advanced and the advanced Plus users, Really incredible information. 

So let’s talk about this first for AI generated summaries. This is account IQ provides these AI generated updated summaries of accounts, they go out, they are looking at sources for Financials for press releases. And it will actually also give you the sources where it pulled that information, which is amazing. So you can click through and see the original source. So how are we using this? This is incredible pre call planning, even pre cold calling or pre outreach planning to get to know what’s happening in trends inside of these accounts. 

And it’s really just incredible, like moments of insights that are triggers to start conversations to identify what’s happening inside of that company, along with the other wonderful features in Sales Navigator, like identifying those personas. And then sidenote, there’s a relationship Map Builder, also that has been launched. That’s really cool too. It’s you’re building out your org charts. But we’re going to talk more about account IQ first. So it empowers sellers, how does it do it? It does, it’s designed to enable us to act as trusted advisors, because we have more intel and more information. 

So when we come to the table, instead of sitting back with our little yellow tablets, saying, “Hey, what keeps you up at night?” We have, we know. So we sit while the conversation is around. I noticed this, I saw this, I read this, how is that impacting you, and your position and your role and the company as a whole. And when you come in informed, you are so much more respected, there’s a higher level of credibility, it just makes that conversation so much easier. So talk a little bit about foresight, the tool offers powerful foresight to help sellers deeply understand their accounts. 

So when you start to understand how to leverage some of this intel along with other intel on the Accounts page or the company page in Sales Navigator, you’re going to start to see some patterns, that when you see certain things happening, you’ll expect that there will be other needs that pop up when they’re hiring when they’re laying off. Right. These are all things that you can see the trends inside of organizations, not just as the whole company. But even from a department standpoint, where are they hiring? Where are they laying off? You know, are they hiring or do they have a lot of job openings? There’s so many things that you can find. 

But with account IQ, we can go even deeper. And the insights are just incredibly powerful to understand not just what’s happening now. But now as we start to use this on a consistent basis. And when we started to ask the question, I noticed this: What’s the impact? This is going to start to teach us to foresee the impact of the next company that has that trend of the next company that you see there’s a significant drop in employee size, when you see that their financials may, you know may have had a huge impact, we will start to learn that and there will be patterns that we’ll be able to use, which is really powerful. 

So efficiency in presentation, let’s talk about that for a moment. Sellers can certainly show up much more as a trusted adviser rather than having that PowerPoint of their capabilities. And these are the clients that we’ve helped over the years you can get to know them, but we can start conversations by already guiding them around the challenges that we have identified that are specific to them. That’s what I love about this, Right. This is not general information. This is specific information that is being pulled in from Sales Navigator, and summarized in very easy to consume paragraphs and bullet points are really fabulous. 

I’m so excited about this. It enhances the customer conversation. So what does that mean? It elevates that conversation to a place that’s highlighting critical account information. You know, when we’re having conversations, we can start our conversation by asking them what their agenda is, and sharing what our agenda is. But if we know those critical account data points, when we start the conversation, we ask how this impact worked for a parent to talk to them or with them.

I should never, but talk with them and have a conversation around those critical data points where we can be prepared with ideas around solutions and thoughts and insights may be things that you’ve seen other accounts other companies go through that had the same challenge. And their challenge, maybe they’re hiring quickly and always negative. But you know, you want to really lead this back to your solution. But the conversation is not about you and your solution. It’s about what you’ve learned, and insights that eventually will get to you. 

But we’re not starting with you. And that pitch right your that’s how you’re going to show up as this trusted adviser, I don’t want you to go completely off left fields, and have conversations around something that’s never going to lead back to your solution. But if you can bridge that prior to the conversation, maybe you can go to the rest of your team and say, “Here’s a challenge,” What are some ways I could bridge this conversation that leads back to us all of those things can be really powerful. So I think that’s really important. 

Next, this is one part of Sales Navigator. You know, there are a lot of other features and touch points. So the other piece when you bring in your persona, right, so in in Sales Navigator, you can have up to five persona which are specific filters that with one click, you can identify all the right people that you know, based on your search filters inside of that organization that you want touch points to the people that you’re gonna have conversations, your stakeholders, your buyers, your shoppers, even the users of your product and service, whoever is going to touch the conversation throughout your sales process should be in a persona. 

So with a one click persona, now all of a sudden, we can leverage the insights that account IQ brought in and we can map out our social proximity. Who do we know that can get us to some of those folks that match our persona? So the next thing that I want to mention is how you can blend that data and their company activity and personal activity. So we see this, we see this happening and now we go into the company page and the content they’ve been sharing. And by the way, you don’t have to limit this to LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the hub that’s bringing this all in. 

But you may see something and want to hop over And again, these are all cited, there’s a citation for all of these things. So you can now hop into the original source and do even a deeper dive, you can take that original source, grab the text, stick it into Chat GPT and say, “Give me the highlights,” chances are, they’re gonna align pretty well with the highlights that you saw on account IQ. But you can continue to go deeper and deeper, but account IQ is going to pull in those key areas that are going to give you triggers to start that conversation. 

I’m saying and I don’t want to promise this but from what I’m seeing, it really does provide a holistic snapshot. This tool creates a comprehensive view of the account, where you can scan when I started in sales. I use Miller Heiman, green sheets and blue sheets and gold sheets, right. And we did all this research to fill out these sheets. I don’t know if you guys, I’d be curious to chat for those of you that are alive. If you’ve ever used the Miller Heiman research sheets, they were brilliant, brilliant. But now we can get a lot of that data from LinkedIn for persona purposes for the buyers purposes. 

And the data, this account IQ can really bring that in. And we can kind of fill out whether we’re really using the sheets or just the information, we can really do a deep dive here and pull out all the information we’re going to need when we’re having these conversations. The number one thing really that I believe that this does is it simplifies your account research. Right? It researches the process that we go through for key account information from sources from Google . It could take an hour, sometimes two hours if it’s a large company. 

And now it’s literally like right inside of the account. So this account IQ is available, not in the core. So if you have the core LinkedIn Sales Navigator account, you will not see this. But if you have the advanced or the advanced plus, I think guys that this is a game changer. So I’d love to hear what you think about these the new AI and Lincoln’s rollout, there are other things coming, the relationship map has rolled out, that’s the org chart play the place where you can create your own org chart, as you’re talking with people in your learning who reports to whom you can build that out, you can have two adjacent org charts. 

So for me, sometimes I’m working in marketing and then working in sales. So I can have two org charts, probably they’re all one that go up to the CRO but the point you know, you can really leverage this tool to help keep you organized. This replaced the tier one, tier two, tier three. And I really, I’m really excited to play with this because I think it’s really going to help us in understanding kind of the hierarchy in the buyer’s journey, who’s going to be involved in what level. And again, when you’re pulling out the information from account IQ, you could say at this level, they’re typically interested in this or this is where it impacts at this level. 

This kind of information is the impact. And over time when you start using this well, it’s just going to become innate to you like it will become part it may seem like a lot now. But it will become a part of your sales process. And you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is to slow down your outreach to speed up your outcome. The interesting thing is, this will speed up your outreach, right, this will speed up the time to conversation, this will speed up, they’ll give you hours of your life back if you are researching accounts. So all I can say is if you’ve got this play with it, you’re gonna be blown away by it. 

I am blown away by everything that Sales Navigator is doing and oh excited. And I just think from an efficiency standpoint, the ROI on this is absolutely amazing. So if you guys have any questions around this, you can always join our free library LinkedInlibrary.com or socialsales link.com/library We have a community where you can come in and ask your questions for free. All of our podcasts are there. 

We’ve got Ebooks and other training, really great stuff. Go to socialsales link.com/library Well, thanks so much for joining us. I really had a ton of fun, kind of breaking down a count IQ for Sales Navigator. And you know, we’ll keep you in the loop as new things are coming out.

Outro  27:25

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