Episode 378: 5 Ways to Leverage Sales Navigator for Prospecting

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, me, and Bob Woods as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:01:10:13 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone. It’s time for Making Sales Social Live coming to you from the Social Sales live virtual studios and is brought to you by Ask SSL dot AI. I’m Bob Woods. Brynne Tillman is off today but I am joined by Stan Robinson Junior. How you doing, Stan? 

00:01:29:67 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Great, Great as always. Good to see you, Bob. 

00:01:34:22 – (Bob Woods): Good, good. Glad to hear. Good to be seen. Really appreciate that. So today we’re going to be talking about LinkedIn Sales Navigator Product or as I like to think of it, LinkedIn on Steroids. We’re going to link the sales navigator in with the concept of deep sales, which incorporates both data and the people who drive it into the selling equation.

00:01:58:04 – (Bob Woods): Then, you know, because we are who we are, we’ll toss in a little bit of AI for good measure. And the resulting entree, if you will, gives us as sellers five ways to leverage Sales Navigator to give us the business intelligence we need to build trust with our customers as I’m still under the weather Stan is going to handle the bulk of things here.

00:02:18:28 – (Bob Woods): Plus you know Stan is our Mr. Sales Navigator anyhow here at SSL, so it makes sense for him to drive the conversation. So, before we get into the five ways any further thoughts on deep sales? 

00:02:32:56 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Deep sales is a term that the LinkedIn Sales Navigator came up with just to describe the process more effectively, using data to learn more about our prospects, potential clients and form more better informed, knowledgeable and personal relationships with them.

00:02:54:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And AI, of course, is a tremendous help when it comes to gathering and analyzing the data and making sure that it’s useful for anyone that’s responsible for driving revenue. 

00:03:07:87 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s a good point. And what I like best about it is usually when you hear, like, you know, sales and data and AI and things like that, it sounds very analytical it doesn’t sound very genuine and authentic.

00:03:22:02 – (Bob Woods): But what we’re going to be talking about is actually using all that to bring the humanness into the sales equation through the five things that we’re going to be talking about. So I just I personally think that that’s very important. 

00:03:36:90 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Exactly. Totally agreed. 

00:03:38:43 – (Bob Woods): Yep. So let’s get right to it. Excuse me. So the first they were going to be talking about is optimizing personas and searches for identifying key accounts and the prospects within those accounts Stan.

00:03:54:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So with Sales Navigator, one of it’s functions you see as soon as you get on the home page, about 3 o’clock on the page is the opportunity to create personas. And personas are high-level forms of ideal customer profile because personas include function, seniority, title and geography. Those are basically the components of personas. Now, Sales Navigator does have many, many more search filters than that, but you can really create up to five personas to help get your searches started.

00:04:39:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And one of the ways that you can use personas, there are a number of ways, but one of them is if you’re responsible for large accounts that have a thousand, 5000, 10,000 employees, and you want to narrow your search within an account very quickly, personas are helpful as a way of doing that. When you’re inside the account, you can search by persona within an account, and it’ll save you a lot of time in terms of finding the people that you’re looking for.

00:05:13:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And then you can also use persona as an additional search filter because you can add personas to your filters when you’re searching more generally. So personas are number one, they’re a useful tool, something that Sales Navigator added maybe I don’t know about 12, 18 months ago. 

00:05:36:65 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, yeah. That was fairly new. And actually one thing that I want to point out is, most everything where we’re going to be talking about is sales Navigator specific?

00:05:48:13 – (Bob Woods): This next item that we’re going to be talking about, you can do this in the regular LinkedIn dot com, but it is so much more effective in sales Navigator. It’s not basically. So number two is leveraging social proximity for referrals. 

00:06:08:00 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes. So social proximity is a fancy way of saying how closely are you related or connected to someone on LinkedIn.

00:06:17:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So first degree connections, maximum social proximity, you’re directly connected. You can send each other direct messages, presumably you know each other at some level. And then we have second degree connections, which are people with whom you share a mutual connection. As Bob mentioned, with regular LinkedIn, you can pull up, you can easily see who your first three connections are.

00:06:46:03 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You can easily see who your second degree connections are what Sales Navigator adds to the mix as an example is you can add the additional search filters. So for example, if I wanted to know who Bob Woods knows, who’s an accountant in New York City with a company with a headcount of over 5000, I can do that in Sales Navigator.

00:07:19:19 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So the biggest thing about Sales Navigator with social proximity is it allows you to throw in those additional filters so that if I’m coming to Bob, it can be and looking for him to refer people, it can be a very specific list of people because Sales Navigator can deliver those results to them. And LinkedIn, it’s great if you’re not paying for Sales Navigator, you can search for connections of Bob Woods, and then you’re going to do a fair amount is scrolling after that to try and figure out if they meet your ideal customer persona.

00:08:00:05 – (Bob Woods): So yeah, definitely scrolling and kind of going you know, hm does this especially if you’re looking for like certain size companies and things like that as I mean, hm does this company seem like something that would fit into my, you know fit into my list of potential prospects whereas in Sales Navigator so you’re got it all right there in front of you.

00:08:23:11 – (Bob Woods): That’s why when we talk about Sales Navigator, we’re always like the filters alone. I mean, even going beyond everything that we’re talking about now, I mean, just the search filters, you’re really in sales and data-driven sales. This is it’s definitely the way to go for you. Yeah. 

00:08:41:21 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah, Exactly. 

00:08:44:67 – (Bob Woods): So we’re going to go to number three now.

00:08:47:18 – (Bob Woods): So that is responding to engagement opportunities from the sales Navigator newsfeed. And that’s what’s critical here is the sales Navigator newsfeed because it is different from the LinkedIn dot com newsfeed, which if you’ve seen sales, navigator’s newsfeed and you’re seeing LinkedIn dot com newsfeed, you know that they’re different because the LinkedIn news feed as they can be just full of all kinds of things that you know, between the ads and what the algorithm thinks it wants you to see and everything else, you’re like, you know, sometimes it might be a little overwhelming.

00:09:28:09 – (Bob Woods): Tell us why the Sales Navigator newsfeed is different. And in my opinion alone, just so much better than the regular LinkedIn dot com. 

00:09:35:45 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes, Bob, as you mentioned, the LinkedIn newsfeed can be kind of overwhelming. And what’s wonderful about the sales Navigator newsfeed is that it’s driven by the accounts and the leads that you have saved. Now the algorithm is going to recommend additional accounts and leads based on the ones that you see.

00:09:59:29 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): However, what you see in your sales Navigator newsfeed will not include ads and it will not include extraneous content from people that you have no interest in from a sales standpoint. Right? So one of the things that you can easily use to pull up relevant information, especially when you’re pressed for time, are account alerts which alert you to things like employee headcount growth.

00:10:30:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): If headcount is growing at a company that might be of interest to you or conversely, if headcount is shrinking at a company and you have a solution that will help in that type of situation, alerts can alert you to that new decision maker hires a great opportunity to just start sales conversations with a new relevant decision maker that’s trying to make a name for themselves at their new company.

00:11:01:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And if you have a solution that can help them do that great opportunity for conversations and then lead alerts, they’ll highlight things like career moves. Any time someone’s engaged with content that you’ve posted for your company’s post, content that they’ve shared. So, some of these types of things you can find on LinkedIn that you have to do a lot of looking for a sales navigator.

00:11:28:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You just go straight to your alerts on the home page and you can do some filtering within alerts. You can even filter by lead and account that you’ve set up. So that’s a quick overview of some of the things that you can do with alerts and what makes the Sales Navigator Newsfeed very user friendly. 

00:11:47:34 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, very. And you know, especially one of the things that I’ve always suggested is that if you have Sales navigator and you are actively prospecting, obviously put everyone that you’re prospecting into Sales Navigator specifically.

00:12:07:16 – (Bob Woods): So in other words, don’t depend on LinkedIn dot com to bring that stuff over for you. You need to put those accounts in there, and the leads from within the accounts are up. It’s just a lead without whatever that looks like, basically to put that in there so that you are seeing the content that those people are sharing and you’re only seeing the content that those people are sharing without all of the wall coming in from the LinkedIn algorithm, that’s very important.

00:12:36:11 – (Bob Woods): It keeps you focused when you’re in Sales Navigator, which, which I think is another advantage of that as opposed to LinkedIn dot com because over on the other site, we all know that there are many rabbit holes that you can fall into. It’s much more difficult. I mean you probably could fall down a rabbit hole, and Sales Navigator is much more difficult to do.

00:12:59:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah exactly. And focus was exactly the word that I was looking for. So yes, by the way, you also want to go ahead and save your existing clients. Yes. In sales nav. it’s easy to overlook that, but put the algorithm to work for you by saving your existing clients. And of course, you can build lists within Sales Navigator.

00:13:21:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): But saving your existing clients helps to start to send signals as far as who you’re looking for to sales navigator. So it can start to recommend people just like that. 

00:13:33:44 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, very cool. Get that AI. Get that algorithm working for you on the sales navigator side. So that’s an excellent suggestions Stan. Appreciate that. So number four, this again, you can, you might be able to do this on the dot com side, but sales navigator makes it easy to do, and just the way you do things with it is it actually very easy to do, and that’s buyer mapping and socially surrounding accounts.

00:14:02:21 – (Bob Woods): So I think before we get into the how to do that, what our buyer mapping and social surrounding. 

00:14:10:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah so buyer mapping in this case is just looking at who are the stakeholders in purchasing decisions because these days, especially the business to business, there is no one buyer. Yeah. So, so you will probably have a champion within accounts that’s helping you kind of navigate the political landscape within an account.

00:14:37:05 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): But that’s probably not going to be the person who’s signing the check and who’s doing the evaluation of your solution. No one person is still aware of all those facts. So you want to make sure you’re aware of who all the influences are within the purchasing decision so that you can start to connect with them and start to build relationships with them socially.

00:15:02:20 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Surrounding is simply another way of saying don’t just connect ethical multi threading, but don’t just connect with one person. Connect with as many people as you can within a company. And one of the questions, Bob, in that we get this all the time, what happens if the person I want to reach out to is not active on LinkedIn?

00:15:27:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes. Then what do I do? Look for other people within their organization above and below them on their chart, their peers, and start to connect with them. Those people, if that’s what we call socially surrounding someone, just starting to connect with their peers, those they manage, those who manage them. And that’s one way that you will become visible.

00:15:58:17 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): It’s the long game. But when you have a good relationship with especially someone’s boss or manager, it’s very easy to get a conversation with someone that they manage. 

00:16:10:98 – (Bob Woods): And then based on your buyer mapping and your social surrounding activities, you can, you know you can chart that in the accounts or you can make a separate list of that.

00:16:21:23 – (Bob Woods): You obviously have a way to, while maybe not obvious if you’re not on Sales Navigator, but you can actually include notes directly into Sales Navigator about any person or or any account that you have there. That’s something else that you can’t do in LinkedIn dot com. And if you have the right type, if your company and this is definitely a company thing at this point because it’s really expensive but if you have the right type of sales navigator account, that actually sales navigator actually interfaces with several CRMs.

00:16:53:06 – (Bob Woods): The biggest ones obviously being like Salesforce is the one that always comes to my mind. It does interoperate with some others as well. And if you’re a big company that has a big CRM that Sales navigator works with, it just becomes an already very powerful tool, becomes that much more strong for you. 

00:17:17:64 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah, exactly. And sales now also include some relationship explorer and relationship map, which are simply ways of being able to view people within an organization. Relationship map actually allows you to build your own org chart and pull in people so that you can see how they’re related to each other and see who may need to connect to if they’re missing from the chart that you put together.

00:17:46:13 – (Bob Woods): That’s the Yeah, I forgot about that relationship. A score and relationship map are two very powerful things that again are only available in sales navigator and yeah, we talk about sales navigator a lot, just want to let you know we don’t make a dime off the sales navigator. It doesn’t have anything to do with that. We think it is so powerful of a tool and a resource for you that we do talk about it a lot.

00:18:10:25 – (Bob Woods): We do Stan, all of us especially Stan offers training on how to use it efficiently and effectively as well. So we are here for you when it comes to that. And that’s especially helpful for number five, our last item on our list today, which is two kind of separate things. But they do definitely intersect with one another.

00:18:35:07 – (Bob Woods): And that’s a special not special. It’s only available in the higher levels of Sales Navigator. But my God, it is such a great tool to have and that’s smart links. And then how that interacts with buyer intent. Plus Sales Navigator just handled buyer intent on its own as well. Yeah. 

00:18:53:87 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. Exactly. So smart links, as Bob mentioned, are available with advance in advance plus those.

00:19:04:26 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): It’s not available to core members, but basically if you haven’t tried it yet, you want to try a smart link. If you have access to it, it’s basically a way to create a link within Sales Navigator. Add any content, whether it be PowerPoint presentations, PDF data sheets, white papers, case studies. You can add that content to one link that you share.

00:19:31:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So you’re not having to worry about uploading documents and sending those, trying to send those to email and getting caught in spam filters. Yeah, etc. So being able to send a single link with multiple pieces of content is a beautiful thing. The second thing about it though are the analytics, because you can have it dated such that someone has to put their email in order to access the information and Sales Navigator will show you analytics as far as from the content that you shared with them, which ones, pieces of content they opened and how long they spent on each piece of content that you shared within the Smart lik, which is, yeah, it’s definitely huge.

00:20:19:22 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): It’s an indicator of their interest in the different pieces of content. And then if they do share these smart links with some of their colleagues, may be part of the buying process. It is also a way to basically get the names of new decision makers in the process that you may not already have on your radar. So smart links are wonderful and there are multiple ways that you can use them.

00:20:47:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Buyer intent is something that probably less than a year old doesn’t, less than 18 months old. And basically buyer intent means signals that LinkedIn has gotten from their members that they have an interest in your company. So, for example, if someone at a target account of yours has looked at your LinkedIn company page or connected with one of your colleagues on LinkedIn, even if it’s not you, those are signals of buyer intent.

00:21:24:13 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): In other words, they’re interested in your company and this type of data, and this is where AI comes into play, would be impossible for you to see. You have no visibility into things like that. But this is where AI, sales nav, algorithms could surface information that will help you and the salespeople. 

00:21:46:54 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, that’s all and That’s absolutely tremendous.

00:21:48:21 – (Bob Woods): And getting back to where we started with smart links, just having that ability to not only be able to add to a smart link as you go along. So you know, maybe you do like a preliminary proposal, say that’s three times faster and then you have some more meetings and things like that. You then uploaded and updated one of the uploads, some other documentation, things like that, but you keep it all in that same repository.

00:22:18:26 – (Bob Woods): And then people other than you, like Stan said, other people from within the company can come in and look at that. You can see when they look, how long they look, you can enable downloads as well so people can actually download if you want them to. Sometimes you may want to do that, sometimes you may not.

00:22:35:07 – (Bob Woods): It just depends on your specific situation, but it will tell you if people downloaded something which is a pretty strong buyer intent signal. If you ask them when they want to actually download software. Absolutely. So with that, I think unless I’m lost and you have any final thoughts, I think we’re going to go ahead and wrap things up.

00:22:58:26 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yep. I think we’ve given everyone enough to chew on. Sales Navigator just offers some powerful features that help you move the sales process forward. Gather intelligence on your potential clients sets. You can, as Bob mentioned at the outset, you can have conversations with them that are relevant, that are trust based because you’re bringing data and additional insights to them, which helps them and what they’re doing.

00:23:30:18 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Right? So thanks, Bob. 

00:23:32:32 – (Bob Woods): Yeah, it’s definitely all about, you know, helping them with the types of data or whatever it is that they need to have. The more involved, the more educated and more aware as they move through the sales process, which is all just fantastic stuff. Stan, thanks. Thanks for giving my voice a little bit of a break during this.

00:23:55:07 – (Bob Woods): Appreciate that. And thank you for joining us. And for putting up with my scratching is for this episode of Making Sales Social Live sponsored by Ask SSL for AI if you’re with us live on LinkedIn or YouTube right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, which means you’re listening to the recorded version, and you haven’t subscribed at all, subscribe already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button, and also drop us a line in the comments, we definitely love those as well.

00:24:28:05 – (Bob Woods): We do two shows weekly, this one and our Making Sales Social interview series where we discuss with leaders and experts all types of topics and things like that. And they’re in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas. If you’d like more on our podcast, go to social, Social Sales link dot com slash podcast. So Stan, it’s just you today, so we can probably handle this without, without much difficulty.

00:24:54:25 – (Bob Woods): So when you are out and about, be sure to make your sales social. Oh yeah. Bring in the base with that too. I love it. Thanks everybody. Have a great day. Bye now.

Outro:

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