Episode 406: 5 Powerful Sales Navigator Features for B2B Sales Success

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.

00:00:59:29 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Hi there. Thank you for joining us for today’s Making Sales Social. I’m Stan Robinson, chief coaching officer here at Social Sales Link. Brynne and Bob are both in different places today. We’re going to be talking about basically five powerful Sales Navigator features for B2B sales success. And I always like to start by talking a little bit about what makes Sales Navigator different from LinkedIn.

00:01:35:10 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Sales navigator is a premium version of LinkedIn, and it is specifically designed for those who are responsible for generating revenue to help them stay focused on sales opportunities. So when you log into Sales Navigator, one thing you notice immediately is the absence of any ads and any extraneous content in your news feed. Everything that you see in Sales Navigator, in terms of leads, which are individuals

00:02:09:16 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): and accounts, which are organizations or companies. All of that information is driven by the leads and accounts that you have saved. And of course, when you save a leader or account in Sales Navigator, it’s automatically saved to a bucket. We’ll be talking a little bit about lists a little bit further in, but when you save leads in accounts, it sends the sales navigators algorithm a signal to try and surface similar leads and accounts for you as potential prospects.

00:02:44:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So the other big difference between Sales Navigator and LinkedIn are the features such as extensive search filters, extensive use of algorithms to provide in-depth information on leads and accounts through account IQ, and more recently, lead IQ. So the whole goal with Sales Navigator is to help you stay up to date on insights, events, and any other triggers that may provide opportunities for you to start sales conversations with individuals and accounts that are of interest to you.

00:03:32:04 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So let’s talk a little bit about these five factors. One I already alluded to, which is the Sales Navigator homepage. Because the home page is designed to remove any distractions to your sales process. And we’ll talk a little bit about some of the features on it, but you won’t be distracted by a news feed where you’ll be seeing posts from people that may not be relevant directly to your sales activities.

00:04:08:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Everything you see there will be about the companies and the individuals that are of interest to you. And so Sales Navigator’s homepage is customized to show you alerts, business insights, accounts that you may have prioritized as ones that you want to keep an eye on and continually come back to. So the first thing is simply the homepage.

00:04:37:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): The second item that helps with your prospecting and sales efforts are sales navigators, alerts and alerts are front and center on your Sales Navigator home page. There are alerts segmented by leads and alerts segmented by accounts. So when it comes to alerts they will show you relevant events like job changes for leads whenever a person of interest to you is a decision maker at one of your target accounts.

00:05:16:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Whenever they change jobs. That is a significant event for you, whether they’re changing jobs laterally or they get a promotion within your target account, or whether they move to another company. So that type of information is critical. Another alert will be around when with your sales, saved leads posting. If they’ve posted on LinkedIn, you will see that in alerts because when they post, it is a potential opportunity for you to engage with the post, support the content that they’re posting, and also gain some visibility because particularly if you tag them when

00:06:07:08 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): you comment on their post. They get notified. And so it’s a way to stay on someone’s radar without being overly intrusive. And when it comes to accounts, you have the ability to see things like funding events. Because whenever an account gets more money, that’s a potential opportunity for you. Also, new decision makers coming into an account, whether a, an accounts headcount is growing or whether it’s decreasing.

00:06:51:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Both of those can be very important indicators as far as potential opportunities for you. And, simply account updates whenever the company page publishes new information. That is also a potential opportunity for you to engage with the account. Next, sales navigators, search filters, sales Nav at this point has about 50 different search filters between account searches and lead searches that you can use to hyper focus your searches on the companies and people that are of interest to you.

00:07:38:06 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So one of the things about searching, whether it be in LinkedIn or in Sales Navigator, is that normally your challenge will not be getting enough search results. Your challenge is going to be narrowing the search results that you get down to a number like 200, 250 people or accounts that are manageable for you when you do a search and it brings you back 500 results.Well, they may meet your search criteria yet, but 5000

00:08:17:06 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): or even 500 results gets very unwieldy very quickly because you can’t see yourself going through 500 results in a week, two weeks, or even a month, let alone 5000 or more. So the search filters help you narrow your accounts, for example, down based on everything from headquarters location to even whether a department’s headcount is growing or dropping,

00:08:52:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): whether they’re a public or private company or a nonprofit. You can search for those types of filters and criteria as well. You can also search for accounts that have what’s called buyer intent. And this is where sales navigators algorithm identifies signals that you yourself would have never been able to find. Like whether employees at that account visit your companies company page on LinkedIn, whether people at that account have connected with not just you,

00:09:32:00 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): but any of your colleagues within your company. So buyer intent is a wonderful feature, something that Sales Navigator shows you using algorithms and other technology to surface information that you would not have been able to find on your own. In the lead category, when it comes to lead filters, one of the most valuable filters that I’ve found is the ability to filter leads based on those who’ve posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days. Now, you may as well stand. Why is that particularly helpful?

00:10:12:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): That basically because when you’re reaching out to people on LinkedIn, it helps to know whether they’re active on LinkedIn or inactive on LinkedIn because they’re over a billion people on LinkedIn right now, some of whom are much more active than others. So how do you distinguish between those who are likely to accept an invitation to connect from you or respond to a direct message, even if you’re directly connected to them? How can you tell who’s likely to see your interactive action and your engagement on LinkedIn?

00:10:50:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Well, when you filter your search results by people who posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, that is an automatic indicator that they’re active on LinkedIn. If they’ve posted within the past 30 days, then they’ve been on LinkedIn at least once in the past month or so. And those are the people that you’ll want to start with when it comes to your outreach efforts. So in addition to posting on LinkedIn, in the past 30 days, there are a number of other lead filters, including geography. You can do a radius search around zipcode

00:11:34:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): on Sales Navigator, which can be extremely valuable if your sales territories are geographically organized, or if you’re driving to see potential prospects and customers. It helps to know, okay, who’s within ten miles? Who’s within 25 miles, who’s within 50 miles of my location? So those are just some of the search filters that you have access to in Sales Navigator. Now the next list. Sales navigator allows you to create lists of accounts and leads based on any criteria that you choose that are available within the 50 some odd search filters available to you in Sales Navigator.

00:12:27:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So as an example, I definitely suggest that you create a list of your current clients. It doesn’t hurt also to create lists of past clients who may not be active with you right now, which you may want to return to in the future. Prospect lists. And depending on how you’re approaching your sales motion, it may be prospects based on industry prospects based on geography. However you choose to segment your lists such that it makes you more efficient when you’re reaching out to people.

00:13:07:09 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): The other great thing about lists is that you can use your lists as a search filter. When you’re doing searches, you can include your list along with other filters. When you’re doing searches or probably more commonly, you can exclude your lists if you’re looking for new logos. If you’re responsible for generating new accounts and you want to exclude those who meet your search criteria, but you’re already working with them, so it makes no sense for Sales Navigator to pull up those people

00:13:46:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): in your search results. When you do a search. So lists are extremely powerful. Now, one of the things about a list is that a list is static.In other words. The only reason that a list will change is that you go in and add or delete an account, or a lead from a list that you’ve put together. We talked a little bit about search filters before, and the 50 plus search filters that you have access to.

00:14:24:15 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): when you do a search on Sales Navigator. Once you’ve established a set of search criteria using filters that return the results that you’re looking for, and it gives you a quality list of search results, you can save those searches in Sales Navigator, so you can always come back and pull those search criteria up again without having to recreate them. Now, the good news about these saved searches is that they’re dynamic. So anytime an account or a lead

00:15:04:11 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): adjusts its profile and meets your search criteria, that account or lead is automatically going to appear in your saved search. And you can ask Sales Navigator to email you. Your save search results each week. So any time new accounts and new leads that meet your search criteria appear on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator will consolidate that and email it to you. So it’s like Sales Navigator prospecting for leads for you and surfacing these leads when they appear. So I just wanted to go back to that to distinguish between saved searches that you set up using your search filters. And then when you.

00:16:01:02 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Have set up a search that specifically meets your search filters, then you can simply hit the little toggle next to save search at the top of your search results, and it will automatically save that particular set of search criteria for you. And that list again is dynamic. It’s going to change every time. New accounts and new people meet those criteria, as contrasted with lists that we were just talking about, where you can set up lists of accounts and leads

00:16:34:27 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): based on criteria such as clients, prospects, partners, channel partners, investors, whatever criteria you decide makes sense to help you organize the accounts and leads that you’re working with, and that you are reaching out to and in a way that gives you easy access to those lists. So we’ve talked a little bit about the Sales Navigator home page. We’ve talked about alerts that you will find on the home page. We’ve talked about search filters to help you narrow down your searches, and then save searches that are of interest to you, and deliver the results that you want.

00:17:22:02 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): We talked about the ability to build lists on Sales Navigator, which again, you can’t do on LinkedIn. And then the last one that we will wrap up with at number five are Smart Links. Now Smart links are available to you if you have an advanced or advanced Plus Sales navigator, subscription and Smart Links allow you to set up a link that you can share, which includes different types of content that you want to share. So with under one link,

00:18:00:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): you can attach PowerPoints, PDFs, website links to just one link. So it makes it much easier to get through email filters by sending a link to someone that they can in turn open and see any other documents, web links, etc. that you’ve shared with them. Now that in and of itself is very powerful and you can use Smart Links for sharing content with prospects. You can share it and use it for sharing presentations, because if you’re doing presentations to groups of people, one of the first things that comes up as a question is, can you share the presentation with me?

00:18:52:19 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And you can simply share it with them as a smart link. You can also include a smart link and a QR code, so you can use it to help with your marketing efforts. Because of the additional feature of a smart link, in addition to being able to link multiple pieces of content to just one web link, the additional feature or the analytics. So when people open a smart link and start looking at the information that you’ve sent to them, underneath that smart link, you will be able to see who’s opened the smart link, which pieces of content that they’ve looked at,

00:19:34:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): how long they’ve spent looking at each piece of content, and if they pass the link on to some of their colleagues and those people, open the smart link. Look at pieces of information. You also get analytics on that. So smart links can actually help you start to map the contacts that may be of interest to you within an organization. And you can see analytics as far as who’s looked at what. Because with smart links you also have the ability to date the content that people can see.

00:20:18:11 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): So you can make an email address required in order to view what’s in the smart link, or if for some reason you want to remove friction from the process, and you just want to make sure that you share content with people that they can easily access. You can disable the email capture feature and simply share the smart link with them. So I hope those points help in terms of how you can use Sales Navigator as one of your tools for B2B sales success. For additional content, we publish two podcasts a week. One is an interview with the leader in sales, marketing, AI, or other facets of business that we interview.

00:21:11:07 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): And then we also do this podcast where we’ll talk about subjects around sales, marketing, how to leverage AI and other topics that are of interest to revenue driven professionals. If you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, we ask, what are you waiting for? You can go to Social Sales Link dot com all one word slash podcasts. To see past episodes of all of our podcasts and subscribe. So thanks for joining us. We look forward to talking with you next week. Bye now.

Outro:

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