Episode 504: 5 Underleveraged Sales Navigator Tactics That Are Costing You Opportunities

Bob Woods [0:00]: Hey there, everyone. Thanks for joining us for Making Sales Social Live, coming to you from the Social Sales Link virtual studios. I’m Bob Woods. Brynne Tillman and Stan Robinson Jr.. are joining me as well. What’s up, guys? Brynne Tillman

Stan Robinson Jr. [0:19]: Hello, my friend. How are you, my friends? You’re both here. Great. Both of my friends—two of them at least, doing awesome.

Bob Woods [0:31]: Yeah, Brynne has a ton of friends as we know, which is a good thing. Let’s get right into things here. One of the first things we hear from sales pros who are unfamiliar with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that it seems so overwhelming. That’s because it is. Because of this, though, most salespeople and sales teams vastly underutilize Sales Navigator as they were never really taught to think beyond the search bar. That’s why Brynn and Stan are going to discuss five strategies that will help you turn Sales Navigator from a contact database into a deal-driving engine and change overwhelming into productive. Before we get to that, we have a free ebook that details these strategies. It’s going to be at socialsaleslink.com/salesnav That’s all one word: socialsaleslink.com/salesnav I’ll get everything up on the screen so that you can see that while we go ahead and talk just a little bit about Sales Navigator before we get into the nitty-gritty of the five.

Brynne Tillman [1:48]: Awesome. So I’ll start with a little bit of Sales Navigator. I will tell you it is, hands down, the most powerful tool that we have available to us today. It is really an incredibly powerful sales tool because of its filters, which I know we’re going to talk about, and because of smart links, which I know we’re going to talk about. But here’s the thing: imagine all the tools you have. You have ZoomInfo that gets you lists of people, and then you have your address book that gets you the people that you know. This brings them together. I really am surprised when people are spending an enormous amount of money trying to find and buy lead lists, because it really misses what I think is the most important piece, which is the relationship. Sales Navigator kind of does both. Those are my thoughts. Stan, I know you are obsessed with the tool as well.

Stan Robinson Jr. [2:47]: Yes. Everyone’s talking about AI these days, and of course, Sales Navigator is incorporating AI into the platform to help us do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of research so you don’t have to spend a whole lot of time trying to research prospects and clients. SalesNav can do a lot of that for you and surface potential conversation triggers that you may have missed. As long as you’re on your homepage in Sales Navigator and checking alerts regularly, it’ll help make your life a lot easier.

Brynne Tillman [3:27]: Love that. Very good.

Bob Woods [3:29]: All right, let’s jump into the five things.

Stan Robinson Jr. [3:34]: Yep. I guess the first one is building what we call a living, breathing, or dynamic list that mirrors your ideal customer profile (ICP). Of course, you can build lists of accounts and leads in Sales Navigator based on filters that you set up and leads and accounts that you’ve saved, but those are static. We definitely suggest putting your top prospects, your accounts, and the partners you work with on lists so that you can keep track of them and search against them. However, SalesNav also has saved searches where you can use the same filters to search for your ICP. We’ll talk a little bit about some of the special filters like job changes and posting on LinkedIn, but saved searches are dynamic. Every time a new profile meets your ideal customer profile, you will get alerts from SalesNav. Brynn, it looks like you are excited about jumping in.

Brynne Tillman [4:46]: I know, I’m always excited about jumping in! I love this and I love what you’re saying, Stan. I think it’s magic. We talk a lot about the primary searches that you need to create to feed you opportunities. I just did a training at a major bank. All the bankers were saying, “I’m a relationship person. Do I really need this?” We actually did the seven base searches—and there are 11 if you’re account-based, meaning you have accounts that are assigned to you. The first one was the base search: what is your perfect ICP? That creates the largest list that makes the most sense. Then we look at job changes for those people, as you mentioned, and all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh my gosh, all these people are switching jobs.” If a relationship-driven person says, “I don’t need LinkedIn or Sales Navigator,” you can say, “Yeah, but now you just saw your relationships move jobs. Go use your relationships alongside this data.” Another search was shared posts. You can add in your first-degree connections, or if you have 30 or 50 assigned accounts you’re following, they can be in these search filters. These are dynamic searches. They are built on certain filters, and when the right people take the right action, you are alerted. There’s a green hyperlink every day or every week that you click through to see all the new people that meet that criteria. When folks say, “I sell based on relationships” or “I don’t need LinkedIn because it’s my relationships,” this is relationship plus data. When you save these searches—whether they are for first-degree, second-degree, or second-degree plus your client name to tell you who your client knows that you want to meet—there are so many combinations. When you do those, there’s a little toggle that you click to save your search, whether it’s for people or accounts, and it feeds you the new changes every week. This banker program was a four-week Sales Navigator course, and the first week we did these searches. By the fourth week, which we just finished with them on Friday, we looked at that search—which tracked first-degree relationships of the right people who had a job change—and there were 17 people. They were all CFOs. Seventeen CFOs that he was connected to had switched jobs in that four-week period! Those are relationships. Those are people that he knows, and now there’s data he never would have known any other way. Then we’re going to get into the next one. I’ll let Stan open it up, and then I want to talk about how we’re using this next tip with the first one. Stan, do you want to go into number two?

Stan Robinson Jr. [8:24]: Smart Links, which is a favorite. If you’re using Sales Nav Advanced or Advanced Plus, you have access to Smart Links. In short, it is a way that you can share multiple pieces of content using a single link, which helps get through email filters and things of that nature. You just send a link, they click on it, and they can see proposals, PDFs, presentations, white papers, case studies, and anything else you attach to it. I know Brynn will talk about the analytics, which are the secret sauce that comes with Smart Links, but it is a tool that you don’t want to sleep on.

Brynne Tillman [9:08]: Yeah, so I’m going to keep going with my banker. In week three, we created Smart Links in our training. One of the things that we did—and by the way, they’re using Copilot now, which I’m so excited about—was use a precise prompt that gave CFOs tips on how to evaluate the current bank of the new company they’re working for. The tips were tailored because Copilot was inside of their organization and already had their brand voice. We created a piece of content in three minutes, with maybe 10 minutes to edit. It centered around three tips for new CFOs in their first 90 days on how to analyze the bank relationship to identify if it’s meeting all of the company’s needs. It became a checklist. The CFO is now at a new company, they inherited a new bank, and they need to know what to look at to identify if this bank is meeting their goals for the new company. That went into the Smart Link. That Smart Link was then shared with some of these CFOs. Out of those 17 CFOs, they received a note saying, “Congratulations on your new role. We put together an easy checklist for when you’re analyzing the new bank you’ve inherited to help you identify what’s working and where the gaps are.” Six of them clicked through to it multiple times. They still might keep clicking because it’s still out there, but we already have six out of 17 who demonstrated interest. That’s a conversation starter. We also know who downloaded it. Actually, I think we set it so they couldn’t download it, meaning they had to keep coming back—which they did. You can choose that setting. We also saw that one of the companies shared it with multiple people on their team. There were other people inside of the finance group getting the Smart Link, and we know that because we were tracking those views. To be clear: the Sales Navigator job change alerts us to send this piece of content inside of Smart Links. We see who’s interested, and we see who else is sharing it inside of the organization. These are triggers to start deeper conversations. I don’t have the final conclusion to the case study yet, but the follow-up now is to reach out again: “Congratulations. I hope that the checklist was helpful to you. I have a few additional ideas or insights that can help you do this audit quicker. If you’re interested, I’m happy to come out to your office and have a conversation with you and your team.” We know there’s a team because he sent it out to them. We’ll let you know how that goes. But you can see that this is a banker who started off saying, “I don’t want LinkedIn or Sales Navigator because I’m a relationship person,” and now we have identified trigger data that maps directly to a relationship. The other side of this is that there is a new CFO coming into the previous company to track as well. Keep that in mind. This is not in lieu of relationships; this is how we use those relationships and data more effectively. What’s number three, Stan?

Stan Robinson Jr. [13:55]: Mapping. It’s interesting you mentioned the Smart Link that was shared among a team, allowing you to see who looked at it and essentially identify the team members. A lot of times, you won’t have that kind of visibility for a variety of reasons. We know that particularly with complex B2B purchases, buying committees keep getting bigger. Instead of asking your champion who else is normally involved in this type of purchasing decision, Sales Navigator gives you the ability to do some of the heavy lifting yourself through research. Instead of simply asking “who else,” you can look up the titles of the people likely involved in the buying committee based on your industry knowledge. You can then come back and say, “Bob, we should talk with your other team members about this. I noticed that Brynne Tillman is the CFO.”

Brynne Tillman [15:06]: CMO would be better, but okay, I’ll take that one!

Stan Robinson Jr. [15:11]: Yeah, take that one. You can ask, “Do you think we should include her in this discussion?” It’s a bit of a rhetorical question because you already know who should be included. The point is that you can come to them with a list of names instead of just asking, “Who do you think?” This makes their life easier and gives you more credibility in their eyes. Brynn, any additional thoughts on that?

Brynne Tillman [15:39]: I love that. I’m just going to give a quick little tip. If you use personas inside of Sales Navigator, you can build out either all the company titles that you think would be involved, or a combination of role and—oh my gosh, see, this is what happens. There’s a magic combo when you are completing any search inside of LinkedIn when looking for specific people. It’s either you put in job titles, or you put in this combo… LinkedIn is being really slow while I’m trying to be clever. Seniority and function! Thank you. On the fly: seniority and function. For those of you that are listening, just act as if there was an edit in there, which we won’t do. When you create the persona, you can’t do all three. You either do job titles of all the positions, or seniority and function. Now, when you get to that company page, all you have to do is turn on that toggle and LinkedIn will give you a full list of all the people that meet that criteria. If you’re targeting companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, using personas to do stakeholder mapping makes all the difference in the world. My quick tip was way too long! Super. All right.

Stan Robinson Jr. [17:28]: Next, we already hinted at the fact that Sales Navigator has incorporated AI. Two of the main features are called Account IQ and Lead IQ. This means SalesNav uses AI to do a lot of the pre-research on accounts and individuals, surfacing information that will be helpful for a productive sales conversation. With accounts, for example, Account IQ can include everything from the biggest challenges the company faces to how they make money, a list of their competitors, and trends with company headcount. These data points are delivered in a form that you can scan very quickly. Ten minutes before a sales call, you can use Account IQ to bring you up to speed on the pertinent information about the account. There’s a similar functionality for leads. Sales Navigator finds this type of information, packages it up for you in a nice, easily scannable form, and delivers it to you. All you have to do is be aware that it exists and click “build insights for me.” Brynn, anything else that comes to mind as far as Account IQ and Lead IQ?

Brynne Tillman [19:06]: I think you’ve really nailed the functionality and the value of those two. I will sometimes take that content into Claude or Gemini and massage it even more. I may ask it for a competitive analysis, or although they do have some SWOT analysis features, you may have additional insights that you’re looking to build. One last thing that I do: if your organization has discovery questions, you can take that Account IQ and Lead IQ information and, with the right prompt, generate discovery questions that tie right back to that information. That’s an advanced way of looking at it, but you can take all of that insight and map it to your discovery questions. Instead of asking a generic question like, “What’s your biggest challenge?”, you can say, “I noticed that you guys had a recent acquisition of a small account. How is that affecting X?” Aligning your discovery questions through AI along with Account IQ and Lead IQ information can really help to customize that first meeting.

Stan Robinson Jr. [20:42]: Good. And then we’re at number five.

Brynne Tillman [20:45]: Yes, and we’ve touched on this in terms of buying signals. You may have the relationships, but being able to keep up with what’s new in the lives of your relevant contacts is virtually impossible without help. As mentioned with job changes, most people don’t think to notify their account executive when they change jobs, but Sales Navigator shows you that. You don’t have to wait six months—or forever—for them to let you know they’ve moved. It also surfaces things like activity on LinkedIn, such as people who have posted within the past 30 days. With accounts, there’s a field where you can check for funding events in the past year or senior leadership changes in the past three months. The point is, Sales Navigator is alerting you to relevant opportunities for sales conversations. Anything else that comes to mind on that?

Brynne Tillman [22:00]: In leads, you can also take a look at “account has buyer intent,” which can be meaningful if you are dealing with a huge company. For smaller companies, it might not be as precise. Buyer intent signals could include someone following your company page or viewing your profile. Those are engagement signals. Buyer intent could also mean someone else from your company just connected with them, or they engaged with content that your company posted. If they’re engaging with your company, some of those buyer intent signals can help you identify if there’s already knowledge of and interest in you. If you see that quite a few people are suddenly following your company page when they weren’t before, to me, that is a buying signal. So Bob, why don’t you take us in for a landing, my friend?

Bob Woods [23:09]: Yeah, absolutely. As we’ve seen, Sales Navigator works the best when you work it right. With what we’ve discussed today, as well as our ebook, you’re going to be well on your way to seeing new heights of success by using it. Speaking of the ebook, it’s at socialsaleslink.com/salesnav All one word: socialsaleslink.com/salesnav With that, thanks for joining us here on Making Sales Social Live. We’re here live every week, Mondays at 12:30 p.m. Eastern Time, US, so feel free to put a block on your calendar for us. We’d love that. If you’re listening to us as a recording on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, one click of the subscribe or follow button is all you need to do. Drop us likes and comments as well; we like those and would love to converse with you within them. Besides these LinkedIn Lives, we also interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas, so catch up on those episodes as well. socialsaleslink.com/podcast is where you want to go if you want more information about who we are and what we do here at Social Sales Link. When you are out and about, be sure you’re making your sales social. Brynne Tillman &

Stan Robinson Jr. [24:32]: Social.

Bob Woods [24:34]: Excellent. Excellent. Thanks, guys. Great to see everybody.

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