You may have heard a lot about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, however, never used it before.
Don’t worry, we are here to help you understand what it is, how you can use it, and its benefits.
Social selling is transforming the sales landscape and making it easier than ever to connect with prospects and discover leads organically.
LinkedIn is a standard social media platform you can use for professional work and relationships.
With 720 million uses, this platform is growing every day in both size and value. Other than recruiting, a lot of marketers are using it to up their digital marketing game.
Moreover, has long been a popular and effective place to find and nurture your sales lead.
It is important to note that LinkedIn sales navigator offers sales organizations even more power so that they can find more leads and manage their pipelines effectively.
How? Keep on reading to learn more.
Understanding LinkedIn Sales Navigator
It is important to note that LinkedIn has both free and paid versions of the sales navigator
There are also paid licenses for recruiters, job seekers, professionals, and sales reps.
Moreover, it is a paid sales solution as well.
This sales navigator is the sales management tool that helps sales reps to tap into LinkedIn’s extensive network more effectively and landing to more and better deals.
Here’s how:
Top Features: This sales navigator has some interesting premium features. These are some of the few impactful on each plan:
Core: With this subscription, members can access:
- About 50 InMail messages per month
- 10,000 saved leads
- advanced lead and company search
- Custom lists
- Lead and account alerts
- Notes and tags
It is important to note that InMail is the key feature for salespeople who are on the hunt for leads.
The free version does not allow users to directly message others outside of their network.
Moreover, with a sales navigator, you can reach out to fresh leads that may not be directly connected with you.
A feature that gives you more opportunities to discover and build relationships with leads outside their direct network.
Additionally, the ability to use advanced searches, save leads, create custom account lists, and add notes or tags to leads and accounts will make it easier for you to manage your pipeline and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Advanced: This plan includes everything just like the Core plan, with a few more key features:
- TeamLink and TeamLink Extend
- Team collaboration tools
- Embedded profile integrations
- Smart Links
Moreover, this plan gives you access to TeamLink and TeamLink Extend, integration with your workflows, collaboration functionality like sharing lists and searches, and Smart Links for tracking content engagement.
TeamLink enables you to view and search your team’s connections to identify who has first-degree connections with a prospect in the pipeline.
You can then reach out to the team members for a warm introduction to the lead, giving them a more likely path to a sale.
Advanced Plus: This plan tends to have all the best features from the Core and Advanced plans along with:
This plan is designed for teams of 10 or more.
You can integrate with your CRM and measure the impact on revenue.
Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
On the sales navigator, the extensive premium features and sales resources bring together a number of benefits.
As you learn how to use this feature more effectively, you will enjoy more benefits, including greater efficiency and improved sales results.
Some of the few benefits are:
CRM Integrations: This feature integrates with a number of popular sales apps and customer relationship management programs.
These include Salesforce, HubSpot, G2, Outreach, etc. You will simply need to import your sales navigator data into your preferred CRM and it will begin working.
This will make it even easier to manage your pipeline and track sales data from one location.
Targeted Searches: The advanced search functions will give you the power to target your ideal leads more and discover relevant connections.
Moreover, as a sales rep, you can choose from a large number of filters for people and/or companies including:
- Keywords
- Geographic location by region or state
- Job title
- Company name, size, type, e.g., public, private, or nonprofit
- Group membership
- School
- Years of experience
- Industry
- Job opportunities
- Number of followers
These premium search filters will save time by helping your target the most relevant connections.
It helps so that you can focus on more valuable sales tasks like building relationships and closing deals.
Automated Lead Generation: The Lead Recommendation feature tends to suggest relevant leads depending on your:
- sales preference,
- search history,
- profile views,
- past saved leads.
Moreover, it is a great feature as it saves you a step-in sales process, and helps you fill your pipeline faster will relevant connections.
Powerful Sales Insight: One of the best advantages of using this feature is that the more you use it, the more data it can use to deliver valuable insights.
As you search for prospects, save leads, and more connections, it will keep you posted on updates in your networks like:
- job changes,
- company updates,
- relevant connections
- warm leads.
Access to Out-of-network connections: One of the biggest benefits of using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced plan is it provides an opportunity to extend your sales reach outside your direct network.
In most cases, you can only view a limited number of profiles of people outside your network.
While in the advanced plan, lets you “unlock” that information so that you can better understand our lads and make more meaningful connections.
Let’s learn how you can use the LinkedIn Sales navigator:
1# Start your Free Trial
The first thing you need to do is to go to the Sales navigator page and click on the “start your free trial” option.
LinkedIn will let you use this feature for free for 30 days, so make sure you take full advantage of that in your first month.
You will need to provide your credit card information to sign up for this offer.
However, you will not be charged anything if you cancel your subscription before the trial period ends.
Then you will be directed to the Sales Navigator website, it is a different platform in itself.
Whatever you do, it will not affect your normal LinkedIn Account.
Learn more about LinkedIn Ads here
2# Set Up your Account
After signing up for an account, you need to set your preferences accordingly.
You can personalize this feature account by setting up your preferences like job titles, verticals, and regions that you want to target.
At first, this will give you the option to save your existing LinkedIn connections as leads.
Moreover, you can also syn the Sales navigator with
Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 to import all your contacts and accounts.
There are many more options to integrate with other apps if you are using other CRMs.
At this point, you are done with the initial settings of your account.
Now you can view and save companies Sales Navigator suggests, saving a company in your account will allow you to follow updates, track new leads, and receive company-specific news.
Moreover, this will keep you well-informed before your first conversation with a potential customer.
However, if you are not sure what companies you need to save, you can skip this part and add them later.
Lastly, you will need to fill out the information on what type of leads you are searching for.
During this, you can enter information bout your sales region or area, industry interests, and job functions you are targeting.
Learn more about 9 Powerful LinkedIn Marketing Tips here.
3# Find Leads and Prospects
The next thing you need to do once completing the account preferences is to search for prospects and build lead lists.
A simple way to do so is to use Lead Builder, a tool that is present within the
Sales navigator that will offer you an advanced search filter.
For anyone using this feature, understating how to utilize Lead Builder is another important step.
To refine your search criteria, you can also search for certain job titles or companies.
When you complete your search parameter, you will need to click on the Search option to see the results.
Sales navigator will give you more data in its results than you can find in the standard version of LinkedIn.
Right beside every result, you can find a “save as lead” option and you can use it to save relevant prospects.
Make sure to look for your prospects wisely instead of just selecting random people off the bat.
The next step is to save a lead to an account and here accounts refer to the companies you want to follow to keep you up with the latest developments.
On the left of the page, you can find a number of filtering options like industry, designations, first and last name, postal code, company size, seniority level, and years of experience.
Moreover, the Sales navigator will also provide a feature; TeamLink and you can use this to filter your results to view bridged or team connections.
However, if it notices any personal connection between your prospect and a team member, you can ask your mutual connection for an intro.
Lastly, after you add prospects as leads, you will see them on the Leads Tab.
4# Filter Sales Preferences
On the setting page of your Sales Navigator profile, you can see Sales Preferences in the mid.
From here, you can narrow down the ideal client you have in mind depending on the industry, geography, function, and company size.
It is important to that that these preferences will appear whenever you check the profile of a potential prospect.
And LinkedIn will also show you lead recommendations depending on the preferences you set.
This one is especially the most effective prospecting feature on Sales Navigator.
You can also run an advanced search on either leads or accounts while there are more than 20 search filters you can apply to your search.
These included keywords, titles, company fields, and much more.
5# Check up on your Saved Leads
On the homepages of Sales navigator, you can also track all the recent updates and news that are relevant to your saved leads.
The good thing about this feature is that you can also see updates even from people who are not your connections.
With all these insights on your prospects, you can write better InMail i.e. direct messages to engage them.
Moreover, if you intend to narrow the range of your updates, use these filters on the right side of the page.
In the Accounts tab, you can see a list of companies you have already saved. To more about them, you will need to click on the View Account option.
There you can find as well as add more people and find the latest information about their companies.
You can also click on the “all Employees” option to view everyone who works for that company This is an intuitive feature as it will enable you to connect to anyone in that company at any time.
6# Build Contacts
After you identify your prospects and actively follow their developments, you can contact them. How?
The best strategy to adopt is to keep in touch with your key accounts and send relevant and timely messages.
With the help of Sales Navigator, you can be up to date with the activities of the buyer.
Moreover, you can know when to reach out and send them InMail.
Craft messages and create a template in such a way that it invites constructive discussions.
And this is the kind of relationship-building strategy that will help you pave the way toward social selling success.
However, this feature has one small disadvantage.
You will need to reach out to every single of your leads manually which can be time-consuming.
To avoid this, you can simply use the LinkedIn automation tool.
It is important to note that not all automation tools are safe and if you want safety and efficiency, it is best to choose Expandi for your social selling automation process for instance.
This will help make sure that your account is safe by implementing its built-in safety limit for follow-ups and connection requests, sending messages within scheduled working hours, and improving piled-up pending invites with one click.
Furthermore, using the right platforms will let you build a large prospect list quite fast as well as with minimal effort.
You can then take that list and import it to Expandi which will perform the most time-consuming tasks for you.
7# Leverage Insights from Sales Navigator
There are a number of varying features on Sales navigator that you can put to great use if you know how to use them the right way.
For instance, if you need some fresh leads, this feature can recommend leads depending on your profile information and usage.
Again, if you have high-maintenance leads, the sales navigator will allow you to assign notes and tags to the customer profile and also syn with your CRM.
Moreover, if you want to find inbound LinkedIn marketing, Sales Navigator will give you expanded visibility.
Thus, you can view who saw your profile.
In this way, you can know who is already interested in you and your organization.
8# Offer Prospects Value and adds an Extension to Chrome
Prospects who fill out the “interests” section of their profile are doing you a favor on LinkedIn.
On this basis, they are providing you with a list of topics you can use as:
- The ground of discussion to understand their personalities and priorities
- A road map on how your company and its products can meet their demands
Understanding what your leads are interested in and how your products can provide them with the value they are looking for is a great approach.
Moreover, it will give you an upper hand over competitors who do not care to personalize their approach to the leads.
Chrome extension of Sales navigator will enable you to see LinkedIn profiles from within your Gmail Account.
Also, this will guide you with ice-breaker topics, save leads for you and show you, TeamLink Data.
Learn more about 9 Popular Chrome Extensions for Content Writers here.
Final Thoughts
After reading this far the article, you may be wondering whether Sales Navigator is worth the money or not.
The answer is Yes. While the small business and sales organizations will need to try out the free version to see if it is worth investing in at the right time, the larger business should definitely use this platform for better sales pipelines and more efficient workflow.