How Facilicom built its growth plan around LinkedIn Sales Navigator

How does one of Europe’s leading facilities management groups set about doubling its revenues over a five-year period? For Guy Claes, Marketing Director of Facilicom Group, it was clear that his company’s ambitious growth targets would only be made possible by effective implementation of a supporting technology.

“We don’t have an army of marketers or sales people, and so we needed to build a tech stack for sales and marketing automation that could help us take ownership of the funnel,” he says. “LinkedIn Sales Navigator was part of that strategy from the beginning. We needed to get our teams using it on a daily basis, and we’ve seen spectacular progress over the last few months.”

The Challenge:

Facilicom set themselves ambitious sales goals, and an even more ambitious timeline in which to achieve them. But with clear direction and dedication to an informed solution, they set about tackling three prinicpal objectives:

1. Building a sales and marketing automation stack to support ambitious growth targets
2. Driving 100% adoption of Sales Navigator across Facilicom’s sales team
3. Growing the opportunity pipeline by building relationships at scale
   

The Solution:

After adopting Salesforce and integrating it with Sales Navigator, Facilicom was able to transform the quality and value of its CRM data. This delivered benefits for the sales team almost immediately, helped by full adoption of the company’s entire 117 Sales Navigator licenses. When a sales team collectively invest and adopt a technology like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, certain features, such as TeamLink, become even more impactful.

But how did Facilicom activate Sales Navigator among it's workforce? In two main ways, firstly, their telemarketing team were retrained to act as social selling ambassadors. Secondly, careful integration with Salesforce was used to transform the quality of CRM data, ensuring their prospecting efforts were using the most up-to-date and reliable data possible.

The Results:

Facilicom's hard work and dedication paid off in the end, with the comany smashing their targets and bringing about a cultural shift in how they go about their selling activities. 
This is what their success looked like:

•  100% activation of 117 Sales Navigator licenses
•  Significant increase in conversion rate to opportunities for digital events and webinars
•  Sales Navigator adopted as the key to mapping target accounts and planning campaigns
•  Expanded opportunity pipeline in key verticals such as catering services

“Over the last few months, we’ve seen spontaneous adoption of Sales Navigator across the business with sales teams embracing it as a source of insight and a relationship building tool. We’re now mapping sectors and building campaigns on the platform. We can see the ROI through our teams’ ability to identify the right decision-making groups for our services and turn second and third-degree connections into first-degree connections."
- Guy Claes, Marketing Director, Facilicom Group.

Building relationships at scale

Facilicom’s telemarketing team epitomised the benefits that the business could gain from adopting sales technology. “We had a team of about four people calling suspects and prospects and achieving a conversion rate of roughly 2% to 3%,” Guy recalls. “I knew that a conversion rate like that wasn’t going to achieve our targets, and so I gave that team a new challenge to help me implement Sales Navigator and Salesforce, and help themselves to be more successful in the process.”

With prospecting through Sales Navigator quickly becoming a daily habit for the team, conversion rates dramatically increased – and Guy had a set of ambassadors to demonstrate the advantages to the rest of the business. “Telemarketers are often seen as very conservative in the way that they work, but our team really made Sales Navigator their own,” he says. “They found it extremely easy to use and way easier to get results.”

The experience of the telemarketing team acted as a template for sales reps looking to increase the value of webinars and digital events – and build relationships in key verticals. “We’ll often have a webinar where the majority of attendees are suspects and prospects rather than existing clients,” says Guy. “Messaging on LinkedIn enables us to reach out to those people in a GDPR-compliant way and start a conversation.”

Taking control of the funnel

Successfully integrating Salesforce with Sales Navigator helped Guy to transform the quality of Facilicom’s CRM data – and demonstrate the value of social selling to the business. “Cleaning up the CRM was an immediate win for us,” he says. “It helped to really ramp up the use of Sales Navigator – and it means that we can track our leads and demonstrate the value that we’re getting.”

That value is being felt across the business in recent months. Despite the COVID-19 crisis forcing sales teams to work remotely, their adoption of Sales Navigator – and ability to identify and reach out to decision-makers – has increased. “Reaching out to the right people for a new contract isn’t easy,” explains Guy. “You’ve got a small window of opportunity to present your services in a relevant way. “When you sit down and look at the amount of time your team are saving by being able to identify those opportunities, Sales Navigator really becomes a no-brainer.”

Guy will be speaking as part of the LinkedIn Virtual Live Leaders Panel on Wednesday, September 16, 2020. Tackling the subject of the State of Sales in Europe. Tune in at 10AM (GMT) to hear more about how the evolving sales trends in Europe, and how sales technology can equip sales teams to deal with them.