How a Global Mobility Service Provider is Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Accelerate Growth in Africa

To Santa Fe, the world is a small—but hardly simple—place. The leading global mobility services company offers global, regional and local single-source solutions to both international businesses with expatriate employees as well as individuals across six continents, including Africa.

With the once-overlooked African market now transforming into an attractive business destination, Santa Fe is ramping up efforts to grow its presence so as to better serve international companies entering Africa and local companies expanding within the continent. But the journey is not without its challenges.

To achieve the company’s ambitious sales and marketing growth targets, and to reach out to a geographically-dispersed audience in and beyond Africa, Ruth Lockwood, who is now Business Development Director of Africa after a decade of managing Santa Fe’s Asian operations, believes that digital is the way to go.

By establishing a strong digital identity on LinkedIn, then using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify and engage the right audience with targeted content, and staying updated with changes in their key target accounts, Ruth reveals that her team’s sales and marketing process has been totally transformed.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for me, is absolutely life changing. While we do have an amazing CRM system, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator I can reah out to people, profile them quickly, and better quality the right decision-makers to engage. — Ruth Lockwood, Business Development Director, Africa, Santa Fe Relocation

From Cold Calls to Hot Leads

“I used to regard LinkedIn as a vehicle to connect. Now that I’ve taken on sales responsibilities, I’m discovering that there’s so much more to the platform, especially with a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator. As a sales team, we want to reach out to people but we may not always know who they are. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we can search, profile, target, and engage them with much more efficiency and efficacy than cold calling,” Lockwood said.

“The training that the LinkedIn Sales Solutions team provided was excellent too. After I learned about LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s advanced lead and company search function, I tried it out on my own and found a contact that Santa Fe was working with globally, but not in Africa. I reached out to him, arranged for coffee, then a meeting, and closed the deal. That account is now worth about €40,000 (US$49,000). It was our first LinkedIn Sales Navigator success story, with many to follow.”

Ruth and her team also uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator for another critical sales and marketing step—to share content of value, in order to engage, nurture and convert.

“Previously, we would send emails, but we would not have visibility into the level of interest and engagement that our emails generate. Now that we’re distributing content via LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we know exactly who has read what, so our understanding of our target audience has definitely deepened. Every day, we’re getting insights that are helping us refine our engagement strategy and improve the way we produce content,” Lockwood said.

“Overall, we’re extremely pleased with the results that we’re getting through LinkedIn Sales Navigator—so much so that we’ve since implemented it globally, to give all our sales teams the tools they need to be great at their jobs.”

After about a year with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I'm convinced that if a teammate is not logging on regularly, they're missing a huge opportunity to identify new leads to grow business. — Lockwood

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