How LinkedIn Sales Navigator Bolsters Startup Grind’s Pipeline

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., Startup Grind is the largest independent startup community, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting more than 2 million entrepreneurs in more than 600 chapters. Startup Grind nurtures startup ecosystems in more 125 countries through events, media, and partnerships.

Challenge

Startup Grind is a business that focuses on helping other businesses grow, through events and community-building for startups and entrepreneurs. With a prospecting approach driven by insight and data, Startup Grind wanted to level-up its targeting and research.

Solution

About six months ago, the team at Startup Grind upgraded from LinkedIn Premium to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. The platform opens up a new world of business details to help spark and direct conversations. Hosting more than 30 million companies, LinkedIn is a key platform for identifying and engaging with potential clients and partners.

“It’s just the most accurate, up-to-date data that you can be using as you’re looking to prospect,” opines Lindsay Markel, Startup Grind’s Senior Partnerships Manager.

Results

Startup Grind’s model is supported by continual expansion of its client and partner ecosystem. Sales Navigator has lent a major assist on this front. Across 10 Sales Navigator licenses, the team has saved more than 2,300 leads since implementing the platform.

The biggest difference-maker, according to Markel, is the relative rate of response (16%) with LinkedIn’s messaging tool, which healthily outpaces the company’s emailing efforts. “There are responses we are able to get there that we’re not able to get on email. That’s one metric that we’re constantly looking at.”

Doing more with less

Beyond the improved results with Sales Navigator, Markel is impressed with how efficiently her team is able to achieve them. “It increases productivity,” she says. “It’s time-saving to have access to the right information. From what I know, no one’s had a hard time learning the platform and making it a part of their day-to-day.”

Across the board, I think Sales Navigator just makes our lives easier, and helps us understand that we're reaching out to the best people possible. — Lindsay Markel, Senior Partnerships Manager, Startup Grind

Scoring big wins

Alex Gordon-Furse, Director of the Global Startup Program for Startup Grind, shares this story of a successful experience with Sales Navigator: “For each new campaign, I spend a long time working out which combination of search criteria will get me the best search result, because I know that once I have it, I have a very high chance that there are some future partners in there. Having done that for the consumer goods market, within minutes I found the right contact for my campaign and was able to connect with him directly and set up a meeting, which eventually led to a great partner deal.”

Now that we're fully onboarded on Sales Navigator, we can't imagine it any other way. It really makes the whole prospecting process so much easier, especially for my team. It's kind of a necessity, I’d say, for any sales team to have. — Lindsay Markel, Senior Partnerships Manager, Startup Grind

Powering up the sales toolkit

Even though it has seen superior results with LinkedIn InMail compared to email, Startup Grind isn’t abandoning this tried-and-true mainstay tactic. In fact, they’ve improved the efficacy of email as a selling tool by combining it with Sales Navigator, via the Gmail and Outreach integrations.

“That definitely helps make it even more efficient, to have all of our data compiled in the other platforms that we’re using,” says Markel.

Download the full Startup Grind customer story.