As a salesperson you need to be able to connect with your target audience. How else can you expect to sell? The nature of sales is to get closer to customers to understand their business and the challenges they face. But how do you optimize building relationships with the right people?
Using LinkedIn data, we studied activity between Sales Navigator users and nonusers within the same company. We compared how both groups discovered and connected with decision makers and aggregated the results. Sales Navigator users vs nonusers saw the following uplifts:
2.8x lift in Searches
4.6x lift in Decision Maker Profile Views
2.5x lift in Decision Maker Connections
Industry Breakdown
From these stats, it may seem straightforward that we see strong results for Sales Navigator in the tech software space given that the product is an online sales tool. But how does Sales Navigator impact productivity of reps in more traditional industries?
Breaking out results by industry, we can see that all industries exhibit positive uplifts across searches, profile views, and connections. Across searches and profile views, industries such as professional services, media, and telecom perform exceptionally well. Across connections, we surprisingly see many traditional industries such as architecture, finance, and retail leading the way with strongest uplift.
Finance & Insurance Sales Navigator users have the highest lift in both Profile Views (~6x) and Connections (~3x). This makes sense, given that we’ve seen many financial advisors use Sales Navigator to bring in new business. Their livelihood is strongly dependent on growing and maintaining assets under management. Due to the nature of this business, reaching out to people becomes more of a necessity compared to less aggressive industries.
Why do these metrics matter?
Searches and profile views allow you to zero in on the right prospects and prioritize those who share a mutual connection or attended the same school as you. These seemingly simple details are significant because finding common ground is one of the easiest ways to engage with people.
Connecting with customers is also key because it allows sellers to stay informed with their customers’ interests and updates. Especially in this digital era where customers are used to personalized experiences, it’s even more critical that sellers do basic research before reaching out. We’ve seen that connecting with people on LinkedIn also translates into 29% average lift in win-rate (source).
How does this impact you?
Regardless of what industry you are in, Sales Navigator can ultimately help you get closer to your target buyers and maximize your team’s productivity. Reps on Sales Navigator are searching and viewing more Decision Maker profiles while other reps may remain in the weeds, having a harder time evaluating who to reach out to. Not only are Sales Navigator reps discovering more Decision Makers, but they ultimately connecting with more of them.
Together, searches, profile views, and connections optimize your team’s ability to target and engage with the right decision makers. The more your team leverages social selling actions to nurture leads and accounts, the more likely they are to successfully win deals. Find out how your team can see these results today.
Source: LinkedIn Internal Data. Analysis included companies with at least 50 SN users and 50 non-SN users. Timeframe for data is from March 2017-March 2018.
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Topics: Winning with Sales Navigator
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