Winning with Sales Navigator

My 3 Best Tips from Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator Every Day

Editor's Note: This guest post was contributed by Lia Paddy, Business Development Manager for HR SaaS at NSW Business Chamber in Sydney, Australia.

If you asked me what the secret to my success in sales was, I would confidently tell you that I owe it all to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. After using the product on a daily basis for several years, I find it necessary to share with you the three most unorthodox ways I leverage Sales Navigator in my sales activities for maximum impact and success.

1. Use the power of LinkedIn

LinkedIn's best practice is supportive of only connecting with people you know. In non-sales roles, this makes sense, as you want to build a genuine online network through the platform. However, as a salesperson, you need to "dig the well before you put the water in."

To achieve this, you can use the power of the Sales Navigator search to filter and find prospects by Industry, Role, and Company Size. Just remember to send them a request first to connect on the LinkedIn platform as well.

Your connections can see everything you post. So, if you're selling marketing automation software, why not connect with 200 marketers before you begin posting content about your product? Or if you're selling golf carts, why not connect with every general manager for every course in Australia?

In this way, you can have a highly targeted, earned audience following your content – whether that's your posts or the posts you share from your company's LinkedIn page.

2. Your InMails are unlimited if you use them in the right way

I find that InMail is a helpful and simple tool for trying to create a communication source with prospects, as it allows you to directly message other LinkedIn members that you’re not connected to.

As a regular Search Navigator user, you may find that you have run out of InMails yet again. Fortunately, there’s a solution for this problem – thoughtful messaging, which can turn your account into a repository of unlimited InMails.

How is this achieved? Every time you send an InMail, it generates a response, and you get that InMail credited back. Even if that response is a simple "No thanks!"

Therefore, your tone needs to be carefully crafted to generate a response from prospects —even if they don't want to engage with your services. It would be best if you took this opportunity not to send spam to prospects, but rather to craft thoughtful, targeted and polite InMails.

3.  You can be direct, but only if you are solving your prospect's problem

A recent trend in outbound sales practice is to not ask for a phone call or meeting straight away but to send content through InMails as a way of warming up a cold prospect. Personally, I feel that sending someone you don't know an article that could take them 10 minutes to read is asking for a lot of their time.

I believe that you can ask for a call or a meeting in your initial InMail if it's written in the right way. Unfortunately, the most common email I come across from salespeople is:

"Hi, my name is 'X', and I am from 'Y' company. At 'Y' company we do..."

Everything in the above example is all about you, and nothing about the prospect. Your InMails need to be framed in a way to solve a problem that you know the prospect is facing in their company, role or industry by using your product or service.

When I was tasked with contacting marketing prospects for a web traffic recovery tool, I had a response rate of over 50% to the subject line of:

"Are you still losing your leads?"

This tactic worked, as I knew this was a pain point in their role, which I also cared deeply about and understood. You need to know how your product or service solves your prospect's problem and learn to lead with that. You can then ask to meet with them and show them more. 

The most important part of this list is how to put these points into action. I follow a rule for myself, "LinkedIn for Breakfast" — every morning, I only commit the time it takes to drink a coffee at my desk to grow my network on LinkedIn, share content, and send a few InMails.

Overall, the power in Sales Navigator is found in its regular use and build up over time — so don't commit to using it for hours a day only to find yourself never logging in. Your success rate can increase dramatically if you use its resources, such as the Sales Navigator search and InMail, and take a direct and professional approach to your communication methods, while solving your prospects problem. Speaking with five new prospects a day equals to over a thousand outreaches in a year — the power is in the aggregate and your execution!

See the power of Sales Navigator for yourself. 

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