Winning with Sales Navigator

Bringing Modern Selling to Life with Sales Navigator to Acquire New Business

Editor's Note: Enjoy this special encore post, which was one of our readers' favorites in 2020. It originally published on March 10, 2020. 

90% of decision makers say they never respond to cold outreach. And, of those, only 28% engage in conversations. 77% of buyers won’t even engage salespeople who can’t provide insights about their business. These are just a few of the statistics that indicate that traditional sales tactics are losing their efficacy.

In contrast, research indicates that modern sellers gain 57% higher ROI than their traditional counterparts. One modern selling technique, multi-threading, leads to 34% higher win rates for new business development. 84% of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with a referral. And, 74% of buyers choose the sales rep who was first to add value and insight. 

As you think about strategies to acquire new business, the tactics you adopt impact, not only how successful you are but also, how influencers and decision makers view your brand. We have defined five modern selling tactics critical for acquiring new business, and how Sales Navigator could help you incorporate them into your strategy.  

Put Modern Selling into Action with Sales Navigator

Modern selling works (and we love it). Sales Navigator users experience a lift of +7% in win rate from modern selling activities. And, here’s how you can use Sales Navigator to apply these winning tactics to accomplish your day-to-day goals:  

1. While identifying target accounts, prioritize those with high fit based on growth potential and latest company updates. 

Territory Based Hunting: Utilize product filters such as geographic locations, company & department growth, and company news to identify high-potential accounts within your territory.  

  • Apply ‘Funding Events Spotlight’ to filter target accounts who received new rounds of funding.  
  • Utilize your most successful account searches and identify newer accounts with similar characteristics. 
  • Save your account search to get new results daily.  
  • Save target accounts to get alerts and relevant news.  

Existing Customers Moving to Potential New Customers: Get alerted when decision makers at your existing customer change jobs. This gives you the opportunity to find new potential accounts.  

  • You can enable sync between your CRM and Sales Navigator to utilize templatized ‘job change’ reports via our Data Validation feature.* 

2. As you prospect leads, research and qualify by absorbing all available prospect insights, find commonalities and deliver value up-front. 

Exploratory Lead Search: You could begin your lead search by applying a set of sales preferences you can select (based on geography, industry, company size and numerous other filters) in Sales Navigator. In addition, you could conduct lead search via keywords.  

  • Remember to be very specific in the search keywords and use modifiers such as “And,” “OR,” “Not,” etc., for enhanced search results via Boolean search.  
  • To minimize re-typing with your Boolean searches, Sales Navigator allows you to save your lead search, thus making future queries more efficient. You can also view new lead search results daily. 
  • When you visit a saved lead’s profile, Sales Navigator shares additional recommended leads, thus expanding on your search.

Named Account Lead Search: If you work with named accounts, Sales Navigator allows you to save your accounts or organize them into a list, and allows you to search within saved accounts or custom lists.  

  • If you have been assigned one target account, you can search for leads at that account in Sales Navigator. 
  • Alternatively, Sales Navigator allows you to visit the account page, view all employees and/or decision makers, and browse for leads from there. 
  • You could also use multiple filters to see new roles within the account in the last 90 days and/or look for prior connections with the leads at that account. 

Events or Work Travel: Sales Navigator could help you better prepare for events or work travel. With a very targeted search within a geographic region, in a specific industry and/or within a list of named accounts, you could create a list of prospects to connect with before the event.  

  • You can also see prospects who have been active on Linkedin recently, and thus are more likely to respond.  
  • When interacting with prospects via email or in person, you could utilize Sales Navigator’s suggested commonalities to build a connection with your leads. 

3. While qualifying leads, track the customer journey to develop a data-informed view of individual customers.

Sales Navigator provides you with daily alerts whenever your saved leads post relevant content or interact with posts, articles, videos, etc., thus helping you create a data-informed view of your leads.  

Delivering value upfront: Sales Navigator allows you to deliver value to your leads by helping you identify personalized icebreakers.  

  • You can research lead profiles by looking for specific keywords or past experiences, view groups they are affiliated to, their current recommendations, endorsements, and other commonalities including mutual connections.  

4. During outreach, leverage the full extent of your professional network through warm introductions and master the art of multi-threading. 

Use warm introductions to begin engaging with leads by sharing a mix of relevant industry content with some branded content. Sales Navigator helps you identify common connections with the lead, within your team or your broader network. 

Follow up with leads by sharing relevant updates via Sales Navigator. Explore email best practices to increase your response rate. 

5. Adopt sales enablement tools to engage with qualified leads, help accelerate the sales cycle, and make the negotiation and close process easier for customers

For a seamless experience, utilize Sales Navigator Application Platform to bring Sales Navigator insights into the other tools in your sales stack.  

Ready, Set, Sell!

We encourage you to apply these modern selling tactics in your upcoming sales opportunities and see the impact for yourself, then share the results with your community of sales professionals.  

Ready to roll? Take Sales Navigator for a spin, and feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!

*only available to Enterprise SKU

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