How LinkedIn’s Sales Team Uses Sales Navigator to Earn More Targeted Leads

Just think about all the customers that you do not have. They’re on LinkedIn. They’re not reflected on your P&L but there’s one platform where they are present and that’s LinkedIn.

The quote above is excerpted from our new guide, Get Closer to Your Prospects, in which real sellers share their own unique insights and experiences to help you sharpen your own approach with Sales Navigator.

Maybe Kaan Akkanat, an account executive for LinkedIn Sales Solutions, was exaggerating just slightly, but he’s not too far off. While not everyone in the world is on LinkedIn, the platform does host more than 500 million professionals, and there’s no doubt that some of them could benefit from your product or service, whatever it might be. Of course, with such an extensive user base, narrowing your sales lead generation scope can be tricky.

Today, we’ll uncover a few tips for navigating your way to the most promising opportunities.

Advanced Search Brings Sophistication to Prospecting

Advanced Search is one of the most oft-used features for successful sellers on LinkedIn. Applying strategic filters helps refine your results and surface individuals with purchasing influence at a given account.

By limiting your search results with parameters such as seniority or job function, you can exclude numerous employees at a company who clearly don’t have a role on the buying committee, while also discovering key stakeholders you might’ve otherwise missed.

Plus, these capabilities open the door to creative methods and approaches. For example, here’s a handy practice shared by LinkedIn’s George Lukaszewski in the ‘Get Closer’ guide:

One LinkedIn Relationship Manager, George Lukaszewski, was targeting engineers who are manager level and above in the United States. By choosing 'past' as his search filter, he was able to track engineers that previously worked at a company he closed but had moved to a different company he was now targeting. By keeping tabs on these contacts, he was positioned to reach out and ask for a referral based on the previous relationship.

So often, generating quality new leads is a byproduct of existing relationships or previously completed deals. Using Advanced Search helps you take an active role in finding and spearheading these opportunities. Plus, once you identify potentially important individuals, you can save them as leads and keep track of what’s happening with them and their company.

All of these ingredients help you engage the right people with the right message.

Lead Recommendations Serve as Your Compass

Once you save leads or accounts in Sales Navigator, the platform will intelligently use this data along with your sales preferences to help guide your efforts, offering new suggested contacts via Lead Recommendations. The more you run searches and use the tool for prospecting, the more accurate and relevant these recommendations become.

In this respect, Sales Navigator helps automatically build out your pipeline while you simply go about your business, creating new threads to follow while also growing your presence within target accounts. For account-based marketing programs especially, this is essential.

Sometimes, the Lead Recommendations feature can rekindle an opportunity that’s gone cold. Account executive Rae Jones shares one such experience in the guide:

One of my accounts went dark. After we ran a pilot program with them, I couldn’t get in touch with the managing director. I followed up multiple times with no luck. Then I got a Lead Recommendation through Sales Navigator. So I reached out to this new contact at the account, and he said, ‘The MD actually left. I’m now in charge.’ So now we’re back in conversations.

Advanced Lead Search and Lead Recommendations are just two of the ways Sales Navigator helps LinkedIn’s sales pros expand their lead lists and stay busy with new prospects to pursue.

To find more inside tips from our own team, download Get Closer to Your Prospects: How the LinkedIn Sales Team Leverages Sales Navigator to Target, Understand and Engage Prospects.