LinkedIn Sales Navigator stacks up for Toyota Material Handling Italia, as it confirms its leadership through a smart selling approach

Toyota Material Handling is a world leader in goods handling and logistics with 700 direct employees and four sales offices in Italy. Its go-to-market model traditionally depends on dealerships and other indirect sales organizations.

Toyota Material Handling Italia saw an opportunity to grow its market share through a smart, direct sales model that involved proactively identifying and engaging high-value prospects through digital. In doing so, it could take greater control of the customer journey, strengthen its pipeline, build awareness and use social selling and salesperson profiles to build its brand as an advanced logistics consultant, with a wide range of solutions.

Historically, Toyota Material Handling Italia’s direct salesforce had been focused on reinforcing existing customer relationships. Digital Marketing Specialist Fabio Soffici and Marketing Director Stefano Zaccaria adopted an ambassador-led strategy, to build a new prospecting culture. They launched a four-month pilot of LinkedIn Sales Navigator to establish value and secure sales team buy-in, with growing demand quickly expanding the number of licenses from four to 32.

“For our pilot deployment, we allocated licenses to those salespeople with the right attitude to trying new tools, and inspiring their colleagues,” says Fabio. “That momentum has really carried through for us. The salespeople talk to each other, and so within a few months, more and more of our team wanted the licenses.”

Fabio and Stefano worked with LinkedIn Sales Solutions to roll out social selling training that elevated salespeople’s profiles and helped to build a thought leadership brand for Toyota Material Handling Italia. They also encouraged salespeople to map buying committee members within their prospect accounts, in order to understand the best routes in.

“We’ve found that mapping accounts with LinkedIn Sales Navigator has helped our people to find bigger and more sophisticated opportunities within accounts, and it’s given them the confidence to reach out to people at a more senior level,” says Stefano.

Toyota Material Handling worked with LinkedIn to develop customized reporting that tracked LinkedIn Sales Navigator adoption and cultural change while also capturing the impact on pipeline, conversion rates, revenue and ROI.

The sales team rated the experience of onboarding onto Sales Navigator as 4.8 out of 5, with intelligent prospecting through LinkedIn Sales Navigator saving each rep an average of 3.5 hours per week.

This led to strong adoption levels, with each user logging an average 24 days of LinkedIn Sales Navigator activity and saving 25 accounts every month. By the end of the four-month pilot, demand from the sales team had grown the number of LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses from four to 32.

Using Sales Navigator to generate account insights and map influencers and decision-makers dramatically improved the rate at which the sales team could secure meetings and move opportunities forward. This was dramatically illustrated through the impact of Toyota Material Handling Italia presence at exhibitions and events. Reaching out on InMail ahead of these events converted leads to meetings at a rate of 8%.

“Traditionally, our salespeople have just gone to conferences and reached out to prospects who they find there,” says Fabio. “With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we’re able to identify the most important prospects who are attending, reach out to them in advance and book time for coffee and a chat. At one show we were able to secure 20 meetings that way, all through prospecting on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.”

For Stefano, fusing digital and physical selling is helping to align Toyota Material Handling’s sales approach with wider cultural changes. “With LinkedIn, we’re starting to embody the ambitious vision for Society 5.0,” he says. “It’s a dynamic ecosystem that’s moving us towards a super-smart society that seamlessly integrates cyberspace and physical space. It shows how digital technologies can drive innovation and social progress.”

This has direct benefits for the Toyota Material Handling Brand, with the thought leadership shared by salespeople on LinkedIn epitomizing a new position as logistics consultants. “We are no longer just a supplier of forklifts,” explains Stefano. “We supply a wider range of solutions, and the way that our Sales Navigator users have established themselves as consultants reinforces that brand positioning.”

“We’re looking at rolling out Sales Navigator licenses to our entire team, and our other country operations are interested in following our program. The results we’re seeing show that Sales Navigator is helping to improve both awareness and market share, and this justifies a wider adoption as soon as possible.”

Stefano Zaccaria

Marketing Director
Toyota Material Handling
“There are large businesses that our sales teams have been trying to contact for years. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, they were able to reach them and open opportunities.”

Fabio Soffici

Digital Marketing Specialist
Toyota Material Handling

ABOUT TOYOTA MATERIAL HANDLING

Quality in everything we do: this is the main mission of Toyota Material Handling, one of the companies of Toyota Industries Corporation, and this is what makes it the global number one in material handling and logistics since 2001.

Toyota’s extensive experience in quality and efficiency related to production processes is applied to logistics processes with the same objectives: reaching zero waste, maximizing added value and ensuring total quality. The Italian headquarters include 4 commercial branches, 5 equity dealers and over 100 indirect sales organizations, with a service assistance network supported by more than 1000 specialized technicians.

Daruma, a votive doll from Japanese tradition, is the symbol of Toyota’s inspiration: representing goals to be achieved, it symbolizes optimism, perseverance and strong determination.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator stacks up for Toyota Material Handling Italia, as it confirms its leadership through a smart selling approach

A new, direct sales model for engaging prospects proactively and building brand awareness

Building a prospecting muscle with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

“There are large businesses that our sales teams have been trying to contact for years. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, they were able to reach them and open opportunities.”