Technology that Builds Trust: How to Use Sales Navigator for Deeper Selling

B2B sales is both an art and a science. It sits at the intersection of meaningful human interaction and technological efficiency, which isn’t always easy to locate. To help, we reached out to three sales and marketing leaders for advice on how they achieve sales success at scale.

1. Invest in brand trust  

“Having a great product is one thing, but being a brand buyers can trust is another,” said Samantha Barnfield, Channel Marketing Manager of Canon Australia.   

Canon provides trust credentials for a wide range of customer propositions, from security to services and sustainability, in numerous forms — think: high-value content, sales tools, and even in their tender responses. The same principle is applied to customer relationships.  

Believing that it’s easier to retain existing customers than acquire new ones, Canon invests heavily in brand trust by building collaborative partnerships with their customers.   

How technology builds trust: Canon leverages sales intelligence platforms like Sales Navigator to ensure that their sales teams are armed with timely and relevant insights into what’s happening in their customers’ organisations. By understanding the needs, challenges, and requirements that are front and centre for their customers, Canon is able to tailor their support in a meaningful, mutually beneficial way.   

2. Place people first  

“I’m a big believer that people buy people, period,” said Fraser McNaughton, Chief Marketing Officer of Grant Thornton Australia.   

As a leading professional services firm, relationships at both the organisational and individual levels are the heart of Grant Thornton Australia’s business. To achieve scale and efficiency, the company uses customer experience as its anchor to align technology, processes, and people behaviour.  

How technology builds trust: Grant Thornton Australia maps its customer engagement strategy across both human-led and technology-driven interactions to ensure a consistent and coherent experience. It has a fully integrated tech stack that spans CRM, marketing automation, relationship intelligence, surveying, data analytics, webinars, social media, and more. Integrating Sales Navigator into this adds even greater depth and richness to its wealth of customer data, ensuring that every interaction, human or otherwise, contributes to sales objectives.   

3. Make every interaction meaningful  

“Personalised outreach has become table stakes. You cannot walk into a deal without first going deep into research and having a point of view,” according to Phil Cleary, Sales Excellence Coach of Salesforce.  

How technology helps build trust: With sellers having less and less face time with buyers, every interaction has to count. Research is fundamental to the pre-sales process but it is also the most time consuming part of it. Salesforce uses technology like Sales Navigator to make this a lighter lift for its reps, allowing them to spend their time on higher value activities like analysing the data and developing recommendations. Additionally, Salesforce leverages Sales Navigator to support multi-threading within an account, using it to identify and engage key stakeholders along the way.   

Explore more ways in which LinkedIn’s deep sales platform can help build trust and unlock your seller superpower.