Buyer Centric Selling with Sales Navigator

'As B2B sales become more complex and churn in both client and sales org increases, companies that once relied on a one to one relationship between their salesperson and a single point of contact at the client organization, are discovering that this strategy is no longer viable. 

In fact, with 6 to 10 people involved in purchases of $500K or more ( Source: Sirius Decisions ) and 1 in 5 of those decision-makers churning every year ( Source: LinkedIn) we see organizations rapidly adopting modern selling. Simply put, modern selling is knowing who your buyer is and what they want so you can help them as a partner in achieving what they need to. 

The need of the hour is to leverage sales intelligence tools to help you harness the power of the buyer information embedded in social networks. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a solution that seamlessly integrates with the sales methodologies and tools you leverage in your sales process.

You may be familiar with the LinkedIn platform, but you may not be aware of how broad, vast, and deep our data is. It is hundreds of millions of professional members, 10s of millions of companies and this is in some ways the bedrock of all our solutions for big enterprises. This gives us a unique vantage point of the world of sales as we can see all the world buyers and the world sellers and how they interact.

With this unique lens of the world of sales, today I will lean in on the Miller Heiman Methodology and talk about 4 most important questions one must ask themselves about your potential customer, also showing you how Sales Navigator brings this to life

1. Who ( How to do you identify)
2. Why ( would they meet you ) 
3. When ( do you contact your buyer ) 
4. How ( to thoughtfully engage them )

A. Let’s start with the “Who” - Our Buyer Influencers

1. Economic Buyer Influencer:

The most important one is an Economic Buyer Influencers who hold budgets and will sign your deal. Sales Nav helps me search and prioritize these executives with 2 simple filters – Seniority & Function. EBIs typically have C-Level designations. An even smarter way to do this is to run a "Title" search, so if you are an example you are selling a sales enablement tool, you would want to run a search for "CEO"s who would typically hold budgets in the case of SMB/Mid Markets, or Functional leaders in the case of Enterprises. Let’s use the Lead Search Filter of Sales Navigator to see how this works:

 2. User Buyer Influencer:

Now while the EBIs will open up the discussion for feedback from the team to the UBIs. The Users Buyer Influencers who will be using my product day in and out, and will be asking the key question – How does this help me in my job?

So let's say the end-user for my product is the sales team, we can search for our potential users with the filters of the function “ sales” and in geography “ India ". This view gives me a quick scoping of the potential, and if I further filter by the company I would know how many end-users I have there.

 3. Technical Buyer Influencer

Now comes a role that is not the most intuitive for a salesperson to target but is the gatekeepers – and is such a missed opportunity if we do not build relationships proactively here earlier in the sale- these are the Technical Buyer Influencers.

They care about specifications and their role is to weed out the competitors and make sure your solution fits the requirements of the company. If you are selling a digitization solution to the Sales & Marketing team, your product would need to be compatible with existing solutions, and here is where say IT and Procurement would get involved to discuss things like how your solution integrates with the existing CRM.

Sales Navigator helps me search for these top functions – Procurement, Legal, and IT. To be more specific we can add a keyword search. If we are working on a regional deal, sometimes there are multiple TBIs globally and with Sales Navigator, you can easily know who they are and what they care about based on their profiles.

4. Coaches

Now we Identify the 4th role - my coach or coaches, these are your "insiders" who know your product well and can help you navigate the organization internally. They care about your success with this proposal and they can play any number of the 3 roles we just talked about.

One of the ways in which we can identify coaches is the concept of “ Former Client - New Company” All I do is enter the name of my client in the previous company filter to generate a list that in a way, can also build my Referral Lead List.

Think about your company - on average each salesperson is connected with 1% of their colleagues! This creates a missed opportunity for referrals, using Sales nav you can uncover that. Here I have taken the example of Microsoft alumni ( my past customer) in LinkedIn ( my target customer) and found leaders who are now in a decision-maker capacity.

To increase my chances of getting a meeting with them, I will apply the “ Teamlinks” filter to see who in my company knows these coaches well – it will also show how they know them.

B. Now let's talk about the WHY –

Why would a customer give me their precious time? I have to be aligned with their professional goal and their personal goals. There are 2 ways we can find this opportunity for a win:

People who are new in an organization are the most open to change – a new solution, a new vendor.

To identify what result based conversation I could drive with them - I can also use “ mentioned in the news” to learn about their recent wins or announcements to hear what they are talking about externally, especially EBIs.

C. Let’s talk about WHEN

Understanding buyer modes tells us when to engage - growth mode, trouble mode, even keel ( no change) mode. On the company account page you can see the account news and articles at a company level, together with headcount change this helps us identify mode based on buying signals.

To find this information you go to the Account Search Filter of Sales Navigator, where you can find companies that have had headcount growth and are even hiring on LinkedIn.

D. Finally, the most important move: “HOW” to get in touch.

Watch this space for Part 2 of the series!

If you would like to learn more about how LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help your sales team, drop me an email or comment below!

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