Sales Navigator Chronicles - 1st edition

Whether you're a solopreneur or a multi-million dollar enterprise, acquisition is the life-blood of your organisation. If you don't consistently invest time looking for new clients, you're going to be in trouble. Period!

I work with a lot of different, and successful companies. Yet most of them are somewhat frustrated when it comes to their lead generation strategy, especially about the lack of high-quality opportunities at the top of the sales funnel.

If you work in a B2B environment, your best prospects are on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the powerful sales tool you need. Learning to take advantage of it will get you more leads, provide you with data to help you track your efforts, and get your message in front of the right people at the right time.

Why am I such a huge fan of LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Here are the three main reasons you should try it out for yourself (LinkedIn offers a 30-day free trial):

1. Solid Search Filters: there isn't a tool in the world that gives you such powerful and advanced search filters to search through more than 700 million people to help you create a list of prospects that meets your ideal client criteria. You can search for title, company size, industry, seniority, experience just to name a few. But did you know that you can also exclude certain titles from your search results? A nice, very practical hack that almost none of my clients knew about
2. Saving Leads, Accounts and Searches: by not having to go back and search from scratch every single time, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can easily save you up to 30-minutes a day, time that can now be spent actually talking to clients and prospects. And, by saving your searches, if you want LinkedIn can automatically send you an email (daily, weekly or monthly) when there are new leads that meet your search criteria. What a way to start your day! :)
3. Collect, Connect, Convert: Sales Navigator not only let you collect lists of leads and accounts, it also lets you collect important insight about these prospects, about their companies, their competitors and about other stakeholders or influencers at their company. All these insights help you greatly lower the threshold and raise your chances of acceptance when you decide to connect with this prospect. Oh, and when I say connect, I don't mean send them a sales-pitch in your invite!!! In fact, never, ever send a sales-pitch in a LinkedIn message. LinkedIn is about making and deepening the connection with your prospects and clients, the conversion takes place off of LinkedIn.

SALES NAVIGATOR NEWS

Today, the 25th of August 2020 is the day that account and lead tags will be sunset and will be replaced by account and lead Custom Lists.

That news came as a big shock in July, especially because it was in the middle of the summer which didn't give many of my clients the proper time to adapt.

I was invited for a chat with the product team and I must say, they convinced me that this move does have certain benefits. For example, you can now see the status of your outreach activity:

Also, previously you could only save a maximum of 250 leads in one list. They've now raised that to 1.000 leads per list and a total of 1.500 leads for Sales Navigator Professional Users and 5.000 for Sales Navigator Team Edition users.

One issue I still have with the removal of Tags is that I don't want to SAVE all the leads in my lists. For example, previously I used to append a Tag to all people who attended a certain event I organized. That was great because I could quickly call up all the people that attended that event and when I opened their profile, the Tags would show me which events they had attended. But I did not want to Save them all.

You see, when you save them in Sales Naviagtor, you automatically also save the company they work at, and you start to receive all updates about that person and that company, inundating the Sales Navigator timeline which makes it become less effective as a tool! But, the product team promised me they're going to work on a solution... I can't wait!

I hope I've been able to show you that as a professional salesperson, Sales Navigator is an essential tool for your acquisition. As I already mentioned, LinkedIn offers a free 30-day trial (and no I don't get paid for saying that... I wish... I'd be rich now ??). You can more info on that on this page.

To help you get started, let me offer you the first chapter of my book LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Dummies? for free! To download, simply click this link or the image below:

So, this was the first edition of the Sales Navigator Chronicles. Let me know what you think? Did you enjoy it? Will you subscribe to this newsletter? And tell me what you'd like to write about in the next Sales Navigator Chronicles, what's your most pressing and urgent challenge with Sales Navigator? Let me know!

Many thanks and here's to your success with LinkedIn Sales Navigator!

About the Author

Perry van Beek has been training and coaching entrepreneurs and sales teams since 2009 to use LinkedIn smarter in a commercial environment. He has helped more than 10,000 sales professionals worldwide. From solopreneurs to large brands such as IHG (Intercontinental Hotel Group), Cisco, Korn Ferry, ABN-AMRO Bank, Cognizant, United Nations, ING Bank and many others, including various presentations for LinkedIn Benelux.

He is also the author of the book LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Dummies? which was released worldwide in 2018 and is still a big hit today.

If you also want to learn how to get more high quality leads at the top of your sales funnel, feel free to connect with Perry (and please personalize the connection request).