What is LinkedIn Navigator and How Do You Get It to Work for You?

Most salespeople we meet struggle with LinkedIn Navigator. They either don’t understand how to use it, or they don’t have the time are the main issues. LinkedIn Navigator is though the only real way you can get the most out of LinkedIn as a tool and is a good barometer of how effectively your lead generation as a company is working

Personally, I love the system. It took a few years to truly start to understand how it worked, what LinkedIn is trying to do with it and now it’s become an integral part of life for myself and our team.

The following article is about how we see the system, how we use it and I will share some of the best practices on getting the most out of it.

As an quick intro, we have 8 salespeople using Navigator daily and we work with over 30 companies supporting them in running their BD, with Navigator being an integral part of this.

Let’s start with what is LinkedIn Navigator:

• It’s a sister platform that sits alongside LinkedIn, they are separate, and they both do different things, working from the same database.
• It’s at heart a database management tool.
• It’s a search function that allows you to find the right people in the right companies at the right time.
• A system that actively keeps you updated with what people and companies are doing.
• A way of managing prospecting that is not available on CRM or any other tool.
• It drives leads.
• It’s a nurture tool for contacts.
• It can help build community.
• It’s a client management tool.
• You can use it for target account marketing.
• Ideal for partner management.

Who Is It Not For?

• People who have no interest in reaching out to others.
• People who are not involved in revenue generation.
• People who are not building any sort of community.

LinkedIn Navigator is designed to drive revenue, manage contacts, and build communities. It allows you to build accurate databases, organise them into lists, manage and interact with these databases at scale, and nurture relationships over time, guiding contacts in the right direction.

On a personal level, I have had it for 7 or 8 years and have had various levels of success with it, but over the last 4 years, I managed to tame it and get it to work for me. As a platform, I find it invaluable. Without it, the amount of work we would have to do manually would be off the charts.

Why LinkedIn Navigator Works for Us and How We Use It

1000Steps is a BD and sales consultancy. As with any business, we must sell ourselves, we must get out there, and as you will know, it’s a very competitive marketplace. Coming back to a basic sales process, you have various stages:

• Building a base
• Nurturing the base
• Converting into meetings
• Creating/managing opportunities
• Bringing in clients
• Customer service

Navigator is useful throughout all the stages, but our focus here is on lead generation.

Where do you start then?

Segmentation is where you start. This is where you work out accurately, through a process who you should be talking too, why you should be talking to them and it’s critical that you allocate the right time and resources to doing this, often it takes 2 or 3 days of workshops and data to get right. Segmentation done well is not easy. Segmentation is another session, not for today. Let’s assume though you have done it and you know which companies you should be targeting and which roles.

Account Info:

• Location
• Industry
• Company
• Size of the company
• Turnover of the company
• Other criteria from segmentation process

?

Now we need to focus on who you want to talk to. This is who is the right person in the company that you want to engage with.

Lead Info:

• Right role
• Right location
• Right amount of time in role
• Other criteria from segmentation process

Seems simple, but it’s a lot tougher than you think. LinkedIn lets you send 200 connections per week. This means you can build your base up by 200 per week, 800 per month, and 10k per annum.

Two issues you face is the quality of your search and the acceptance rate once you send connection requests. Low quality search leads to low quality interactions and poor acceptance affects your ratios.

We will focus on the search, but I would suggest a lot of effort should go into your profile. We have seen huge impact on results based on the quality of your profile picture, your role, your history etc. Again, a topic for another day.

Search on Navigator:

On the surface, it seems like you put your search criteria in and then build your lists. The issue is that the first pages of the results usually are accurate, but as you move through, you will find that the accuracy drops. When Navigator does a search, it’s broad and pulls anything in that remotely fits your criteria, so the fine-tuning of the search is critical. The way we do this is a blend of manual and fine-tuning the search. The easiest way to see this is to jump onto the learning platform, and I will walk through with you, but tools we use to fine-tune are:

?For Account Lists:

• Location of company
• Size of company
• Turnover of company
• Keyword search
• Cross-check with other platforms such as Google, ChatGPT, or other database platforms etc.

The key here is we want to make that as we build our connection lists, they should be accurate.

For Lead Lists:

• Their location
• Role
• Length in current role
• Posted in the last three months
• Years of experience
• Company headquarters
• As with accounts, we can cross-check with database systems, etc.

The key here is accuracy. If you are accurate with your search, the rest is a matter of the process. To do this on scale takes time. It’s not a quick fix and is something that very, very few companies do well.

TO DO THIS ON SCALE

You need a process. The following is how you could do it. Note, you need to do this weekly. The allowances of 200 connections sent per week are like hotel rooms. If you don't use them, they are lost.

The value of each database is immense. Think about it from a marketing point of view. Marketing buys a list of emails, then proceeds to engage with them. The pick-up rate might, if good, be 0.5 percent. With LinkedIn, for every 100 connections, you can message every one of them with a personal message if you want. It’s different from email as it’s a personal connection; you really can engage as a human on human.

How:

1.???????????? Build a list of accounts

2.???????????? Build a list of connections to send

3.???????????? Build a list of connections sent

4.???????????? Build a list of connections that are 1st connections

5.???????????? Start the nurture process

Build a list of accounts: Normally, I suggest building these out, so you have enough to be able to do the search for leads easily. To get 200 per week, you generally need, depending on how many people in a company fit your target, between 25 and 100 accounts on a list. Again, if the number of people in that role in the company is limited, you will need more accounts.

Also, if there are a limited number of companies you can target, which is normal, then the model changes a bit, and I will talk about target account marketing later in another article.

Personally, I like to build for a month if possible. Then, I don’t have to go back to the search and redo it each week. One burst, put them on lists, and I have 4 weeks of search done. Normally, I would be doing the search for accounts as mentioned above within LinkedIn, also I use ChatGPT a lot as it seems to be pretty accurate now on finding info. You do have to get the prompts right, but I find combining that with LinkedIn does a pretty good job of sweeping up all the companies.

Build a list of Leads: Now, when you build your lead list, you use the account list as the baseline. I go to lead search, add the account list, and then create a search. This is a critical point to remember.

Note: Whenever you build a search, either in accounts or leads, SAVE IT. It really helps a lot to be able to refer back to how you built your list.

Building the lead lists is tough. It’s a skill that, on the surface, seems easy, but in our experience, it’s not. It takes time, creativity, and patience to be accurate. The pitfalls are the inaccuracy of the system search; counter that with it pulling everyone, and you need to learn how to filter. For us, keyword, role search, and manual checking seem to be most effective.

So, we have built a list of companies, and we have built a list of people. We hopefully are sending on a weekly basis 170 a week. That’s our magic number; it leaves 30 for other things, and 170 is a lot. Our aim is to get up to 40-50 percent acceptance rate. This is high and means you are connecting with 5,000 new people a year. Within 4 years, you have 20,000 people you can talk to. Think of how valuable that is.

What Next?

Nurture the Base: This is the second part of building out LinkedIn Navigator. This about asking the question, how do you get onto someones radar. Its the goal of navigator, my aim is always to be on their radar and in being there I can interact with them.

The risk here is being too transactional. What I mean by this is you are connecting and selling straight away. We find that this does not work as it comes over as transactional.

?The way we do it is:

1.???????????? Connecting

2.???????????? Nurturing over time

3.???????????? Getting on their radar

4.???????????? Being relevant

5.???????????? Communicating

6.???????????? Then asking for a meeting

Selling is a factor of time, trust, and building a relationship. THINK ABOUT IT. DO YOU BUY FROM NEW PEOPLE THAT CONTACT YOU RANDOMLY? WHY DO YOU THINK THEY SHOULD BUY FROM YOU?

The middle bit, nurturing, getting on their radar, being relevant, communicating, meeting, and nurturing, takes time. It’s what marketing is. The lovely thing about LinkedIn is you don’t have to be a marketing genius to do this. But you can do it, and you don’t need a big budget, just time.

How Do You Do It?

1.???????????? Send an initial message

2.???????????? Post regularly

3.???????????? Interact with their content

4.???????????? Share white papers

5.???????????? Run webinars

6.???????????? Reach out on a personalised basis

7.???????????? Aim to touch high value contacts 12 times over a period of six months

Let’s remember something here. LinkedIn is very sophisticated. They have not been sitting there twiddling their thumbs while AI goes on around them; their platform has super advance AI and has had for many years, it knows what you are doing, how you do it, what you want to do, and will help you to do it if you engage the right way. This means the content you put out there needs to be thought about, who you connect with needs to be clear, and how you interact with the platform needs to be consistent.

I am not going to go into the technicalities of nurture. I have written about this before, and if you want to know more on how to build out your thought leadership, feel free to get in touch.

What I am going to go on about, though, is the consistency of what you do and how to get Navigator to support you.

?Within Navigator, there is the capacity to build lists. These lists are particularly easy to use, they give you live info, and they let you interact with databases very quickly and effectively.

Our model goes as follows:

We build lists in multiple areas. E.g.:

1.??????????? Webinar attendees for each webinar

2.??????????? Shared white papers

3.??????????? Interacted with

4.????????????Ongoing nurture

5.????????????Nurture 1, 2, 3, etc., up to 12. We want all leads to be nurtured with touchpoints over time.

6.????????????Connections sent

7.????????????1st connections

8.??????????? Industry connection, e.g., fintech, engineering, etc.

9.????????????Partners

10.????????? Influencers

11.????????? Personal contacts

12.????????? Key personal contacts

13.????????? Ex clients

14.????????? Existing clients

The value of these lists is that they make the database manageable. We keep the lists on a Google sheet list and can then run campaigns to each list.

As and example: webinars. We run a webinar that is targeted at founders. We go to the founders' lists and then use those with a double screen to do the invites for the webinar. Only by doing this in navigator is it possible to be as accurate as we need to be. Also, we can then manage the attendees in Navigator, we can interact with them pre-event and post-event through the platform. Without it, we would only at best be able to email but often not able to do that, whereas with Navigator we can quickly interact with the attendees in the system messaging in minutes not hours.

That’s our basic model for Navigator, building your connections and managing through the platform. It’s a lot easier to see in a video walkthrough, so go back to the video and look if you need to. We also have an LMS that you can access for free that helps with this.

Summary

I would add a critical point here at the end, we need to remember that not everyone is ready to buy now. Often, they are not in your selling cycle but in their buying cycle which is out of sync with you, and although you want to sell, they do not need or want you. BUT, and this is a big BUT, if you are patient, build trust, brand, and equity, when they are looking, they are much more likely to interact with you, and more importantly if done right you will be the incumbent.

There you have it. An overview of Navigator principles. LinkedIn and Navigator do take time, it does work, and as a platform it’s better than it’s ever been. Don’t get sucked into the hype of people saying it’s full of spam. It’s not any more spammy than it was 15 years ago. It works now way better than before. There are more people on it; it’s more of social media.

People engage if you treat them with respect, and LinkedIn works hard to make it work. They really are a client-first company, as they know that if you love the platform, then you will use it, and then they make money. For me, this is the way it should be. I really do love the platform and have said many times: offer me a million pounds to give up my use of it. I would not take it.