What Sales Navigator won't tell you
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA
President and CEO, Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, another lousy golfer, terrible cook, friction fixer
Sales Navigator is a social selling platform by LinkedIn that provides an array of features which focus on helping you find the right prospects to build trusted relationships. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can reach the right kind of prospects by using the search and filter features. Sales Navigator also provides actionable information and insights that can pave the way for a deeper understanding of leads and prospects. This way, you can engage with your prospects at a far more personal level by offering personalized content, customizations, discounts, and offers.
Sales Navigator can be a useful prospecting tool. However, knowing someone's job title in a certain industry is only one part of the sales funnel success equation. The other is the role they play in the ultimate decision to buy your products or services. Finding those people takes digipreneur guerilla tactics and skills.
On average, there are?6.8 decision makers ?for every sale who have a say in whether a product is purchased. In sickcare, it is even more. These people make up what is called the “buying center.”
A job title is not the same as a persona. A?customer persona?(also known as a?buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you've collected from?user?research and web analytics.
Here is how to create a detailed customer persona. But, how do you establish contact with these people and get them to talk to you? Watch these videos on customer discovery techniques. Here is how to do it during COVID.
Here is an ever growing list of sickcare IT physician titles:
Chief of Staff
Chief Medical Officer
Chief Innovation Officer
Chief Intelligence Officer
Chief Health Information Officer
Chief or chair of service, department
Chief Quality Officer
Then there are the job titles of those with a data or computer science background who deal with health data. For example, data scientists work more on the front end of the data collection and analysis business. They tend to develop more technical skills in the area of collecting and analyzing data. A business analyst typically focuses on finding trends in data and developing ways to leverage that information to improve an organization’s operations, data scientists tend to look more at what drives those trends.
The personas are as follows (though it’s important to note that those with the same job title will have different personas):
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One useful step in creating your go to market strategy is to determine the role a given target stakeholder plays in the process. Create a position/persona matrix and target those who are most likely to be your advocates or evangelists for your ideas.
In their book, "The Challenge Customer", Adamson et al. describe the seven flavors of customer stakeholders as:
The Go-Getter
The Skeptic
The Friend
The Teacher
The Guide
The Climber
The Blocker
Target the Go-Getter, the Teacher and the Skeptic.\
For example, if you have just created an AI driven algorithm to forecast the need for COVID related space, staff and stuff and are looking for health systems organization customers, you are likely to have several stakeholders involved in the decision who play one or multiple aforementioned roles, including not just those in the C-suite, but IT managers, healthcare providers,clinical leaders and champions/sabateurs, infrastructure managers, nursing staff, finance people and many more.
Your job is to define the persona or archetype of each member of the buying center, determine their roles, and create a strategy to craft a personalized value proposition describing the benefits, expected gains and pain relievers they demand. Think of it as a 2 x 2 job/role matrix that informs your value proposition design.
How do you know who might be an evangelist or an adversary?
Some have used Linkedin polls to get feedback. However, they have limitations like they have a limited time on the site, participation is limited, the sample responses are not necessarily representative of the target population and you don't get a clear picture of who responded.
The same applies to gaining stakeholder engagement when you are trying to overcome not just external sales barriers, but internal organizational barriers to dissemination and implementation as well. Here is an engagement plan template.
?Recent surveys by Pew Research and Gallup found that only 51% to 58% of respondents said they would get a Covid-19 vaccine if it were available today, well below the minimum 70% threshold needed for herd immunity. A strategy to engage "willing skeptics" is as applicable to your product as it is for overcoming the objections to COVID vaccination.
The key to a successful product launch, go to market strategy or internal stakeholder engagement plan is a thorough understanding of what your buying center or stakeholders are willing and able to buy and the roles they play in the process. Sales Navigator won't tell you that. It will only point you in the right direction for a start. The hard part is up to you.
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs
This work is licensed under a?Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .
Updated 4/20/2022
Serving rural hospitals and physician entrepreneurs at UBS Financial Services, Inc.
3 年Thanks Arlen. As always a great article. I use Sale Navigator and think it is a wonderful resource. However, you are right it is only one of the tools in the customer buyers journey.