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Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from the Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business by Ted Prodromou .
Sales Navigator It’s LinkedIn on Steroids – a completely independent app designed to meet the needs of marketers. Subscriptions range from $ 64.99 per month for an annual individual subscription, to $ 99.99 per month for an annual team subscription. Some people are tough on the price, but even at $ 1,200 a year, the unrestricted access to the entire LinkedIn membership and the specialized tools for prospecting and tracking make it well worth the money. Bluntly, if you can’t make at least $ 1,200 a year from your LinkedIn network, you’re in the wrong job.
The heart of Sales Navigator is its advanced search engine, with detailed filters that allow you to identify your ideal prospects. You can search for leads or accounts, and there are several lead search filters available when you do an advanced search, which can help you find an unlimited stream of leads for your products and services.
To save time, you can mold your sales preferences, or the default search settings, in the Sales Navigator settings. You can set geography, industry, company size, role, and seniority level.
Think of sales preferences as your starting point when looking for potential customers. You must include the characteristics of your main consumers. Once you’ve created advanced searches that reliably find great prospects, you can save them so they’re available 24/7. You can receive notifications of new leads on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, or you can manually check for new leads from those searches.
As you scroll through the list of search results, you have a few options. You can:
- Save money. This allows you to monitor a person to see how active they are on LinkedIn and to receive notifications when you post or share content. You can send them a message without being a 1st degree connection or using InMail. You can also save your company as a potential customer account.
- Connect. Use this to send the person a personalized invitation to connect on LinkedIn.
- View profile. You can view their profile to see if they are suitable for your network.
- See similar. The LinkedIn algorithm will show you 99 other professionals who are similar to the person you are looking at.
- Add tag. You can flag a lead using pre-selected categories like Follow-up, Customer, or Decision Maker, or you can create your own lead tags like Cold, Hot, or Hot.
- Message. You can send a message without using InMail, even if you are offline. This is a great benefit of subscribing to Sales Navigator.
Engage your leads and connections
Now that you’re following some leads, Sales Navigator will give you a lot of great information about your LinkedIn activity. For example, you can see how many people in your first grade network changed jobs in the last 90 days. This gives you a chance to congratulate them and start a conversation. You can ask them about their new roles, which could give you an opportunity to work with them in their new positions.
You will also see who has been mentioned in the news in the last 30 days. This is another opportunity to congratulate them. And you’ll see who’s posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days, so you can see their posts and be one of the first to like, comment, or share their content. If you’re looking for ways to start conversations on this social network, Sales Navigator offers you ways to reconnect with your potential customers.
News and updates from your network, as well as the people and accounts you’re following, will appear in your Sales Navigator newsfeed. This is similar to your LinkedIn newsfeed, but you will only see information about specific people and accounts that you saved as leads. You can filter the newsfeed data by the most important or the most recent. You can also sort by sales alerts, job changes, suggested leads, news, lead actions, account news, and account actions. You can also only show news and updates from a specific company or person that you follow.
Quickly interacting with the people featured in these updates is a great way to start a new conversation and get back on their radar.
Image: Depositphotos.com
Discover new leads and accounts automatically
The “Discover” tab in the menu uses the LinkedIn algorithm to view recommended leads and accounts. You don’t need to waste time looking for new leads because the app will do it for you. The site searches for people and accounts with similar characteristics to the leads and accounts you are currently following.
Tools for the team
The Team version of Sales Navigator allows you to connect popular CRM applications like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, so all your Sales Navigator activity is captured in your CRM records. The most powerful tool is called Teamlink, which allows you to coordinate your sales activity when selling to large organizations.
Let’s say you have 20 sales representatives who are responsible for managing a large account, such as IBM. It would be embarrassing if two of your sales reps from different divisions called the same contact at IBM to sell them services. With Teamlink, your salespeople would know who’s been calling that person and what they’ve been talking about.
Social sales index
LinkedIn also has a tool called Social Selling Index that assigns you a “score” for your activity on LinkedIn.
Your score is based on how well:
- You establish your professional brand
- You find the right people
- You interact with knowledge
- You build relationships
The social sales index gives you an idea of how well LinkedIn thinks you are using the site. The score is not perfect, but it gives you an idea of what the platform thinks of your daily activity.