LinkedIn Sales Navigator is at the nexus of virtual selling. But most gloss over it. With shifting buyer practices, it’s time for sales to also gear up.
Today, modern buyers want to engage on their terms and at their own pace, even within B2B. But there’s a hindrance: the operations and functionalities are more complex than B2C.
At the end of the rope, there’s not a single individual trying to purchase your solutions, but an entire committee of 6 to 10 decision-makers. Most often, they are all geographically spread out with their personal levels of motivation, priorities, and influence.
Catering to the distinct personas within a single buying committee isn’t as simple as one might think. One strategy won’t resonate with the different decision-makers.
In a sprint to catch up, modern sales has designed a strategic solution, one that caters to distinct buyers’ with their shared need for agility and control.
Strategic virtual selling.
The move to the virtual selling landscape wasn’t anticipated. But it was the need of the moment, especially when COVID-19 took the world by storm. It wasn’t just about adapting to the new normal in the digitally-led landscape.
But a way to accommodate the shifting psychology of sellers and buyers.
While the rise of digital sales rooms and collaborative data-driven tools has accelerated sales roadmaps, there is always an latent need for a more intuitive catalyst. One that informs a balance between a psychologically and technically resonant sales strategy.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed to do just this.
What’s the LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
As per Salesforce, Sales Navigator is:
A platform for sales teams that facilitates virtual selling on LinkedIn by empowering salespeople to build and manage client relationships backed by LinkedIn’s data and advanced sales tools.
In short, it’s a premium tool designed solely for sales professionals to amp up their sales strategies.
At its nexus, this sales navigator operates as an intelligence and engagement platform built to tackle the fragmented and dynamic nature of B2B selling head-on. It’s a robust engine that affords modern sales professionals with the data and tools they need to navigate the undercurrents of the evolving B2B buyer psychology.
This tool has become imperative for sales teams to reach the right prospects. And connect with them seamlessly.
Today’s buyers crave a relational comms approach, where they aren’t just perceived as numbers but as humans in need. Sales Navigator is built on this notion- to meet the buyers where they are.
It opens up a new avenue for sales reps to become more personalized and insightful in their approach. The question here is, how?
The salient features of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator
1. Advanced filters that foster deep research into prospective buyers.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows businesses to move beyond surface-level demographics. It entails advanced filters, such as seniority, industry, job title, skills, tech infrastructure, and years in the role, among others.
This helps sales teams identify the different individuals in a buying committee and understand the professional context. All of this even before the appointment setters have made initial contact.
It’s more of a psychological preparatory step where sellers attempt to gauge the buyer’s self-research journey. And also understand the buyers themselves. Such that your SDRs arrive at the virtual interaction with purpose and direction, rather than dropping generic sales pitches.
But this isn’t the actual perk of leveraging LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.
Benefit #1
It helps you meet your buyers at the most opportune moment when they’re more open to listening to you. The tool literally uncovers signals as buyers conduct their research.
Source: LinkedIn
There are features like activity alerts and “Buyer Intent” that offer clues as to what buyers are researching or the kind of niche topics they’re interacting with- basically, what matters to them in this moment. And it’ll also let you know if they’re looking at your brand’s page.
Tactically, the navigator outlines when the buyer is ready for a sales interaction.
This helps your sales teams send InMail requests that offer genuine value. Not a templated sales pitch you forward to a hundred others. This means not messages regarding your solution, but relevant add-on content on their posts or opinion pieces. Something that invites them towards a fresh perspective.
This feeds into the buyer’s want of control over the narrative and builds trust.
2. TeamLink to transform sales teams into consultants and trusted advisors.
The Sales Navigator allows businesses to track prospects’ professional lives. It offers real-time insights into company updates, shared connections, title changes, and the content they’re generally interested in.
This data may look minimal and generic, but for sales, it’s crucial to develop messages and comms that highlight empathy. And of course, understanding.
One of the most common downsides of virtual selling is that it could prove to be too impersonal.
But Sales Navigator’s advanced features ensure this isn’t the case.
An overview of the prospect’s LinkedIn profile outlines possible challenges and genuine interests. With this, you can ask insightful questions and show up prepared for the meeting.
The point is to dodge the initial skepticism. But how? Through warm introductions.
Source: LinkedIn
Benefit #2
Sales Navigator also affords you reach and accelerates connections and introductions, expanding your network.
Through TeamLink, you’re discovering warmer paths to interacting with prospects to build long-term, genuine connections. This feature offers further insight into who, amongst your entire sales team, has a first-degree connection with the prospect.
Thus, also encouraging collaborative work across your team and leveraging each other’s connections.
With a warm path already laid out, you’re more likely to get a positive response.
3. An account-based approach to navigate fragmented B2B buying committees.
In 2020, LinkedIn and Forrester found that 86% of marketers focus on the accounts that sales hope to target.
Then, they found a crucial disjuncture- marketing and sales don’t share the same goals or KPIs. It’s been five years, and there remains room for improvement. Sales and marketing have too often operated in silos to make a 180-degree shift overnight.
Taking an account-based approach creates room for seamless collaboration and coordination. It combines the two different roadmaps into one, narrowing the focus to key accounts that are the most promising ones.
Marketing and sales, both their perspective must merge to form a unanimous decision.
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator has proved to be a lynchpin for precisely this.
Benefit #3
The tool affords both teams resources to operate together and for siloed operations. Marketing can now curate personalized messages based on LinkedIn data. And sales have become more proactive and insightful.
Source: LinkedIn
It helps boost multithreading, i.e., an act of building connections with multiple stakeholders across a single buying committee.
It’s not a piece of cake to establish key players. But the Sales Navigator offers broad transparency into organizational structures to imbibe insightful outreach practices.
How does it work?
A list feature in LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps SDRs build a list of 6 to 10 top decision-makers with the ability to make purchasing decisions. And offers a multithreaded account list.
These lists are then shareable with AEs for building a strategic selling approach that resonates overall.
4. Gauge the effectiveness of your sales strategy through the Social Selling Index (SSI).
Source: LinkedIn
In simple terms, the Social Selling Index (SSI) score is a benchmark that highlights the efficiency of a salesperson in social selling on LinkedIn.
There are four fundamental categories, each of which is attributed a score out of 25:
1. Establish a professional brand, i.e., build a professional and complete account with:
- Multimedia on profile
- Cover picture
- Endorsements
- Long-form posts
2. Find the right prospects through lead finder, prospect profile views, people searches, total days active, etc.
3. Engage with key relevant insights– unearth or share valuable information to build connections through shares, comments, InMail response rates, messages sent, groups joined, etc.
4. And build relationships to expand your LinkedIn network through internal and VP+ connections, and the acceptance rate of connection requests sent.
The overall SSI ranges between 0 and 100 based on how the salesperson performs across each category.
Benefit #4
With the SSI scores, users can gauge their own performance and compare it with their competitors and connections. LinkedIn suggests that for business leaders to be considered thought leaders, the overall score should be 75 and above.
The more insight you’ve into your SSI scores, the more strategically you’ll be able to maximize the performance of your social selling tactics and elevate adoption.
And track your sales team’s progress to urge the right digital selling behaviors.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator isn’t just a dispensable tool or an add-on for your sales strategy.
It’s a comprehensive solution and one of the main drivers in shaping the modern digital selling landscape.
But the traditional LinkedIn Sales Navigator is evolving to offer brands more.
The upgraded solution: AI-powered LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn came to a fundamental realization: A higher SSI score is no good.
It doesn’t translate into measurable outcomes, and neither does it illustrate a sales professional’s efficacy. The modern sales arena demands a revamped solution that doesn’t distract sellers from what they must do: develop a human-first approach to building client relationships.
LinkedIn now hosts a new version of its Sales Navigator. One that’s driven by artificial intelligence.
According to the social platform, it cut down the total virtual selling time by helping sales professionals save 65 hours annually.
From automated account alerts to layoff announcements, this version of the Sales Navigator feels like the diamond in the rough. It offers:
- Advanced lead-gen capabilities with 50+ advanced search filters that allow you to filter out all stakeholders in the target buying account.
- Insight into company data, such as growth and headcount, and then sort them through intent and connections. The platform syncs the relevant LinkedIn data with your CRM, also optimizing pipeline management.
- A warm path to work across complex business connections to stand out in front of the target account, beyond a high SSI score.
- Understand how stakeholders in that account are connected through the Relationship Map. And move the buying committee faster through the funnel cycles.
- Spark high-quality conversations with already-provided conversation starters by leveraging tools as Message Assist and Lead IQ. And curate personalized InMails.
- Regulate relationships with priority clients and send post-sales InMails that keep them engaged and interested.
These Sales Navigator features aren’t just amping up your sales strategy. But redefine sales success with the help of AI.
However, integrating it into an already familiar framework seems a bit queasy for sales teams. To successfully adopt AI-driven tools across LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, sales teams must reiterate their knowledge from the crux.
The improvised Sales Navigator is your vehicle to detangle the complex knots of LinkedIn’s customer ecosystem.
To gauge the maximum potential of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, your sales team must drop the conventional reliance on the SSI metric.
It has to reiterate what sales success truly means to them. And whether the desired outcomes really depend on the SSI scores.
The underlying logic is clear- adding AI features has only enhanced the capabilities of the Sales Navigator.
It’s no longer about connection requests and prospecting in the wild, without a clear vision. But about adopting innovation and leveraging it to cruise the landscape of dynamic buyers.
And helping your sales team feel more confident and less intimidated, for building long-term profitability.
