LinkedIn is an essential tool for B-to-B salespeople. Sales Navigator, one of the dedicated paid solutions, makes it much easier to build relationships and generate conversions. What are its various features? How does Sales Navigator make sales prospecting easier and more effective? Brigitte Neveu-Dérotrie, digital marketing expert, explains.
Sales Navigator is a paid service specially designed to simplify the process of finding and converting new prospects. This tool enables you to target and contact B-to-B prospects on LinkedIn, a vast database updated by the users themselves.
What you need to know
In France in 2023, LinkedIn will have more than 28 million members and 13.5 million monthly active members (according to Digimind). 500,000 French companies have a LinkedIn page. It is the network most used by B-to-B decision-makers.
Sales Navigator is a must-have investment for B-to-B salespeople, enabling them to maximise development opportunities and results. In a competitive and uncertain sales landscape, this tool saves precious time in maintaining links with existing customers, reaching out to potential prospects and generating a steady flow of new leads.
What is social selling?
Beyond simple online prospecting, social selling consists of identifying, connecting and maintaining relationships with your potential prospects on the Internet. social networks. It integrates value creation and relationship marketing strategies, such as inbound marketing, to target and convert prospects into customers.
The four pillars of social selling as defined by LinkedIn
Building your professional brand
Finding the right people
Using information to get in touch
Building and maintaining relationships
Take the test: you can obtain your score free of charge on the Social Selling Index (SSI) from your LinkedIn account. This test will also give you your position in relation to your reference sector.
The different Sales Navigator subscriptions
Sales Navigator offers three subscription options:
- Core : for salespeople, entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals who want to grow their business through social selling.
- Advanced : additional functionalities enabling sales teams to collaborate and share personalised information (new appointments, strategic moment to contact a prospect, etc.) as well as tools (reporting, engagement tracking).
- Advanced Plus : Designed for organisations with large sales teams, it enables advanced integrations, particularly with the most widely used CRMs.
The main features of Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is easy to use and provides multiple functions. By combining targeted search, personalisation, interaction tracking and active engagement, salespeople can maximise their conversion opportunities and business development.
1. Advanced filters for targeted searches
The search engine's filters enable you to carry out precise, targeted searches for prospects or company accounts, based on criteria such as sector, company size or position held. They also allow you to obtain valuable information such as new appointments or those who have recently published on LinkedIn. You can also save your searches for future use.
Example
A software company may only target IT managers in medium-sized businesses, including those who have recently taken up their post.
2. Creation of lead lists and activity monitoring
Once your prospects and corporate accounts have been identified, Sales Navigator makes it easy to monitor them on an ongoing basis, with functions for creating customised lists, tags and notes.
You can create lists of priority leads by sector of activity, function, level of relationship (prospect, customer, etc.). You can also set up alerts to notify you of any changes to your prospects' jobs or new publications.
Sales Navigator helps you to contact the right people at the right time, increasing engagement and positive responses.
3. Personalised InMails
InMails can be used to send personalised messages to key decision-makers after analysing their profile and areas of interest.
By mentioning points in common or useful information, you can considerably increase the potential response rate.
4. Lead tracking and integration with CRM
The Advanced Plus package integrates Sales Navigator with your CRM (works with the most popular CRMs), synchronising contact information and interactions for even more effective follow-up.
5. Engaging with prospects through content
On your usual LinkedIn feed, you probably give priority to posts by the most effective authors or those you are close to, which the algorithm has identified for you. But not necessarily, or at the right time, the posts from your most strategic prospects and company accounts.
With Sales Navigator, you can follow, like and comment on the publications of these key people more easily. This makes it easier to build relationships before contacting them directly.
Automation or customisation: what's the best approach?
The balance between effectiveness and authenticity remains delicate. Marketing automation (automation of certain tasks such as making contact and initial follow-ups) and, more broadly, techniques linked to growth hacking are tempting and facilitated by certain tools outside the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Walaxy.
Marketing automation is an excellent way of optimising your time and concentrating on other, higher value-added activities.
This involves, for example, creating predefined scenarios for specific targets and running them automatically, with varying degrees of customisation.
Example of a 3-stage scenario
- Invitation to get in touch
- Thank you for acceptance
- Invitation to a webinar or to download a white paper, to a telephone discussion, etc.
Nevertheless, these techniques should be handled with care, know-how and intelligence. After all, who hasn't received irritating, poorly targeted and sometimes irrelevant prospecting messages?
Automating certain tasks can save you time, but doing it intelligently is fundamental to making new contacts and creating solid relationships.
It is possible, for example, to automate the search for prospects and the sending of invitations (with discretion), and to personalise messages according to the specific information gathered about each prospect, commonalities or shared interests.
Mobilising and challenging sales staff
Sales Navigator is a highly effective tool for B-to-B prospecting. By motivating your teams and providing them with the necessary tools and training, you can maximise your chances of success.
Involve them in the process of developing your social selling strategy. Organise training workshops and set clear, achievable objectives.
Challenge your teams, reward them and offer rewards for outstanding performance.
KPIs: how do you measure performance?
To assess the effectiveness of your social selling actions, it is essential to define key indicators that are tailored to your organisation and easy to monitor.
For example:
- Number of new connections established
- Response rate to personalised messages
- Number of appointments made using LinkedIn
- Conversion rate from prospects to customers
An SME specialising in IT software can use Sales Navigator's advanced filters to target the most relevant sectors (education, health, industry, etc.), the geographical location, the size of the company, the function of the contact sought, etc. This can significantly increase the lead conversion rate.
When a manager or director takes up a new post, it's often a good time to renew suppliers. Sales Navigator shows which prospects have changed jobs in the last three months. This is an excellent time to (re)contact them, congratulate them, find out what's at stake, suggest a meeting...
Sales reps can save their searches to be alerted to any recent publication by a prospect, and from the target company's account, react to it, comment on it, or find additional arguments for making contact. This strengthens their credibility and links with their customers and prospects. It is also possible to map out the key contacts of a target company.
Where appropriate, the Advanced or Advanced Plus packages (with integration of the company's CRM) also enable sales and marketing teams to share their information.
Large organisations can also integrate Sales Navigator with their CRM to synchronise contact information and interactions. This integration enables better coordination between teams, which in turn improves lead follow-up and conversion.
Do you use this tool? What is your feedback?
