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LinkedIn – which sales professional doesn’t use the platform to forge business connections? But the social network allows more than just the maintenance of B2B contacts. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a powerful tool for professional lead management, you will learn to qualify new leads and organize existing ones. With the possibilities for prospecting in the Sales Navigator, relationships can be built and expanded like a professional. The navigator takes into account the fact that sales today are no longer about selling directly, but about building trust.
What you learn while reading the post
Discover what the LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers for lead management, how to create, structure, and store lists for sales. We show you how to tackle the navigator easily, raise your profile and gain visibility. You’ll also learn important tricks on how your sales can reach new people through Lookalike Audiences. To do this, we present three crucial hacks for Lead Research that you should know as an employee in Sales and B2B. Learn how to use keywords and filters that are guaranteed to appeal to your audience and how to realign engagement with your accounts and content. All this for maximum success for lead management and sales!
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sales professionals not only have access to the huge LinkedIn network with more than 750 million members. Within the navigator, you also have several exciting features to qualify, manage, and store leads. For example, you can build an optimized search system for lead research using sophisticated filtering capabilities and based on your buyer personas. Particularly helpful is the relationship filter, which allows you to search for the most relevant leads and qualify leads. The results for people and companies that match the search parameters are automatically displayed separately.
You can also use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to define lookalike audiences. By selecting the most relevant profiles for your B2B Business and using the “View similiar” function in the search, you will see 100 new profiles with similar characteristics. These, in turn, can be created quickly and easily as a new search list.
What would all these findings be without the ability to pursue prospecting and qualify leads? Your search results will help you quickly determine which potential leads are worth tracking. Three steps make for good prospecting:
1. Message with contact request: You should send this message at the same time as your contact request. Always remember the following principles:
- People don’t want to connect to a sales account, but to people who add value to their network.
- Keep the message short and succinct. Play to common interests or contacts.
- When sending requests, the goal should always be a success rate of 30 to 40 percent. So use the appropriate filters to get the right profiles.
2. When composing the first message after a confirmed contact request, you should consider the following points:
- When you formulate, you’re going to say how would you feel if you read this message? Would you be interested or bored? The answer to this question reveals whether you set the right tone or not.
- The goal of the message is always to start a conversation. So formulate a text that makes the other person want to deal with you.
- The goal is a response rate of at least 20 percent. It is important to send this first message one to two hours after confirming your contact request.
3. What if the answer is not given? In this case, two to three follow-up messages are announced. important:
- A follow-up sequence is not about “full-spam” the contact until it responds. Rather, the goal is to show the potential customer what value you can offer for their problem.
- Get permission from the contact! If you send multiple messages, you should be sure that the contact also draws a profit from them – and not just annoyed. Automatic follow-up messages can be problematic for this reason and should contain no more than two messages.
Why you should use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for your lead management
Search for B2B Leads like a real detective
Use the AND, OR, NOT filters to create lists of promising leads using keywords. This allows you to filter out specific groups of people – and exclude profiles that don’t match your Buyer Persona. The three filter components offer the following benefits for your sales:
AND: The more often you work with this filter, the smaller – and more precise – your results lists become.
OR: This filter is particularly suitable for wide-ranging searches that you want to use to broaden the focus of your search.
NOT: The filter is exclusive and is suitable for excluding certain keywords and parameters. It is used to generate specific, very precise lists.
Practical implementation Lead Research
The following examples show how to use the above parameters to narrow your lead research by company, position, region, industry, and other criteria.
(Business) AND (niche market) AND (1st OR 2nd position)
NOT (less relevant)
("Retail" OR "local business") AND Mode AND (owner OR "co-owner") NOT "Marketing Agency"
("Retail" OR "local business") AND "Jewelry" AND ("Owner" OR "Co-Owner") NOT "Marketing Agency"
Retargeting and Automation
To really connect with your sales audience, LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers various options for retargeting profile visitors. You can save users who have visited your profile and then see their updates and posts on the Sales Navigator home page. Take advantage of this opportunity and identify all common characteristics and interests by means of a profile analysis. Then decide whether contacting you might be worthwhile or not. Now you can formulate messages adapted to the specific characteristics of your visitors. Important: Don’t forget the call-to-action at the end of your message.
Of course, there are a few things to keep in mind here too. So you shouldn’t invite more users in a day than your capacity allows. Finally, you need to spend the time (or the number of employees required) to handle the confirmed requests and the resulting leads. Ideally, you’d order one or more people from your team to take on the task.
Various automation software, such as we-connect.io, meetalfred.com, Lusha or Dux-Soup, is suitable for automating your lead research.
Conclusion: Ultimate help for sales
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator supports all important sales tasks in the B2B, from prospecting to business closing. The mail function allows you to reach any LinkedIn member – even if you are not connected to the person. While finding right-choice decision-makers and businesses faster, you’ll also stay informed and get real-time updates on your business contacts. With relevant insights, you can also better reach potential customers and qualify leads.
Would you like more information about linkedIn Sales Navigator? You can get them in LinkedIn Help.