1. What is Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Sales Navigator is a powerful tool that can be used in several different ways throughout the prospecting and sales process. We will cover how you can get the most out of Sales Nav to help you:
- Quickly build out target accounts
- Identify prospects that are in our ICP or would be likely to benefit from our product/service
- Keep track of company news, prospect Linkedin activity, changed jobs/roles, and more to use as triggers for your outreach
Here are the main areas or features of Sales Nav that your will learn in this tutorial:
- Performing Lead & Account Searches and Applying Filters
- Using Alerts to track Lead & Account activity and news
- Advanced Sales Nav Tips
Happy Hunting!
2. What are alerts & social listening in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Alerts are a fundamental feature of Linkedin Sales Nav that allows you to stay up-to-date with your target accounts and prospects. This feature is great for Social Listening which is defined by Sprout Social as the processes of listening for sales means being in tune with conversations your real-life customers are having).
Check the end of this Spek for more Social Listening tools you can leverage.
Here’s an overview of how to get the most out of Alerts:
1. Go to Linkedin Sales Navigator Home
2. Click on All Alerts:
3. Choose from this Dropdown which Alerts you would like to view:
As you can see, you have a range of options (filters) to choose from that relate to both Saved Leads and Saved Accounts. Note that Leads and Accounts must be saved to list in order for them to be picked up by Alerts (See how ). These titles are fairly self-explanatory, so I’ll highlight a few common use cases:
- Lead Shares: This will pull a list of all of the Shared Content that your leads in Saved Lists have posted on Linkedin. This is a great tool for prospect research, engaging with prospects (comment/like their posts), and nurturing relationships.
- Lead Changed Jobs: Tells you if any of your saved leads have recently changed companies, which can be a trigger to reach out
- Account News: This is a great way to stay on top of any News articles that mentioned the companies you have saved
- Shared List Alerts: If you have Sales Navigator Teams or Enterprise Edition, you can view alerts about the Shared Lists that your team has created
Social Listening Tools continued…
- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and personal blogs
- Monitor the web and Twitter for specific keywords, blogs from websites, Twitter lists, etc.
- Similar to Feedly but more oriented for Sales Professionals
- Other similar tools
Happy Hunting!
3. What are custom lists in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Custom Lists are a relatively new feature in Linkedin Sales Nav that allows you to filter your Lead searches by a specific set of accounts.
You may want to use this feature to identify leads in:
- Your target accounts
- Current customers of your company
- A list of Accounts specified by filters like: Industry, Company Size, Revenue, Growth, etc.
Here is a video that illustrates creating & applying Custom Lists:
scan code to view video
(https://youtu.be/FcyxsiZ2CWM)
Basically, the process here is:
- Start Account Search
- Identify accounts you would like to target based off of filter criteria
- Add desired Accounts to Custom Account List
- Create New Lead Search
- Filter Lead search by Custom List = Account List you just created
Happy Hunting!
4. How do you perform company research for personalization in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
When it comes to personalization, the most important thing to make sure the prospect takes away is why them, why now.
Search for the company name on Linkedin and go to company page:
- ABOUT US – get a high level understanding of the business. Specifically look for:
- Brief description of Products/Services/Industry company is in (so you can use their terminology in outreach)
- How long the company has been around (is this an established company with existing systems in place?)
- Number of offices/locations
- Next, go to INSIGHTS to get an idea of the total employees, employee growth and any relevant top hires.
- High growth
- Spike in growth = could indicate an acquisition, verify by looking at the news
- Top New Hires: any senior management that was recently brought in
- Then, search JOBS section for keywords in the Titles most relevant to your product/services ie. If you sell to Salesforce teams, search “Salesforce”
- Look at any open job postings with your keywords in the title (indicates that company is investing more into their Salesforce investment) or learning/enablement/training as it shows that the company is likely looking to address some challenges on that front.
- Look at any job descriptions for other roles that include those keywords in description – for example, it might include how an employee will need to use Salesforce for their job or other key applications built on top of the salesforce platform they’ll use
- Finally look at HOME tab for any recent posts announcing:
- Market/Office Expansions
- Partnerships
- New products they’ve launched
- Acquisitions
Next, dig into any key research you’ve found to help you build your case for WHY them, WHY now by going to their website or searching google.
Finally, use this research to send a personalized inmail or email to your prospect!
5. How do you find a prospect in the news in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Step One: Open Up Sales Navigator
Step Two: Search for Account
Step Three: Select “Mentioned in the news in past 30 days”
Step Four: Click on the link to be directed to the page where the prospect was mentioned in the news
Step Five: You are directed straight to the website.
Now read the article and use any information you learned to personalize your outreach to the prospect!
6. What are saved lists and saved searches in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Saved Lists can be used to organize and keep track of target leads.
Saved Searches allow you to save a set of Filters on Lead and Account searches and receive notifications on a Daily, Weekly, or Monthly basis when new Accounts or Leads who match your criteria appear. This can also be useful for saving time when creating new searches so you don’t have to enter in all of your Filters again.
Here are some walkthroughs on how to use these features:
To create a new Saved List, follow the steps in the GIF:
To add new leads to a Saved List, follow the steps in this GIF:
To create a Saved Search, follow the steps in this GIF:
Happy Hunting!
7. How do you search for leads and accounts in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
How to search for Leads and Accounts
1. From the Home Page of Sales Nav, click “All filters” next to the search bar
2. Select “Lead filters” or “Account filters” from the dropdown.* We’ll use Lead filters as an example, but these tools can be applied to both.
* You can also start this search instead by searching for a specific account in the search bar, and then clicking into their employees:
3. Apply your filters. Filters are a great way to narrow down your results to find specific accounts & contacts. Boolean Search phrases can be applied within each of these filters. Here’s the tutorial Spek on Some of the common filters you will use include:
- Title
- Industry
- Custom Lists *
- Company Size (# of employees)
- Company Growth Rate
- Keywords
- Annual Revenue
* Custom Lists are an extremely powerful way to filter your Lead search down based on a specific set of accounts. View the tutorial Spek here to learn more.
4. Leverage Linkedin’s “Recommended Filters” – these are not officially labeled by Linkedin, but can help you narrow lead results down in some really useful ways to find:
- Leads that follow your company’s Linkedin page
- Leads who have posted on Linkedin in the past 30 days
- Leads who changed jobs in the past 90 days
- Leads mentioned in the news in past 30 days
- Leads who share experience (Past Companies) with you
Here is a video that walks you through using “Recommended Filters” :
scan code to view video
(https://youtu.be/FQ3Qt8vxhzA)
Happy Hunting!
8. How do you use boolean search phrases in Linkedin Sales Navigator?
Boolean Search Phrases allow you to refine your searches and quickly find contacts in your ICP at any given company. There are a few different boolean operators you can use to modify your results. Most of the time, you will be adding these phrases to the Title or the Keyword sections of the filters page.
- AND is used to include multiple search terms in search. Example: Marketing Operations AND Product Marketing AND Demand Generation.
- OR allows you to return results that include one search phrase or another. Example: Data Scientist OR Data Analyst OR Chief Date Officer.
- (“ĝ) Using quotes on your search phrase will return the EXACT match to what you are searching. For example, if you want to find contacts who are VPs of Sales, you would use the quotes around “VP Sales” – if you don’t have the quotes, you will return results for VP Sales Operations, VP Sales Enablement, etc.
- NOT allows you to exclude specific phrases from your search
Adding them all together
Of course, the real power comes in combining all of these into search phrases that are relevant to your business and customers. All of the operators can be combined together using parentheses to look something like this:
Title Filter:
(“Chief Data Officer” OR CDO OR “Data Scientist”) NOT Data Analyst
Keyword Filter:
“Big Data” AND (Apache Spark OR Artificial Intelligence OR ML OR ETL)
Here’s what that looks like in Linkedin:
Happy Hunting!
