LinkedIn Sales Navigator™ is one of the key tools sales teams, and individuals use to build meaningful connections with prospects and nurture customer relationships. You’re already using Sales Navigator™ to target and connect with the right prospects, but there are some features that can improve your success rate. Read on for five advanced LinkedIn Sales Navigator™ tactics.
Save and refine your queries
You already have a good idea of your ideal prospect. Sales Navigator™ lets you build complex Boolean search queries to target the exact people with whom you want to connect. But if you don’t leverage those advanced search functions, you’re missing out on valuable connections. Use keywords to target and identify the connections you are most interested in and who are most likely to be interested in connecting with you. Utilize Sales Navigator™’s advanced filters to search for certain characteristics and exclude others. Then use those queries to create custom lists and filters based on your exact criteria. Building and refining these queries is an iterative process. Save your queries, look at your results, analyze what worked well and what could use some refinement, and then refine that query for the next search.
Organize your prospects and connections
Once you have made the right connections, make sure they are organized and properly categorized. Hot leads need different communications and a different strategy from those who are cold or warm. How fast you respond to a hot lead has a big impact on their conversion rate to actual customers. Organizing your connections into groups gives you the opportunity to create messaging for each one and further nurture those conversations. It means you can quickly reach out and respond to hot leads and prevents you from paying too much attention to leads who are not good prospects. It also allows you to find and leverage shared connections to help strengthen the relationship or identify additional leads.
Leverage InMail
InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system. InMail allows you to directly message other LinkedIn members even if you are not connected to them. Reaching out to the right prospects via InMail messages is a great way to make an initial connection and allows you to customize each message for the individual prospect.
It also offers significant benefits over reaching out via email. People are three times more likely to respond to an InMail message than a traditional email. Take advantage of those response rates by customizing the messages you send with InMail to increase your chances of continuing the conversation. Be brief and conversational in your messages. Get to the point quickly and invite the conversation to continue. Also, be sure to optimize your LinkedIn profile. It’s the first thing a potential connection will see when you reach out to them.
Make it personal
We’ve all been the recipient of a connection request or message that is so generic it makes us wonder if the sender even knows who we are. The truth is, on the other side of your connection request is a person, not a business, and we all want to connect with actual people. The most successful connection campaigns come from connection requests that feel personal, with ongoing communications that feel genuine. So don’t send the same generic message to every single connection. Vetting potential connections to determine if they meet the right criteria before you reach out to them also gives you the opportunity to personalize or further target your connection message for that prospect. Personalizing your message gives you even more of a chance to connect successfully.
Putting that small bit of effort into having a conversation with your connections pays off with higher quality connections that are more deeply engaged and more likely to convert.
Integrate Sales Navigator™ with your CRM
Now that you have made great connections and are having the right conversations make sure you capture them. Sales Navigator™ is designed to integrate with your CRM, so those leads can be added to your CRM for follow-up with your sales team. It’s another way to ensure that leads are not slipping through the cracks and that your prospects are receiving the right information and support at the right time with no downtime between connecting with them on LinkedIn and entering your CRM.
Sales Navigator™ comes with huge benefits, from identifying and connecting with new leads to strengthening existing relationships. Leveraging all the features it offers enables you to easily target the right leads, quickly connect with them, build rapport, and fill your funnel.
