What's up folks today we're gonna be doing an absolute master class on how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I'm gonna be trying to keep this video as short as possible. But show all the different ways that you can use Sales Navigator to find leads, build lists, save searches, make alerts whole bunch of other hidden gems within the platform.
If there's anything I don't answer and if you have any questions, please do drop them in the comments below. I'll be sure to respond to every single comment we get. Let's not waste any more time.
Get straight to it. The first thing we're going to see is the homepage. There's not a lot here yet, but we'll come back to this later to show you how this changes as you add in accounts and leads.
The first thing you're gonna want to do is make a search. There are two types of searches. You can do a lead search, looking for prospects and an account search.
Looking for companies. You can sell to for most cases. It's gonna make sense to do a lead search.
But there are a couple of reasons why you might want to do an account search. We'll get into that a little bit later. Let's start with a lead search.
When you're searching for leads, you can add filters to narrow down your search and find the right people for you to sell to. First of all, let's run through all the filters what they mean and why you might want to use, first of all the company filters, you can search by current company past company company head count how many employees the company has, what type of company is if it's public or private and where the company's headquarters and then we go into the role filters so we can search by function. What department in the company did they sit under sales, marketing, accounting, finance specific job titles.
So VP of sales or director of marketing or HR manager seniority level. Are they a director? VP individual contributor, sea level years in current company and then years in current position.
And then there's some spotlights. These are kind of like potential buying triggers. So changed jobs in the last 90 days.
If they change jobs recently, that might mean that they're looking to make some changes at their new company. If they were mentioned in the news in the past 30 days, that's a great way to reach out to someone with a bit of personalization. Have they posted on linked in the past 30 days?
That's another reason that you can personalize your messaging to them. Do they follow your company? This is a fantastic way to find people who are aware of your company and what you do.
Finally do they have shared experiences with you? Have you and them worked at the similar company or went to the same university and then take a look at this. This is a new feature as of 2022.
You can actually search what they've been posting about in their content. So if you only want to speak to people who frequently talk about sales and marketing alignment or employee turnover, you can actually then search those keywords and that will give you a full list of people who are talking about those topics on the right here. We've got personal So connection, are they connected to you and then connections of?
And this is something that can be really, really cheeky with. So number one, you can put in one of your customers in here and go through all of their connections and prospect those folks and say, hey, we work with this person that I saw your connected with. I thought it might make sense for us to chat to or you could even ask that customer and say, hey, I spotted your connected with this list of 10 people.
Would you be willing to make introductions for me? However, the cheeky ist way to use this feature by far its connect with reps and sales leaders who work at your competition, add them into this filter and you will only see people that they're connected with. Those people might be potential prospects, past prospects or even current customers of your competitors.
If you know that your competitor is lacking in a certain area, maybe a feature or they've been in the news for bad press recently. Well then that's a great reason to them, reach out to all the people they're connected with. Maybe you don't say, hey, I know that you're connected.
This person, yada yada yada, but you could highlight what you do better than them. So hey, a lot of people are telling me that this thing is really important. The thing that you know your competitor doesn't do, we offer this to solve that.
Is this interesting to you right below that geography? Where is the prospect based? This is important because although some companies might be based in let's say France, you might want to talk to their north american team, what groups they're in the industry they have listed on their profile, first name, last name, profile, language, what school they went to and how many years of experience they have and then last but not least you have workflows.
So you can search by account list, I'll show you what that looks like later lead lists. What this means is you can go through and exclude anyone who you might have already put into a list, which means you are only to be searching for leads who are new, who haven't added to a list in the past people in the Crm. So if you've linked sales navigator to hubspot and salesforce, that means you can exclude or include people who are in your Crm.
Now this is really useful because it means you can exclude anyone who's already in your Crm, which once again is going to give you only knew people who your company or your colleagues Haven't targeted before. So those are all the key filters you can use. So now I want to do an example search to show you what it looks like when you start actually applying these filters for this example.
I'm going to search for, let's say senior sales leaders at startups in North America. So the first filter I'm going to include his company head camp. I'm going to say that I'm looking for companies that have between 50 and 200 employees um, and then also 200 to 500 company type isn't very relevant to me.
However, headquarters is, so let's say, I only want to talk to people who work at companies that are headquartered in the United States, you'll see right now we have 18 million results which is a huge number. So as we add more filters, this search, the results will become more and more refined and well ideally see less people, I only want to speak to senior sales leaders. There's two ways I can actually go about this.
I can go in and add their function, in which case it's sales right away. That reduced our number of results down to one million. But you've got to be aware that sometimes people call sales business development.
So we will include that as the function as well. And then because we only want to talk to senior leaders, we can add in a seniority level for me having sold to sales leaders in the past at this size of company. I know that generally the VP is the person making a lot of the decisions here and of course the sea level.
A chief revenue officer for example. So I'm gonna include C XO as well. C X O stands for see anything Oh so that could be a C H R O could be a C R O C T O C F O C I O.
I didn't know what a C XO was for the longest time which is why I'm explaining it to you. So I will include their geography as north America. So now that's given us 980,000 results.
But as we scroll through the search here, you'll see we've got managing director and president and member board of governors and Ceo and founder. If we only really want to sell to the VP of sales then we'd actually be better off searching by job title rather than their function in seniority level. It's a lot more specific.
So we'll add in VP of sales and that just gave us a much more specific number of results and now we can see all of these people here have a VP of sales title. VP of sales. VP of sales VP of sales.
Now that's great. However there are going to be a couple of anomalies thrown in there for example. Some people are the VP of sales west or there.
The vice president of sales operations and they're going to still be including this search and that's where you might want to start using the exclude feature Vice president of sales operations. Let's exclude them from our search. And we're also going to exclude any regional vice presidents as well.
And that removed another 3000 people from the search. So as we start to exclude certain things, we're gonna refine that search down and down until we have a much more specific, highly targeted, more relevant list of prospects moving on. I also might want to say that their profile language is english and here's a big one we want to put their industry.
And so for whatever reason, linkedin hasn't included the company industry in the lead search which is a massive pain in the butt. However, linkedin makes you add your industry to your profile. So if you work in computer software, you might add software.
The challenges. This isn't always accurate. And a lot of people call things different things.
For example, the top two results here are computer software and information technology, which in my eyes are very similar industries. And here's the other challenge, A lot of people who sell a software to a specific industry might list themselves as that industry rather than in the computer software industry, let's say someone's a VP of sales at a HR tech company. They sell HR software instead of listing the industry's computer software, they might choose to list their industry as human resources.
So by searching for computer software industry, we're going to miss all the 172 VPs of sales who have said they work in the HR industry. It's a real pain in the butt. And I really hope that linkedin will add the company industry here at some point.
The best workaround I found for it is by searching for keywords. So if you type in software here at the top, it will show people who have the word software listed in their profile, which to me is a better indicator than what industry they listed themselves as now. Because I use the keyword software, I'm going to remove the industry filters because I'm confident these people will all now work at software companies.
You can get really, really specific with your keyword searches. You can use what we call bullion strings to exclude or include specific queries. But that's quite an advanced way to be searching and we don't have time to show that in today's video.
However, if you would like me to break that down in another video, comment below and let me know if that'd be interesting to you. There we go. We've got 7000 VPs of sales who work for companies that have between 50 and 500 employees based in the United States who speak english.
Now, what we can do is actually save this search so we can save this as VP of sales, 52 500 us and now because we've saved that search, it means we don't have to do all these filters again if we want to come back to this search. But what it also means is linkedin will actually notify us if there's any new prospects who fit this criteria that come up in the future. Now what I'm gonna do is make this search a lot more specific.
I'm gonna refine it to people who have changed jobs in the last 90 days. The reason I've done this is because I've found a lot of success with contacting people who are new to their role, who might be looking to make some changes on their team. Now that list is whittled down to 517.
Results are much more manageable list. What we can now do is just start scrolling through this list and finding people who might be a fit for us to prospect. So Kevin Duffer for example, we can click save either save to an existing list or create a new list.
Q one targets, let's say. And then as we keep scrolling we can keep saving people to that list. Now another option so you have to manually click save on each of them is to use this little box here on the left.
So now we're just going down selecting everyone who we want to add. There we go. We've got five new people and then we can save them to less using this button at the top here and add them to my Q one targets or another option is to click this box at the top here and that will select everyone on this page.
It's a maximum of 25 people at a time before you have to go to the next page. Once we're happy with the list that we have built we can jump across the lead list at the top here go to that list. Q one targets.
So now you've built a lead list. What can you do with these folks now they're in the list. What I personally like to do is use a third party tool, a contact database tool like lead I.
Q. Zoom info, seamless whatever your company uses to pull these people from linked in this list and put their contact details into your crm Salesforce hubspot, whatever that may be or your sales engagement platform like an outreach or sales loft so that you can begin targeting them with messaging, email, cold calls, whatever it may be. Now what I think linkedin wants you to do is send emails to these people.
However I myself have had very little luck using in males sales Navigator plan I think comes with like 50 emails a month which isn't that many anyway even then I've not heard of many people having success with sending them with that said if someone is watching this who has seen some success from in males then please do let me know, I'd love to hear some success stories. Another option that I would opt to do myself is if I'm not already connected with them, I would send them a connection request and then only once they've chosen to connect with me. Well I use any kind of linkedin messages to try and get their attention.
Typically I'll be liking and commenting on their posts as well. If they are someone who's active on linkedin. Now when I jump back into the search feature, you can see my saved search here.
I can easily pull up my last search. So when I have to do all those filters again, however, here's a really great tip. If you're an account executive or an SDR, what I like to do is go through my Crm and find all the companies we've closed in the past five years.
So I'll throw in Oracle for example, let's say oracle was a past customer past. Now, what it's gonna do is show me everyone who's worked at Oracle in the past. This is where linkedin sales.
Navigator could become so valuable because all of these people might have some knowledge or experience using my product and because of that they may be more willing to evaluate it for their current business. And here's another tip that has booked me so many meetings in the past during your sales cycles. As an account executive or even as an SDR when you book meetings with people or you talk to them or you close a sale with them.
What I like to do is immediately add them to a linkedin sales navigator list. The reason why, well they now know who you are. They've spoken to you.
They get some of your value prop and by adding them to a list, I'll show you exactly what you can do. Here's a pretend list. We've got nick Mark, Tom Ryan Tyler and let's say I've sold all of these people in the past or their existing customers of mine.
What I can then see is when they change jobs in the past 90 days. So with Mark or tom just got a new job and they've been my customers or my prospects in the past. Well guess what?
These people already know who I am. They're already connected with me now that they've started new companies, they might be willing to evaluate my solution for their team again. So go into sales navigator, add all of your current customers and all of your people that you've spoken to the past into a list and then once a week just come in and check who start a new role.
Message them say congratulations on the new role. And then 30 days after that, once they've got some time to settle in there on boarded and they're starting to see all the problems in their new organization. That's when you can measure them and say, hey, has your team got anything set up?
Like what you were using at your previous company us and I can't tell you the amount of times when they say no we don't have anything in this company. We need to get that tool in your tool in place here as well. And not only in those lists can you see who changed jobs recently but you can also see his post in the past 30 days and who follows your company on linkedin which once again is a big indicator that lead might be warmer than otherwise.
Alright. So that's how you can do a lead search on sales Navigator. Save the search build a lead list and then some ways that you can use those lead list to your advantage.
I mentioned before that you can also search for accounts and build account lists and there's a couple of reasons you might want to do this. Number one. You might have a territory or a list of named accounts that you want to go after.
Number two. I showed you before that you can't add a industry into the search while you're looking for leads. But you can do that in an account search which I'll show you in a moment.
And the third reason is it might just be an easier way to find good fit accounts while you're doing your searches. So let's take a look at what that might look like. So this is the account company search, you can filter by annual revenue company head count how many employees they have company headcount growth.
So if that company is growing department head count, so let's say if you're looking for companies that have over 20 employees in their sales department, department head count growth and the reason you might want to know that is because as teams grow, that's often where they start to face a lot more problems. A lot more challenges, potentially challenges that your product or service consult fortune, which means are they in the Fortune 100 Fortune 500 Fortune 1000 company industry and this is one that's not available in the lead search. This is one of the big reasons I like to do account searches because you can specifically search for accounts within a certain industry number of followers and check this out.
The technologies they use. This can be huge because your product might not integrate well with Salesforce, but it might integrate really well with hubspot. So by searching for companies that you know, our household users, you're gonna find benefit prospects and then spotlights job opportunities.
So you can look for companies that are specifically hiring and also recent activities. So you can see if they've been funded in the past 12 months if they've had major senior leadership changes in the past three months. Both of those are good reasons to start reaching out to an account because they might suggest that there are going to be other changes in that company.
And then finally workflow. So you can remove companies that are already in your crm if you're looking for exclusively new companies and accounts. Okay, So let's do a quick example account search to show you how that works and how you can build an account list.
Let's say. We're looking for companies that have over 500 employees. So we've included 500 to 1,000,000 to 5000, 5000 to 10,000 And 10,000 plus for this search, let's only look for companies that are based in Canada.
And let's refine this further. We want to look for companies that have an accounting department with over 10 employees, let's say. And here we go.
We've got 12 companies based in Canada with over 500 employees that are in the marketing and advertising industry. With an accounting department has more than 10 employees. We can select all of these companies and save them to a new list.
So now that we've got those 12 accounts added to an account list here, we can do a couple of things. It will tell us when one of those accounts has a senior leadership change and then when we go into the account itself, we can see all kinds of details about it. So number one, we can get some insights on the company.
If it's been growing, how many employees it has the distribution of its headcount. So which departments are the biggest, how much they've been hiring similar accounts that people also looked at here at the bottom, which is a great place to look for competitors and other companies that you can target as well as new alerts for the account. For example when they post or when they make a new senior higher.
We also get access to this account map which linkedin builds for you based on who your ideal customer is when it will recommend people who are similar to folks who have targeted in the past for you to go after. So generally Tier one is going to be your decision makers. Tier two might be more champions and then tier three might be influencers and your potential deals and what you can do is sort through people in the account and add them to that map.
So now we've added serie a in here we can make serie a a tier two in the account map. So if you're working with key accounts or you're really targeting accounts. This account map can be huge to get a lay of the land and understand who's who.
Plus now that we've got some saved accounts, we can actually go back to our lead search and then we can search for only leads who will within the saved accounts that we just found. So in this case I will add a filter for VP of sales and it will show me the 18 VP of sales that work at those 12 marketing agencies based in Canada from the account list that we just made and now that we've saved some accounts and some leads. Whenever we look back into sales navigator here, it's gonna give us alert for when those people change jobs when there are major announcements when those people post or when those companies post, which allows you to stay on top of all the alerts those accounts and potentially gives you new reasons to reach out to them.
So hopefully that gives you a really good overview of how you can search for leads, make lead lists, save leads. Look for accounts, save accounts and get updates on those accounts as well as building an account map. There are a couple of other things that I'd like to show you within sales Navigator which can be helpful as a seller.
The first thing is smart links and this is something that's only available to people on the team's version of sales Navigator. So those who are using the individual plan won't have access to smart links but these are pretty cool. There are a way to upload content and then you can send that to your buyers as a link.
So I upload a pdf and I included the Vidyard website here and I can create that smart link now copy that link and send it to a prospect in a linkedin message or even an email when they open it up. This is how it's gonna look the access to the state of video report. They can scroll through and look at the pdf page by page.
They can also see any links that included in here as well. And this can be a really good place to collect the list of resources for your prospects that they can access. And the reason you might want to send them this as a smart link instead of I don't know a pdf and just a link in an email is for two reasons number one this is much more organized so they can see it all together in one place.
The second reason why you might want to sense like as a smart link is you get analytics, this is going to tell you who opened the link and when and if you click into the specific view session you can see what that person looked at. So in this case Tania open the pdf report for one minute and if we click on this we can see exactly how many seconds Tania spent on each page in the report, we can also see that Tania then opened the website link that we sent as well. Not only could you use this to send content to cold leads but you can send it to contact throughout the sales cycle and use it as a place to collect all of the resources that they might need to make a decision.
Sales Navigator also has a separate inbox for in males and people that have message using the platform, you can get quite confusing because messages that you send on sales Navigator don't sync with the messages that you can send on the core linked in platform. So although Tyler and I have message on linkedin in the past, it's not showing here because those messages didn't take place within the sales navigator platform, they took place on core linked in. So what I'm saying is if your company provides you with the sales navigator license then make sure that you only use it for work messages and not any related to recruiting or evaluating new positions last but not least.
The sales Navigator platform also includes what they call the social selling index. You can find your social selling index. If you click on your image in the top right hand corner here and then scroll to here and social selling index.
This will give you a score based on a couple of factors and it's based off of posting content frequently connecting with people and talking with them, engaging with other people's content and finding the right people, it will tell you how you rank within your industry and also within your network. Alright. And that is a high level walkthrough of sales Navigator as I mentioned.
If you have any questions then please do drop them in the comments below, I'll be sure to answer all of them. And if you'd like to see me take a deeper dive into how to do some really advanced searching on sales navigator, then please do let me know as well. Thanks so much for watching.
Don't forget to like and subscribe. It always helps see you next time.
