Want an index full of business leads? Want to get in touch with “C” level executives or want to find company owners having 100+ employees in your nearby cities? Then stay tuned as we will explore the awesome tool by LinkedIn called the Sales Navigator (‘Sales nav’ for short).

If you want to learn more about prospecting, engaging prospects, and messaging strategy, head on to the ‘What We Know’ section for some interesting blogs. So let’s dive into it!

Why Sales Navigator?

Before we jump into this lead wizard tool, let me go ahead and answer how to use LinkedIn sales navigator? To put it simply, LinkedIn is a dedicated digital platform for business or should I say Facebook of business people.

As per the current stats, LinkedIn has over 740 million users around the globe with around 40% of them using it daily! That’s enough numbers to make salesman and marketing managers’ jaws drop. To top it, people with various educational and work experience backgrounds use the platform, right from students looking for an internship to CEOs and Presidents of multinational giants!

In short, sales navigator helps us reach out to prospects that fit our criteria making it easier for us to close in on the right people, at the right companies, at the right time. Also, check out the comparison chart of various sales navigator editions as per your requirement.

Setting up the sales navigator account is easy; you can reach the sales navigator page either by clicking your profile picture on the top panel where it’s written Me and then selecting the sales navigator account under the Manage section. Meanwhile, you can also click the ‘Sales Nav’ logo on the top panel on the right (see the screenshots below).

Once you reach the sales navigator page for the first time after finding answer of how to use LinkedIn sales navigator, it’ll ask your preferences like the geography you are targeting, companies you are looking for, industries that are favorable to you, etc. It will either look blank or with some feeds depending upon whether you have already set up and saved some leads or have done nothing.

The goal is to tell the sales navigator who you are, what your business is all about, and your sales preferences in a few easy steps. This short video will help you to set up your sales navigator page.

Now that your sales navigator page is set up, let’s jump into the functionalities! Right off the bat, we can see a social selling index that builds over time. As we use a sales navigator to find and save leads or accounts, engage with the right people, how well we are able to establish our brand and how well we are able to build professional relationships.

All these factors help LinkedIn give you a social selling score. Clicking on the social selling index would take you to a detailed infographic, which shows your performance related to the individual factors. It also gives you a comparison of performance with respect to your peers, industry, and your network!

Just below the social selling index, one can gather info like ‘Who’s Viewed Your Profile’. On the left side, you’ll get the option of filtering the updates based on importance, type, and top accounts. In the middle, you’ll see all the updates from your saved accounts and leads. This gives the basic gist of the information you’ll see on the homepage.

Advanced Lead Search

The most powerful feature of ‘sales nav’ is the advanced search which gives detailed filters to prune and find what we are looking for in Linkedin’s database and also the sales navigator profiles of the respective leads or accounts. As we can see in the screenshots below, we can either search for leads or accounts depending on our business requirements.

Profile filters

Let’s add the demographics of people you are targeting like geography, name, and their LinkedIn relationship (degree of connection, 1st degree being already connected).

Role & Tenure filters

Let’s filter based on the functions and experience of the person.

Company Filters

Let’s filter based on the company details of the person.

Other Filters

Let’s filter based on tags or groups of which the person may be a part.

I presented a demo search for leads in Sydney, Australia with 2nd and 3rd-degree relationships in the financial services industry having the title of CEO, Managing Director, and Founder of companies having a headcount of 50 to 1000. Hence, the search result gets narrowed down as I add more and more filters.

After adding all the filters, I click on the search button which gave me a list of 434 results that fulfill my criteria. It’s evident that the search results page in sales navigator is cleaner and informative than the normal LinkedIn search results page.

The left-hand panel will display all the filters you have currently applied along with the option to modify the filters in case you need to add or remove the certain filter(s) at any point in time. You can see there are some leads that have been marked as Saved.

This is a neat functionality of ‘sales nav’, which allows you to save various leads in a separate list for you to follow them up and track their activities. You can view your saved leads and accounts by going to the “Lists” menu on the top panel. It is important to save leads and accounts, which are suitable prospects for you. It helps the algorithm of ‘sales nav’ to give you better search results based on your sales preferences.

Since I had saved a few leads earlier, I’ll add the filter of “Exclude saved leads” which will give me the people whom I haven’t prospected yet.

As compared to a normal LinkedIn search results page, you’ll get a variety of options to interact with the person’s profile. You can save the person as lead, send a connect request directly from the results page, see the number of shared connections you have, view the sales navigator profile, and much more! Coming to the sales navigator profile, I clicked on the first prospect which directed me to his sales navigator profile.

The sales navigator profile gives all the details you need regarding the person to help you answer whether to add the person as a lead or not. On the top, we can see the basic work experience. A handy feature here is the short summary of companies in the person’s work experience if you hover your mouse over them.

You will find it available only if that particular company has a LinkedIn page, as in this case HSBC bank Australia Ltd. It not only gives you a short bio of the company but also allows you to save the company as an account for future reference!

As we scroll down, we see Highlights regarding what is common between you and the person along with the best path to get introduced. Moving down further, we see the detailed work experience of the person along with his recent activity on the right side. Another great functionality, which is a boon for lead hunters like me :D, is the “Leads similar to” section at the bottom-most part of the page

This section shows leads based on your advanced search and also your saved leads pattern. It allows you to directly go to profiles, which are more often than not, suitable for your business without going back to the search results page. You might be wondering wouldn’t be great if we could save this search result page and get timely updates on it! Well, the Sales navigator has that covered (phew).

As you can see in the left-hand panel, there is an option of “Save Search”, which allows you to save the search along with the filters. So, you won’t have to go through the tedious process again and again. What’s more, you can give a customized name to the list which will help you identify multiple saved searches later.

Advanced Account Search

Moving on to the next type of search, we have ‘Advanced Account Search’. Advanced search for accounts opens up a similar panel as in the case of advanced search for leads. Here we have the following filters:

Top Filters

Let’s add the geography and industry of the account.

Size Filter

Let’s filter companies based on headcount and other company size-related parameters.

Other Filters

Let’s add additional parameters like the technology used (technographics), job opportunities, and LinkedIn relationships.

I did a demo search for accounts in the Sydney, Australia region in the Financial Services Industry having a headcount of 51 to 1000 employees with an annual turnover of 1 million USD to 250 million USD. The search result gave me 7 accounts. Again, the search result page is similar to what we saw in the case of advanced lead search.

We have the option of saving the account, view account, view similar accounts and on the left-hand side we have the filters.

Clicking on any of the accounts opens up the sales navigator profile of that account. This profile has a summary of the company, its website, headquarters, etc. As you’ll move down the page, you’ll see recommended leads based on your sales preferences under the “People” panel. Moving further down, you’ll see your connections in the account based on various degrees.

Going to the “News and Insights” makes things interesting as here you’ll get insights regarding news related to that company and similar accounts. Another interesting functionality is the Employee count section on the right side of the page.

It shows the overall change in the company headcount along with a change in various departments as well! This is pretty handy in a B2B scenario especially for businesses offering recruitment solutions or growth strategies to other businesses.

InMails

Icebreaker functionality, InMails is direct mails inside LinkedIn. It helps you strike a conversation with your prospect even if you don’t have their email address! You can make use of the information in the news and insights section along with the feeds on the home screen.

You can send personalized InMails, which might lead you to have a value-adding conversation with your prospect ultimately converting them for sales. The number of InMail credits differs for different Sales nav editions.

Final Thoughts

So, how to use LinkedIn sales navigator? 

Well, going through this article must have piqued your interest to try out sales navigator and reach out to various leads suitable for your business. You can also watch the video down below which will help you with some other amazing features of sales nav!

Have you tried Sales nav? Do you know any other mind-blowing functionality of Sales nav? Looking for a Lead Generation expert in helping you find the right prospect? Please feel free to share your experience, suggestions, and queries down in the comment section.

Happy Prospecting!?