Did you know that an advert on LinkedIn can reach 4.6% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion, and six peo­ple are hired through the plat­form every minute?

Giv­en these astound­ing usage sta­tis­tics, it’s no won­der that LinkedIn is one of the hottest plat­forms for busi­ness­es to show off their brands and engage with poten­tial clients, cus­tomers, and hires.

Cold calls and tra­di­tion­al prospect­ing meth­ods are no longer effec­tive for the mod­ern sales­per­son. They face issues such as inac­ces­si­ble deci­sion mak­ers and unre­li­able CRM (cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment) data.
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Whether busi­ness­es want to adver­tise their ser­vices to cus­tomers or clients, recruit new staff and con­trac­tors, engage with indus­try fig­ures, get involved in indus­try-spe­cif­ic news, or pro­duce Thought Lead­er­ship con­tent, they can achieve it with LinkedIn.

For those busi­ness­es using LinkedIn to gen­er­ate leads and sales, they’ll like­ly want to make use of Linked­In’s busi­ness fea­tures: Ads and Sales Nav­i­ga­tor. These fea­tures can be com­pli­cat­ed for first-time users, so we’ll explain how you can use them in this article.

First, let’s dive into what these fea­tures are and what ben­e­fits they can offer your business.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Nav­i­ga­tor is a sales man­age­ment tool that helps busi­ness­es and indi­vid­u­als improve their sales efforts. By help­ing you tar­get the right leads, pro­vid­ing shrewd audi­ence insights, and per­son­al­is­ing your out­reach process­es, Sales Nav­i­ga­tor can be an extreme­ly valu­able sales tool.

The fea­tures pro­vid­ed mean com­pa­nies can:

• con­duct more pre­cise lead targeting
• auto­mate lead gen­er­a­tion processes
• import data from Sales Nav­i­ga­tor into a CRM
• expand reach by access­ing full pro­files out­side their networks
• receive high-qual­i­ty insights about their tar­get audience

Ulti­mate­ly, LinkedIn users choose to work with Sales Nav­i­ga­tor as it can help increase sales and gen­er­ate leads. Avail­able for indi­vid­u­als and teams, it’s help­ful for any sales pro­fes­sion­als want­i­ng to lev­el up their performance.

The fea­tures acces­si­ble to you will depend on the price plan you choose. Choose from Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus plans. The table below goes into more detail about each plan’s features:

Whichev­er plan you choose, your sales efforts will see a big return on invest­ment. Want to learn how to use LinkedIn Sales Nav­i­ga­tor 2022? We’ll give you the run down in this article.

First­ly, let’s exam­ine Linked­In’s oth­er valu­able mar­ket­ing tool:

About LinkedIn Advertising

As a pro­fes­sion­al social media plat­form, LinkedIn is best for B2B brands. With 830 mil­lion mem­bers, these brands can access busi­ness­es and pro­fes­sion­als from all over the globe. LinkedIn makes it eas­i­er for brands to reach a pro­fes­sion­al audi­ence, and busi­ness­es have eas­i­er access to deci­sion-mak­ers with­in oth­er companies.

With LinkedIn Adver­tis­ing, busi­ness­es can choose from sev­er­al ad for­mats, includ­ing:

• Text ads
• Carousel ads
• Video ads
• Dis­play ads
• Dynam­ic ads
• Spon­sored Content
• Spon­sored InMail

There are sev­er­al main stages of adver­tis­ing on LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn Cam­paign Man­ag­er, you:

1) select a goal (con­ver­sions, aware­ness, or consideration)
2) choose tar­get­ing cri­te­ria (more on that below)
3) pick a for­mat for your advert (from the above list)
4) choose the ad’s place­ment
5) set a sched­ule and budget
6) cre­ate the advert
7) turn on con­ver­sion track­ing (option­al)
8) mon­i­tor your advert’s per­for­mance

The main rea­son busi­ness­es use LinkedIn Adver­tis­ing is to gen­er­ate high­er qual­i­ty leads. Since LinkedIn users are pro­fes­sion­als, they’re much more like­ly to seek pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices than the entire Google user­base. There­fore, leads gen­er­at­ed on LinkedIn are much more like­ly to be high­ly inter­est­ed in com­pa­ny con­tent and adverts.

Busi­ness­es can also tar­get more accu­rate­ly using LinkedIn Adver­tis­ing tar­get­ing variables:

• Skills
• Indus­try
• Com­pa­ny Name
• Com­pa­ny Size
• Job Title
• Degree Type
• Senior­i­ty

These tar­get­ing options mean brands can get their adverts on the screens of com­pa­ny deci­sion mak­ers – those who are much more able to select prospec­tive can­di­dates for what­ev­er pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices are required. LinkedIn actu­al­ly has more than 20 audi­ence attrib­ut­es to choose from when select­ing tar­get­ing factors.

Anoth­er rea­son why busi­ness­es choose to use LinkedIn Adver­tis­ing is due to its retar­get­ing meth­ods. The plat­form has sev­er­al meth­ods for this, includ­ing Account Retar­get­ing, Web­site Retar­get­ing, Con­tact Retar­get­ing, and Looka­like Audiences.

Should you use both LinkedIn Ads and Sales Navigator?

Using both of these tools will no doubt lev­el up your mar­ket­ing efforts. Whilst Ads cov­ers the actu­al adverts placed on LinkedIn user pages; Sales Nav­i­ga­tor allows you to look behind the scenes.

For B2B com­pa­nies, LinkedIn is undoubt­ed­ly the best social net­work­ing plat­form to post con­tent, con­duct out­reach, and adver­tise ser­vices. There­fore, opti­mis­ing mar­ket­ing and sales efforts using LinkedIn Ads and Sales Nav­i­ga­tor is your best bet.

To show you how you can best use Sales Nav­i­ga­tor, we’ve gone through some tips and tricks below:

How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to generate leads

It does­n’t mat­ter what indus­try you’re in; if you learn how to use LinkedIn Sales Nav­i­ga­tor in your cam­paigns, you can com­pile a list of thou­sands of high-tick­et leads. It’s also sur­pris­ing­ly easy to land in the inbox­es of deci­sion mak­ers from even the largest com­pa­nies. So, let’s dive in:

First­ly, you’ll need an opti­mised pro­file to max­imise the like­li­hood of get­ting respons­es to your out­reach. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Look pro­fes­sion­al and con­fi­dent in your pro­file picture.
• Your tagline could just list where you work, but it’s bet­ter for out­reach if this sec­tion calls out to your desired leads. For instance, if you worked for an ad agency that worked for jew­ellery com­pa­nies, your tagline could say, “I help jew­ellery brands reach their tar­get con­sumers through Paid Ads”.
• Your About sec­tion should echo the same sen­ti­ment as your tagline but go into more detail about your credentials.
• Your job his­to­ry and edu­ca­tion should be detailed and up to date. Above all, it should be most rel­e­vant to your cur­rent aims. For exam­ple, jew­ellery com­pa­nies don’t need to know that you worked as a bar­tender whilst at university.
• Have peo­ple endorse your skills sec­tion to back up what you’ve said in your About section.

Now you’ve opti­mised your pro­file, let’s get into gen­er­at­ing leads on Sales Nav­i­ga­tor:

Finding leads with Keywords

Use the search bar to search for leads and keep your search term sim­ple. For instance, if your adver­tis­ing agency want­ed to reach out to jew­ellery com­pa­nies, you’d use “jew­ellery” as the search term.

You might find with this tech­nique that unde­sir­able leads appear. For exam­ple, you might be see­ing a lot of hand­made jew­ellery brands even though hand­made jew­ellery isn’t your speciality.

In this case, you can cre­ate your own fil­ter with­in the search bar. Using the “AND/OR/NOT” (or Boolean) fil­ter, you can pre­vent search results from show­ing you irrel­e­vant leads. This trick means you can access prospec­tive leads quick­er and are more like­ly to reach the high-qual­i­ty ones.

To action this, you’d type:

(“jew­ellery” NOT “hand­made”)

This method can be applied to all kinds of leads. It can real­ly speed up your lead dis­cov­ery process, which can often be made length­i­er by less accu­rate search results.

Finding leads with Filters

Alter­na­tive­ly, you can go onto Lead Fil­ters and use whichev­er fil­ters are rel­e­vant to the leads you’re look­ing for. It might be Geog­ra­phy, Lan­guage, Senior­i­ty, or many oth­ers, but these fil­ters can take you to exact­ly who you’re look­ing for.

You’d still type a key­word but improve the search by using fil­ters. Here are some poten­tial fil­ters you could choose and how they’d relate to dif­fer­ent businesses:

Geog­ra­phy – this fil­ter is like­ly to be high­ly impor­tant if you’re tar­get­ing a spe­cif­ic geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion. For instance, you’d select “Lon­don” if you were adver­tis­ing a Lon­don-based cock­tail-mak­ing workshop.

Lan­guage – if your com­pa­ny can only do busi­ness with oth­er Eng­lish-speak­ing peo­ple, you must set this fil­ter to Eng­lish. Oth­er­wise, you could end up with a list of French busi­ness­peo­ple who’d be no use to you as leads.

Senior­i­ty lev­el – to reach out to the deci­sion mak­ers with­in com­pa­nies, you’ll want to set this fil­ter to Own­er, Direc­tor, or CEO. Just remem­ber that busi­ness own­ers will use dif­fer­ent terms to describe them­selves, so make sure you include a vari­ety of high-lev­el posi­tions to reach them all.

Job title – you could use this fil­ter instead of senior­i­ty lev­el and type some­thing like Man­ag­ing Direc­tor. This ensures you catch all the big play­ers and deci­sion mak­ers despite the var­ied titles and lev­els they may put in their profiles.

Com­pa­ny head­count – any small busi­ness such as an adver­tis­ing agency will want to work with small­er com­pa­nies intial­ly. This fil­ter can help you find those small busi­ness­es you’re look­ing for.

Once you spot the leads that are most applic­a­ble to your cam­paign, save them and cre­ate a lead list. You can access this at a lat­er date.

What to do with your leads:

Your next step should be to reach out. Send a con­nec­tion request and a mes­sage with your pitch.

Thanks to InMail cred­its, you can bypass the need to be “con­nect­ed” with some­one on LinkedIn. How­ev­er, being con­nect­ed can’t hurt your lead nur­tur­ing efforts down the line.

Your mes­sage should be cre­ative, short, per­son­alised, and NOT salesy. Here at pur­ple­plan­et, we know the val­ue of per­son­al­i­sa­tion in out­reach and can­not stress its impor­tance enough. The days of cold call­ing are gone, and mod­ern-day out­reach must be adapt­ed to indi­vid­u­als and busi­ness­es for it to stand out from the crowd. Try doing a lit­tle research to fig­ure out what your per­son­alised mes­sage will be.

If you realise that they don’t have a long-form con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy, and that’s some­thing you can offer, it shows you’ve done your research, and you’re not just an auto­mat­ed sales bot.

How best to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Aside from the above steps in iden­ti­fy­ing high-qual­i­ty leads, the fol­low­ing are some top tips for using Sales Nav­i­ga­tor. Here are some things you might not have known you could do with the tool:

• Set up alerts on your Saved Leads

Know­ing when your leads are active means you can be savvy with your time with­out miss­ing out on opportunities.

• Check that your con­tent is reach­ing the right people

With Sales Nav­i­ga­tor, you can see every­one who’s checked out your pro­file in the last 90 days. By look­ing at their pro­file infor­ma­tion, you can mon­i­tor the demo­graph­ic your con­tent is reaching.

• Use rec­om­men­da­tions to reach the Buy­er’s Circle

With LinkedIn Lead & Account rec­om­men­da­tions, you can see sim­i­lar leads to those you’ve already saved. If you reach the Buy­er’s Cir­cle (i.e., the group of deci­sion-mak­ers in a sin­gle com­pa­ny who can com­plete the sale), you’re much more like­ly to see success.

• Iden­ti­fy who’s active

Sales Nav­i­ga­tor allows you to fil­ter search­es by who’s active­ly shar­ing con­tent on LinkedIn and engag­ing with posts. This infor­ma­tion can be extreme­ly help­ful in nar­row­ing down the best leads to reach out to, as it lets you know who’s like­ly to see your messages.

• Use lists to sim­pli­fy your feed

Reg­u­lar social media feeds (includ­ing LinkedIn) can become over­run with every­one you’re con­nect­ed with. By using Saved Leads lists, you can keep tabs on the most sig­nif­i­cant leads with­out los­ing them in the rest of your feed. Whether they’re com­peti­tors, cus­tomers, or prospec­tive hires, lists mean you can tar­get your time towards those more impor­tant leads.

Improving Customer Relationship Management

CRM is all about man­ag­ing and analysing cus­tomer inter­ac­tions through­out all stages of the cus­tomer life­cy­cle. The aims of CRM include improv­ing cus­tomer reten­tion and cus­tomer ser­vice, as well as increas­ing sales.

As your sales team like­ly already does, CRM involves col­lect­ing data from cus­tomers at dif­fer­ent points in their life­cy­cle: at dif­fer­ent points in the sales fun­nel, as well as through the dif­fer­ent medi­ums they con­nect with the com­pa­ny (email, web­site, live chat, social net­work­ing platforms).

All this data is stored in CRM soft­ware, which can be inte­grat­ed with LinkedIn Sales Nav­i­ga­tor. Both tools are pow­er­ful indi­vid­u­al­ly but can bring great val­ue when com­bined. LinkedIn claims that CRM inte­gra­tions mean teams save up to 30 min­utes per day and stay on top of new lead opportunities.

Since accounts and con­tacts on either end can be sent to the oth­er, all your lead gen­er­a­tion data can be found in one place. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this inte­gra­tion is only includ­ed if the CRM soft­ware you use is Sales­force or Microsoft Dynam­ics 365. If you want to inte­grate any oth­er CRM soft­ware, you’ll incur a fee.

Nev­er­the­less, this inte­gra­tion is def­i­nite­ly a perk of the tool and can improve organ­i­sa­tion and CRM processes.

Should you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

There’s a rea­son LinkedIn busi­ness prod­ucts come under their Pre­mi­um range – they’re pre­mi­um products!

If you’re won­der­ing whether Sales Nav­i­ga­tor is worth invest­ing in, you must remem­ber that the tool is only as good as those who wield it. There­fore, busi­ness own­ers must train their staff to use the tool to their full advantage.

Though vital, the steps out­lined in this arti­cle can only get you so far. Your busi­ness’s spe­cif­ic sales require­ments will be the dri­ving fac­tor in how you use Sales Navigator.

If you can unlock a LinkedIn sales strat­e­gy that deliv­ers results for your busi­ness, you’ll be well on your way to an auto­mat­ed lead gen­er­a­tion funnel.

Since Sales Nav­i­ga­tor offers so much more than a reg­u­lar LinkedIn account, we can’t help but rec­om­mend it.