LinkedIn Sales Navigator For Dummies

Perry van Beek

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119427766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Development
• Index: Business

Make selling a social affair!

The ABCs of sales have changed. It's no longer: A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. The new way of selling is: A-Always, B-Be, C-Contributing to your buyer's journey. Social selling is an effective way to engage with your customer, and the world's most powerful social selling tool for any B2B sales professional is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It allows you to gain access to more leads, more InMail, and data to track your efforts.

With the help of LinkedIn Sales Navigator For Dummies, you'll learn how to write effective InMail messages and engage with prospects on the world's most successful professional networking site. Along with utilizing those features, you'll also benefit from access to full profiles outside of your network, guidance on how to best optimize your own profile for sales opportunities, and much more.

• Use lead recommendations to get in front of the right buyer
• Analyze your social selling efforts with real-time data
• Reach more leads with customized InMail messages
• Save 30 - 60 minutes a day previously spent on acquisitions

If you're a B2B sales professional who is new to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, this is the one-stop resource you can't be without.

Part 1

Getting Ready to Generate Leads

IN THIS PART …

Learning the formula for success in social selling

Understanding the “four pillars of social setting” according to LinkedIn

Deciding which Sales Navigator plan is right for you

Using TeamLink for expanding your network exponentially

Planning your roadmap for success in social selling

Chapter 1

Selling Is a Social Business

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining social selling

Discussing the ins and outs of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Activating your account

Identifying the important features

Social media has been around for over a decade, and social media marketing isn’t that much younger. It’s only been in the past five years or so that sales professionals have really harnessed the power of social media to connect with prospects and close the deal.

In this chapter, I discuss what social selling is and what goes into a successful social-selling endeavor. I also introduce you to a powerful tool, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and tell you about two of its especially robust features — the Social Selling Index and TeamLink — that will help you take your social selling to the next level.

Defining Social Selling

What is social selling exactly? It’s pretty much just what the name sounds like — utilizing online social channels for selling purposes. Sales professionals interact with prospective customers through social media by answering questions and providing helpful content in order to move the potential customer through the sales funnel.

When it comes to having a successful social-selling strategy in your organization, you need to know right from the start that social selling is about both outbound prospecting and inbound marketing:

• Outbound prospecting: involves gathering intelligence and learning as much as possible about your customer base.
• Inbound marketing: is the process of building a pipeline of leads by providing content, such as in the form of newsletters, blogs, and postings on social media platforms.

Most sales teams are already using tools like LinkedIn and Twitter to learn about their customer bases. It’s the process of building an inbound marketing system, however, that’s the hard part. That’s because the process of discovering, curating, and sharing content can take significant time from someone’s day. This is why LinkedIn Sales Navigator is such a game changer. It gives you the ability to do both outbound prospecting and inbound marketing all on one platform.

Looking at the Four Pillars of Social Selling

According to LinkedIn, social selling involves taking a four-pronged approach that it dubbed the “four pillars of social selling.” These four pillars are defined as follows:

• Create a professional brand. Having a strong professional brand shows prospects that your company is active in all areas of the industry. Customers only do business with brands they trust.
• Focus on the right prospects. LinkedIn states that over 76 percent of buyers are open to having a conversation with a sales professional via social media. Sales Navigator helps you identify the right decision-maker with whom to have this conversation through the use of filters and advanced search functions.
• Engage with insights. Position yourself as a subject matter expert and thought leader by sharing helpful industry news as well as commenting on posts made by others. This helps salespeople remain in potential clients’ minds.
• Build trusted relationships. Establish a rapport with prospects by identifying a common ground. Provide relevant content that addresses their pain points as opposed to some generic sales materials that try to cover every feature of your product.

Collecting, Connecting, Converting: The Formula for Success

Collecting, connecting, and converting are often called the “three C’s of online sales” (see Figure 1-1). However, they are the key ingredients to the recipe of any type of sales, not just the online variety. If you were speaking with someone who knew nothing at all about sales, and you say that all it comes down to are those three words, they’d know exactly what to do to make a sale (in theory, of course). Here’s a refresher to set the stage:

• Collecting: This is how a business gathers its intel about contacts and leads. The methodology used differs depending on the organization and where the potential customer is in the buying cycle, but collecting generally includes things like capturing email addresses via landing pages, webinar sign-ups, and opt-in forms. It’s best to try out different collection methods to ensure you’re using the best one for your needs.
• Connecting: Here’s where an organization makes the first contact with the prospective customer, be it through automated response email or other personalized follow-up sequences. It’s important that the connection method used is specific to the recipient. It must speak to the buyer’s needs at the precise time and location in the buyer’s journey to bring the recipient closer to the sale. (Chapter 3 is dedicated to the buyer’s journey.)
• Converting: Now we get to enjoy the fruits of our labors. Converting is when the potential customer becomes an actual customer, or at least becomes a well-qualified lead. The point is that the customer took a direct step further along the buyer’s journey, be it scheduling a demo or making an actual purchase.

FIGURE 1-1: The three C’s of online sales.

The three C’s may seem overwhelming or maybe even like a waste of time. You may even be tempted to skip a step or two. But never fear! LinkedIn created a helpful, robust sales tool that helps professionals move through those stages (hopefully) without a hitch. It’s what we all came here for. It’s LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and it’s time we jumped right into it!

Exploring the Sales Navigator Plans

As of this writing, LinkedIn offers everyone a free month to try LinkedIn Sales Navigator. After that, LinkedIn offers three Sales Navigator plans: Professional, Team, and Enterprise. Each plan comes with specific benefits:

• Professional: $79.99 per month (billed monthly) or $779.88 per year (which breaks down to $64.99 per month) when you buy an annual subscription. This account includes the following features:
  • 20 InMail messages per month
  • 1,500 saved leads
  • Who’s viewed your profile
  • Extended LinkedIn network access
  • Advanced lead and company search
  • Lead and account recommendations
  • Territory preferences
  • Job change alerts
  • Prospect and company news alerts
  • Sales Navigator for Gmail
  • Notes and tags
  • Learning center
  • Sales Navigator Mobile App
• Team: $129.99 per month (billed monthly) or $1,199.88 per year (which breaks down to $99.99 per month) when you buy an annual subscription. This account includes everything in the Professional-level plan plus the following features (the benefits marked with double asterisks [^**] are only available for accounts with ten or more team members):
  • Search includes people who follow your company page
  • 10 additional InMail messages per month
  • 3,500 additional saved leads (5,000 total)
  • 10 PointDrive presentations per month
  • Team network warm introductions with TeamLink Extend
  • CRM (customer relationship management) integrations
  • 25 out-of-network unlocks per month
  • Basic seat management
  • Usage reporting
  • Volume and multi-year discounts^**
  • Invoicing**
  • A dedicated relationship manager^**
• Enterprise: Pricing depends on the needs of your organization so you must call for specific pricing information. This account includes everything in the Professional- and Team-level plans in addition to the following features:
  • 20 additional InMail messages per month
  • 5,000 additional saved leads (10,000 total)
  • Unlimited PointDrive presentations per month
  • Company network warm introductions with TeamLink Extend
  • Single sign-on integrations
  • Enterprise-grade seat management

Activating Your Sales ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Getting Ready to Generate Leads
• Part 2: Building a Database of Leads
• Part 3: Engaging with Leads
• Part 4: Turning Leads into Valuable Relationships
• Part 5: The Part of Tens
• About the Author
• Advertisement Page
• Connect with Dummies
• Index
• End User License Agreement