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How To Leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator For Account-Based Selling

Jamie Shanks
Jamie Shanks

As an Enterprise SDR in a startup environment, I sometimes have to wear multiple hats when converting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Our marketing team does a stand-up job of generating leads through content creation & our marketing automation platform.

Although I have inbound leads to follow up with, I am also responsible for generating outbound leads within key target accounts. Whether your sale professionals have the same responsibilities, or are focused entirely on outbound sales into targeted accounts, LinkedIn Sales Navigator has to be the best tool on the market for getting this job done.

How can your sales team leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Account-Based Social Selling?

SFDC Integration

When your team first registers their new Navigator account, they are automatically prompted with a notification to enable the Salesforce.com Data Sync. It literally takes two seconds, and it will identify which of your LinkedIn connections are also in your CRM. This is useful for account-based selling as you can quickly identify any existing leads within an account, and then be able to socially surround that contact and begin to engage.

Do note that the Data Sync does NOT log LinkedIn activities into your CRM, your reps will still have to do that manually or you can consider 3rd party tools like Ecquire to automate it.

Team Link

Accumulatively, your sales team may have thousands of connections across their LinkedIn Networks. If you purchase the team licence of Sales Navigator, you get a feature called ‘Team Link’ that allows your reps to identify prospects that their fellow team mates may be connected with.

For example, let’s say one of my target accounts is XYZ Inc, and I do not have any 1st degree connections with any employees there. Using Team Link, I notice that my coworker Fred is connected with Jane Doe, the VP of sales at XYZ Inc. I will leverage this insight to ask Fred to reach out directly to Jane and make an introduction for me.

Leads & Account Tabs

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

After being assigned a target list account, your sales team can automatically load each of their respective accounts directly into the Account Tab in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This provides reps with a single place to view each of their accounts, and a second Lead tab where they can view the individual leads within an account. Your reps don’t need to be 1st degree connections with a prospect to save them under the leads tab, which makes managing outreach initiatives easy to organize.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Inbox

This is actually my favorite part of the leads & account features in LinkedIn Navigator: you can filter your home feed by news mentions, updates, and shares specific to your leads or accounts. Manually engaging prospects is key to getting on their radar and proving that you have a genuine interest in them.

Lead Builder

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Builder

So your reps have identified their leads from the CRM, the ones they are directly connected with, and the ones that their team members are connected with, what about the rest?

The LinkedIn Lead Builder is a more robust version of the advanced search available to Premium users. The difference however, is that Lead Builder allows your reps to search for prospects within a company using ALL search parameters and subcategories. It allows you check off all desired filters within your query, so you don’t even need to use Boolean Search.

Let’s say you’re looking to identify the senior leadership team within an organization, simply go into the Lead Builder and apply all necessary search filters, and PRESTO – your leads are granted. From there, you can save all of those leads directly into Navigator and access them via the Leads or Accounts tabs for easy access.

The Bottom Line

Although LinkedIn is not the only consideration necessary for an effective social selling program, with the right training and support, Sales Navigator sure is a fantastic tool that will enable your sales professionals to grow pipeline and sell into targeted accounts.

Know of any other tips for using LinkedIn Navigator to uncover sales opportunities? Feel free to share them with me on Twitter @TheNealeDeal.

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