What would life look like for salespeople without Linkedin’s Sales Navigator? It’s hard to imagine. Sales Navigator brings a lot of value for prospecting purposes, lead list building, research, etc. as it facilitates the process of finding new leads, making connections, and driving conversions.
I always have the feeling that we are not using even half of the capabilities of this database. This is because the search criteria are still a bit limited and subsequently the results are not always accurate.
Nevertheless, sometimes when you experiment with the Sales Navigator’s filters and you are thinking outside of the box you may discover useful tricks & tips that you cannot keep to yourself. Hopefully, one of them will be useful for your own prospecting issues and can give you an alternative perspective.
The 4 Sales Navigator Hacks
1. Custom lists – track people you have done business with in the past
As a consultative salesperson, one of your main job tasks is to build relationships over time, across different businesses. The personal aspect is essential in doing successful sales. You build rapport, work on developing a trustworthy relationship, and then sell your services. By following this process it is 6 times easier to sell to these customers.
So, why not benefit from these relationships?
A powerful tactic is to add each person that you collaborated with in the past to a custom list. This list can be also integrated into Sales Navigator.
In this way, you take the advantage of keeping track of their career path. Thus, a previous customer’s job-related change can eventually lead to new opportunities automatically. Having built interpersonal relationships with customers can help you to approach them, in a completely different manner; more easily and more effectively.
Thus, having a list of all of these customers can make your life easier as you can track their movement. If you want, you can also receive notifications for any change, such as a prospect’s job change or location. This brought me a lot in the past.
2. Custom lists – creating a list with ex-employees from current customers
Another effective tactic is to connect with people who already know your company or even better have experienced your services.
For instance, for one of our clients, we added all of their customers in a search, we deliberately selected the criteria; “worked at this company in the past” and then we added the specific function titles we were looking for.
In this way, we created a list with personas that were matching the function titles we were searching for and at the same time knew the company’s services.
This knowledge can be used as a good reason to reach out; it is beneficial if the people you contact were working for this company and even more powerful if they have experienced the company’s services.
3. Language limitation
Slightly different use cases in this third tip. In Sales Navigator, there is not an option to filter based on speaking language. The majority of people’s profiles are in English and less in individuals’ native language. For instance, the fact that someone’s profile is in English doesn’t prove his/her country of residence or place of birth; it is just a setting on the profile settings.
But what happens if, for example, you are searching for people from the United States that live in the Netherlands? Maybe because of recruiting purposes.
In this case, an effective tactic could be to select the biggest universities in the United States and the Netherlands as the region and then add the function titles you are searching for. In this way, you can get a list with almost only people coming originally from the United States. Of course, there is a possibility to be included exchange students or people who studied in the US and returned, but you can exclude them easily.
4. Exclusion
An important step when you start creating your lead lists is to exclude certain accounts, prospects, but also current clients. For many companies, this can be a difficult and time-consuming task because they have a huge amount of clients.
Nevertheless, Sales Navigator has a handy feature that allows you to directly upload your own excel list to exclude from searches at once. Trust me, it saves a lot of manual labour.