LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful sales tool that provides companies with valuable insights into their target accounts and prospective leads. With Sales Navigator, companies can see detailed profiles of decision-makers, identify connections to warm introductions, and surface timely news and updates to prepare for outreach. Here’s an overview of the key capabilities companies get with a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription:
Deeper Profiles and Insights on Leads and Accounts
One of the most valuable features of Sales Navigator is the ability to access enriched lead and account profiles. Rather than basic contact info, Sales Navigator profiles include the following helpful details:
- Current job title and role
- Work history and experience
- Skills and expertise
- Education history
- Board memberships and affiliations
- Work anniversaries and birthdays
For account profiles, Sales Navigator provides firmographic details including company size, industry, revenue, and more. This level of insight helps sales teams thoroughly research prospects before reaching out and personalize messaging based on background and priorities.
Lead Recommendations
Another way Sales Navigator supports sales prospecting is through its lead recommendations. The tool suggests new prospects based on saved searches and profiles of your ideal customer. You can filter recommendations by criteria like seniority, function, industry, location, and company size. This makes it easy to identify high-potential targets that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP).
News Alerts and Trigger Events
Sales Navigator helps sales teams stay on top of timely news and events within their accounts. You can set alerts to receive real-time notifications when target accounts experience trigger events like leadership changes, expansions, new funding rounds, acquisitions, and more. This news empowers sales reps to reach out at the right time with relevant messaging when accounts are most open to connecting.
Identification of Warm Connections
Making cold calls and sending unsolicited emails to prospects has a very low success rate. Sales Navigator enables teams to identify 2nd and 3rd degree connections into their target accounts, setting up the opportunity for warm introductions. This increases response rates dramatically compared to cold outreach.
You can leverage the TeamLink feature to uncover all shared connections across your company to accounts you want to penetrate. Starting with a warm introduction through a existing relationship cuts through the noise and gets the sales conversation started on the right foot.
One-Click Email and InMail
Once you’ve identified prospects and connections, Sales Navigator makes it easy to execute outreach at scale. With one click, you can email prospects through the tool or send InMail messages to start conversations. Response tracking allows you to see open and reply rates to optimize your approach over time.
Saved Lead Lists and Custom Tags
As your prospect database grows, it becomes essential to stay organized. Sales Navigator enables you to create saved lead lists so you can group prospects based on common criteria. You can also apply custom tags to leads and accounts to segment your data based on attributes like lead source, product interest, deal size, or any other labels that help your team.
CRM and Marketing Automation Integrations
While Sales Navigator provides robust prospecting capabilities, it’s designed to complement your tech stack, not replace it. You can integrate Sales Navigator with leading CRM and marketing automation platforms like Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, and others. This allows you to sync LinkedIn lead data with these systems to avoid manual entry and keep everything up to date automatically.
Sync Contacts and Accounts
Connecting Sales Navigator with your CRM at the API level enables every LinkedIn account or contact to sync directly into your CRM. This ensures all prospect data flows seamlessly between the systems without manual exporting or updating from a CSV.
Trigger Actions and Workflows
When integrated with marketing automation tools like Marketo and Eloqua, Sales Navigator can trigger workflows and campaigns based on account and contact activity. For example, you can set up an automation so that any contact who views your LinkedIn profile gets added to a targeted nurture campaign. Or if an account meets certain firmographic criteria, you can trigger a sales alert.
Analytics and Reporting
Sales Navigator provides several options to analyze performance and showcase the value of the tool through hard data. Here are some of the key analytics and reporting features:
Report Type | Details |
---|---|
Individual User Reports | View number of profile views, InMail acceptance rate, search saves, and lead recommendations per user |
Team Reports | Rollup dashboard showing usage and prospecting KPIs across all users |
Account Insights | Details on current employees, job changes, skills, and similarities compared to ideal customer base |
Lead Recommendation Reports | Analyze the volume and quality of AI-suggested prospects compared to manual searches |
These reports help managers understand which reps are leveraging the tool most effectively and where additional training may be needed. Leadership can also monitor metrics like InMail acceptance rate and profile views to continually refine prospecting workflows.
Custom Reports
In addition to out-of-the-box reports, Sales Navigator enables you to build custom reports to track metrics like:
- Number of shared connections into target accounts
- Qualified leads generated
- Sales cycle velocity
- Win rates for leads from LinkedIn compared to other sources
These custom reports allow you to dig deeper into the areas most relevant to your business and tie LinkedIn prospecting activity to downstream pipeline and revenue.
Conclusion
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides a powerful prospecting engine for businesses looking to identify, research, and connect with their ideal buyers. Robust profile data, lead recommendations, timely news alerts, warm introductions, and workflow integrations enable sales teams to target the right people, at the right companies, with the right message to drive sales pipeline.
With actionable analytics and reporting, sales leaders can also demonstrate the return from Sales Navigator and continually refine how reps are leveraging the tool. If your sales team is looking to increase productivity and slash time spent on manual prospecting, a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription is worth exploring.