Financial services professionals like you have two major tasks in growing your practice - retain existing clients, and convert prospects to new clients. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a fantastic tool for both of these objectives, by giving you news & insights on each group. Once you've built your system, Sales Navigator will deliver you information about your clients and prospects on-demand to help ensure you're following up at the right time. This tutorial will focus on three aspects of using Sales Navigator: your mindset, how to build your system, and what activities to track as you use the tool.
How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a tool for growing your business - your mindset
Let's begin with the association in your mind regarding Sales Navigator, and we'll start with differentiating it from "regular" LinkedIn. Take a look at a screenshot from LinkedIn -
The goal of these activities in this post is to build two key behaviors:
1 - Create an association in your mind with LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a prospecting and communication tool. This is not normal “open & scroll to find interesting stuff” LinkedIn built for everyone. This platform is built to help you sell.
2 - Give a roadmap of what to do each business day with the platform.
High-Level Steps:
1 – Establish target accounts (companies/organizations in the parlance of LinkedIn).
2 – Identify buyers and save leads based on the target accounts or existing client pipelines.
3 – Engage with insights through alerts and email notifications.
In-Depth Steps:
1 – Create an account list to garner news about an organization itself as well as the key people who work there. Once the account list is established, alerts will fill the feed with salient information (hires, promotions, company-specific business news). This information can be used to help facilitate formative conversations with those who work for an organization. Instead of a salesperson needing to browse the web and social media for important happenings, LinkedIn supplies it, saving a huge amount of time.
2 – Create a lead list based on various sets of criteria. As an example, one lead list could be all the employees of a targeted account from whom you would like to get rollover business. Any job changes or other precipitating events will be delivered to you, giving you a competitive advantage. Lead lists should also consist of existing clients and prospects (as separate lists) to give you client/prospect insight into their professional lives. This will form better conversations based on lead intelligence.
3 – Based on insights and email notifications, you can easily deduce whom to contact when. The Sales Navigator messaging system is mutually exclusive of the “normal” LinkedIn message inbox and can be used purely for sales-related activity. The messaging system can be used to start/continue conversations, send approved PDFs, and invite individual to events like seminars.
Daily activities – 30 minutes estimate
1 – Check Sales Navigator Inbox for replies to messages sent.
2 – Send messages to targeted leads with seminar invitations, offers of PDFs to help educate, congratulate on a company accomplishment or personal accomplishment, or dozens of other options. Instead of - or in addition to - email, these messaging activities will advance the know/like/trust sales cycle with prospective clients.
3 – Add any new contacts as leads in the Sales Navigator system. If a personal relationship has already been established (i.e. phone call, in-person visit, email), also send connection request.
4 – Comment on posts from those in one’s lead list.
5 – Send connection requests with proper context (e.g. “I commented on your post about x and would love to follow what you’re doing here on LinkedIn”) to grow your network.