How to use Linkedin Sales Navigator

Linkedin Sales Navigator is a gold mine for prospecting, if you know how to use it effectively. Businesses and professionals freely share data on LinkedIn, making it a great tool for prospecting. 

Here are some of Sales Navigator's key benefits that will help you find prospects on LinkedIn, even if it may seem complicated at first.

Get comfortable with Boolean operators

You can find prospects with Sales Navigator's powerful search function. However, you'll also get a lot of irrelevant results—perhaps junior positions, assistants, etc. The titles of people are often phrased differently, so it can take a few searches for different titles to find all your prospects. 

If you use Boolean operators, you can get more relevant results. Although it sounds complicated, it's simply adding some keywords such as AND, OR, and NOT to your search to refine it. For LinkedIn, AND doesn’t change the results (which are returned by default for all of your search terms), but OR and NOT can change a great deal.

• OR - Use it to find alternative titles, e.g. Director OR Manager
• NOT - Use it to get rid of irrelevant results, e.g. Director NOT Assistant

You can combine multiple operators in the same search once you get used to boolean operators. Finance (Director OR Manager) NOT (Junior OR Assistant)... and so on. By using quotation marks to search for exact terms and parenthesis to combine terms, you can get really specific: Finance (Director OR Manager) NOT (Junior OR Assistant). 

From a single search, you can build an entire prospect list. 

When prospecting, gain more insight

In Sales Navigator, you can learn a lot more about companies, and you can access those insights as soon as you sign in. Depending on your saved leads and accounts, your home page can be customized to show you specific insights and updates. Besides notifying you of job changes and news, it can also suggest leads based on your criteria.

Getting more information directly from a company's page is also possible. For instance, you can see what kind of growth a company is experiencing in terms of headcount. 

Your Sales Navigator leads list can then be populated with potential prospects based on those insights.

Improve sales with CRM integration

With Sales Navigator integrated with your CRM, you can save time copying and pasting information between different apps. By sharing information automatically, you save time copying and pasting. In addition, you can be confident that you always have the right information at hand, wherever you are. 

The integration of Sales Navigator with your CRM allows a two-way flow of data; all the information you uncover in Sales Navigator can be imported into your CRM, and vice versa. 

Now that you have all that information readily available, you can track how leads progress through your funnel and see which prospecting efforts work best.

Sales Navigator can be used as a widget within your CRM, or as just a way to sync all your important company information.

In the current version of Sales Navigator, the following CRMs are integrated:

• HubSpot
• Infor
• Oracle CX Sales
• Microsoft Dynamics
• Pega
• Salesforce
• SAP
• SugarCRM
• Zoho

Get better leads by filtering your results

You can further refine your research results by using Sales Navigator's advanced filters in addition to the search terms you use. You can, for example, look for prospects who are well-established in their field and have been there for at least a year, or those who have recently switched jobs. LinkedIn allows you to search by seniority level and target decision-makers, or for LinkedIn users who have recently posted.

In addition, you can choose not to display previously contacted leads in your results. This will save you time (and perhaps embarrassment). 

Once your search has been fine-tuned and perfected, save it. You won't have to rewrite your search every time, and you'll receive alerts when new matches appear. 

Prospects can be enhanced

With Sales Navigator, you can get quite a bit of information about your leads. However, by enriching your data, you can provide even more information. 

You can enrich your contacts using LeadIQ, ZoomInfo, and Lusha, and there are plenty of options out there. When you use these lead generation tools, you will scour the internet and scrape data for your new leads, filling in the gaps in your knowledge so that you can impress them with your pitch. 

Conclusion

There are a lot of great features in Sales Navigator, but you don't have to be a certified expert to use it. 

You can build a list of highly qualified leads perfect for your company by using search and filter functions to find the best leads, looking for actionable insights on companies, and acting on enriched data.