Why Sales Navigator should drive your sales lead campaign
Why Sales Navigator should drive your sales lead campaign
LinkedIn is increasingly becoming the social media tool of preference for businesses looking to connect with potential customers and generate sales leads. As an element of a communications strategy, we find LinkedIn an excellent method of helping our clients to build trust with their customers and generate interest in their products and services from new prospects.
LinkedIn paid-for platforms including InMail and Sponsored posts and whilst both are excellent at getting your message to a wider audience, we find that Sales Navigator has the edge in terms of sales lead generation. When Navigator is used as part of an overall PR strategy it is a very cost-effective method of generates sales leads.
How does Sales Navigator help me grow sales?
We are guiding more of our clients to using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to generate sales leads. it is a powerful tool that helps our clients access LinkedIn’s 560M+ member network. Fundamentally, Sales Navigator supports your sales teams in building relationships with prospects and customers through LinkedIn’s professional, on line platform.’
When we integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator into our clients’ PR and social media strategy we can start targeting specific groups of customers. With our construction sector clients, for example, it could be selecting architects involved who are members of RIBA and who work in a specific market vertical, such as housebuilding or education.
We’d begin by searching for ‘Architects’ in the Sales navigator search bar. This will generate thousands of architects in the UK, or even more if you do a worldwide search. Each one of these has the word ‘Architect’ on their profile. At this stage, we will search more specifically, identifying architects that fit our clients’ search criteria or their products and services. For instance, it could be architects that use BIM Revit model because that is the platform our client uses. We can then refine this further by adding in company size, location, specialism, such as architects in education or healthcare. This will create a much more targeted search result.
This can be refined further by targeting specific job roles. For example, it is often the Architectural Technician that specifies products rather than the lead architect, so from our clients’ point of view, these are the groups they want to identify.
A great function in Sales Navigator is the Spotlight Tool. This allows you to search for those people who have posted in the last 30 days, indicating that they are regular uses of LinkedIn. We then save the search for approval by our client.
After this process you will end up with a manageable list of potential customers. We then go through the process of selecting each person and sending them an invitation to connect. We can then nurture them through our PR and digital content – we prefer Direct Messaging (DM) these potential sales leads rather than InMail because the latter can appear a little too spammy.
This level of targeting means that the content we create to build up relationships with these potential customers is tailored to their profile and interests. This function makes Sales Navigator a really effective platform for building trusted relationships. It integrates perfectly with other elements of our PR strategy. For instance, when one of our thought leadership or case studies appears in the construction press, we send a friendly email to the targets saying; ‘just wondered if you’d seen our latest project on (for example) Construction Enquirer’. It’s a non-salesy way of letting them know that you are interested in them!
Sales Navigator features a tool that allows us to direct other approved content – always relevant to the target audience - with those who have visited our client’s profile. Before this, the tool also lets you see who’s viewed your content, meaning we respond with content that users are actually interested in.
In terms of cost, LinkedIn charge $79.99 for the basic Sales Navigator package, which also gives you 20 InMails to use a month, or more, depending on what level you’ve chosen (it’s only 15 with LinkedIn Premium).
According to LinkedIn, Sales Navigator achieves: ‘5% Higher Win Rates, 35% Larger Deal Sizes, 34% of Opportunities Sourced and 61% of Revenue Influenced’, and we are certainly seeing very positive results with our clients in the construction and manufacturing sector.
In summary, LinkedIn Navigator helps us generate the highest quality inbound sales leads without the need for activities, such as cold calling by your sales force. It is an important part of a PR strategy and grows your business in a professional, non-salesy way.
Dragonfly PR is a is a Sheffield-based PR agency, with over 20 years’ experience in creating meaningful and engaging content, specialising in working with clients in the b2b, construction and manufacturing sectors.
Let us focus on raising your profile, so you can focus on what you do best. Contact us today on 0114 349 5341 or by emailing hello@dragonflypr.co.uk, to see how we can help you grow.