Why LinkedIn Sales Navigator is Becoming a Must Have Sales Tool

September 13-14th was LinkedIn’s annual Social Selling Conference, Sales Connect – and I had the fortune of attending. There were dozens of incredible speakers that shared mind blowing data, where the sales and sales enablement space is moving and where LinkedIn is headed now through 2017. And although I could write an entire book on everything I learned, I am going to focus this blog on Why Sales Navigator will be one of the most important tools in the Enterprise Sales Reps sales stack.

*LinkedIn Sales Navigator taps into the power of LinkedIn’s 433M+ member network to help Sales professionals find and build relationships with prospects and customers through social selling. On average, social selling leaders see:

• 45%  more opportunities created
• 51% more likely to achieve quota
• 80% more productive
• 3X more likely to go to club

Here is some of what makes Sales Navigator so powerful now…

1. Saving Leads allows you to keep track of prospective buyers through by saving them and their company as a lead. There are many benefits to saving a lead including all LinkedIn updates from that lead or their company will be displayed in the news feed giving you opportunity to engage easily. In addition, LinkedIn provides additional insights such as job changes, recent updates, shared connections and experiences to name a few. Having this information about just your saved leads makes finding and leveraging insights simple and productive. Lastly, LinkedIn will present you with other profiles of potential leads inside of the account.
2. Mining Connections is a feature available on LinkedIn.com but the the ability to filter inside of Sales Navigator makes Identifying who your clients and network knows and leveraging those relationships for warm introductions invaluable.
3. Lead Builder is a more advanced – advanced search. It helps you build your prospect list leads with more expansive filters than LinkedIn.com. From the search you can save a lead which gives you visibility to their updates and shares right on your Sales Navigator homepage to help provide context for you to reach out and start a conversation.
4. The ability to add a link in a connection request is outstanding. Often when I request to connect with someone on LinkedIn I like to add a link to a relevant piece of content or an invitation to a free webinar, but on LinkedIn.com you are unable to add a link to the invitation. In a Sales Navigator connection request you can add a link which can help your first contact to be a valuable one.
5. Sales Navigator Chrome Extension will enhance your Gmail experience by connecting LinkedIn profile and update information that is connected to a particular email. This is new, and has already had a huge impact on how I am engaging folks on LinkedIn based on insights that appear inside my Gmail inbox. I believe this will be coming to Outlook next year.
6. LinkedIn.com mobile is new and improved and so is the Sales Navigator app. It nowoffers recommended leads and accounts for you to view and save as well as engaging with you saved leads from your phone or tablet.
7. Teamlink for enterprise organizations may be one of the most powerful features. aIt allows anyone with a Sales Navigator seat the ability to see who in the company (whether they are connected to them or not) can help them gain access to targeted buyers.

Clearly these are pretty powerful features, but wait until you see where Sales Navigator is headed. Here is sneak peek at what is coming…

New filters that will help you to develop more qualified lists such as:

1. The ability to search for prospective companies based on Revenue ranges will make targeting the right sized companies even better.
2. Identify the Headquarters of a Company by zip code, which makes territory and account based selling simpler.
3. CRM source filter will allow you to identify what CRM they are using. For many businesses, this is search filter that will help them qualify their buyers even deeper.
4. Writing 2-ways. All your activities and messaging in Sales Navigator will now be recorded in your CRM. Includes Salesforce.com, Dynamics, Oracle, SAP, Sugar and more.
5. Searching by software and tools the company is using such as Google Analytics, Amazon Web Services etc provides insights that are invaluable to many business development professionals.

The new and improved inMail will make connecting with your buyers even more successful. The ability to reach out directly to ideal buyers is part of what makes LinkedIn so powerful, and it is just getting better. You will be soon be able to send an inMail without having to say why you are sending it, it will open as a pop-over window (similar to gmail) so you can scroll to continue to read their profile and gain insights that can help make your message very personal.

PointDrive may be my favorite new feature. LinkedIn purchase PointDrive a few months back, and it is a game changer for sales professionals. Imagine this… you have content, presentations, links, videos or other collateral that you share with your prospective buyers – but once it leaves your email it is looking into a black hole; until now. PointDrive brings all your attachments and content together, delivers it in a beautiful one page document inside of LinkedIn, tracks it and reports back how long each recipient spent reviewing it down to the second.

These are just a few amazing features that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is launching between now and Q2, and it just keeps getting better.