There are tonnes of tools and tricks you can use while trying to optimize your sales efforts on LinkedIn. You might be working hard, but it’s time to work smart. The best thing you can do to ensure your digital sales strategy is effective and efficient is to use Linkedin Sales Navigator.

Sales Navigator simplifies the process of sourcing, reaching out and staying up to date with prospects, leads or current customers. Although core to the long-term strategy, building a strong network and then maintaining those relationships manually is time-consuming and low-value. It’s time to let Sales Navigator take the reins and track prospects for instant and invaluable insight.

Here are our top tricks for enhancing your LinkedIn Sales Navigator strategy:

Don’t worry about using your InMail quota

‍InMail is LinkedIn’s version of a paid email or direct message. Depending on your Sales Navigator package, you can send between 20 and 50 InMail messages per month. But to send more than your allocated amount, target users with an open profile.

When searching for users, results which have a dotted circle alongside their name and company have set their profile to be ‘open’. This means contacting them via InMail won’t count towards your quota.

It is good to keep note of this even if you haven’t run out of InMail as open profiles tend to be more receptive to being contacted. When you’re cold-contacting people in this way, it’s better to take steps to ensure prospects are as relevant as possible, otherwise, you may risk wasting your own time and appearing spammy.

‍

‍

Is mail not enough? Unlock out-of-network profiles

Sales Navigator Team lets sales reps view the full profile of users who are outside of their network. Once the profile is unlocked, it’s visible to the whole Sales Navigator team. Every team member can unlock 25 a month, so if you’ve got a large team this is a great way to find out more about prospects before reaching out to them.

This gives you greater insight into who you’re contacting; perhaps you have something in common to engage with or maybe you’re able to grab alternative, more appropriate contact details.

‍

Optimize search through TeamLink filter

According to LinkedIn, you’re nearly five times more likely to succeed in securing the first meeting with a user you have a mutual connection with. That’s why TeamLink is so great: you can easily find prospects that not only meet your search criteria but who you are already connected to in either a first, second or third degree.

This tool capitalizes on the network of those in your team and your first-degree connections.

‍

And reach more with TeamLink Extend

Although TeamLink is a great tool, by only allowing you to connect to your company’s Sales Navigator seat-holders network, it may limit your reach to salespeople and recruiters.

What’s where TeamLink Extend comes in. TeamLink Extend lets your company’s marketers, customer support or even finance team opt-in to the tool so you can take advantage of their network too. This means your pool of potential connections grows exponentially.

‍

As connections grow, so do your search results - so save them

Just because you don’t have a connection with someone now doesn't mean you never will; so save that search. This is especially important if you’re continuously targeting the same personas because you’re ultimately just duplicating efforts when filtering to the same criteria every time. You don’t need a fresh search for fresh results; results will constantly change as your network grows and as your network’s network grows.

Automation will save the day! By saving the search you can automate this process and will also be notified as connections are added, but make sure you apply the TeamLink filter too. Catch those connections.

‍

Take note of others’ TeamLink section

You’re not the only one taking advantage of TeamLink: you can also look at the TeamLink section of a company’s account page.

This will show all of their current employees that you have a mutual connection with. Although sending a connection request to these prospects over those with no mutual connection is favorable, you should ask the mutual connection for an introduction. This will increase the target’s receptiveness and thus your chances of converting them into a lead.

‍

Add tags and keep notes on connections

Connecting with a vast amount of people can get confusing. You’ll often end up with multiple tabs open in your browser; company pages, profiles, groups, etc, before reaching out to a person to ensure your message is personalized and accurate. Instead, try tagging leads and keeping notes for each individual in Sales Navigator.

This will help manage and increase your efficiency levels while identifying a lead’s key goals and priorities, and any other noteworthy information that may help you close them in the future. By tagging leads by, for example, their role - are they a decision maker, or an influencer - you can navigate them better.

‍

‍

Use advanced filters to identify ideals customers

Sales Navigator has an array of handy filters that allows you to identify the ideal customer. This includes company type, groups, the amount of time a person has been in their current role and at their current company, seniority level and even keywords of their posted content.

You can also filter via what a user is interested, instantly enhancing your value proposition while enabling you to build a much stronger relationship from the outset.

The shared experiences filter will also pull out contacts that have at least one thing in common with you. This means you can send a tailored message, putting emphasis on similarities, which will boost your chances of getting a response.

‍

Use filters to find past customers to become future customers

While utilizing filters, don’t let the little greyed out option in the top right corner of some categories go unnoticed.

By filtering categories, such as the company, to ‘past and current’ you can find users that you have worked in the past who have now moved on. By already having a relationship with a person, you may be able to use this to your advantage and turn their new company into your new customer.

‍

The Sales Navigator and Campaign Manager combo

We all know by now that to fully optimize efforts, sales and marketing must work together. Though having different responsibilities and capabilities, the two teams can interact with each other through LinkedIn and also see how the other team is interacting with prospects and leads.

Marketers are responsible for the creative elements and timeline of a campaign, but now they benefit from extra insight into who their sales team are pursuing, which means Linkedin ad campaigns can be enhanced through sales and marketing working in unison. As a result, your company’s messaging and value proposition will be at the forefront of prospect’s minds exactly when you need it to be.

Salespeople also benefit from seeing how their leads are interacting with marketing efforts and can be notified when a saved account reads, likes or shares their company’s content.