LinkedIn B2B Bootcamp: Crafting a winning prospecting strategy

As SaaS sales reps know too well, prospecting and pipeline-generation is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s increasingly competitive, complex market.

By personalizing outreach at scale and ensuring you send the right message to the right person at the right time, you can increase reply rates and conversion rates — and win more business because of it.

To help sales teams like yours overcome the challenges they face and accelerate pipeline, Sean Murray, director of sales development at LeadIQ, recently hosted a webinar, LinkedIn B2B Bootcamp: Crafting a Winning Prospecting Strategy, that featured Sam Lewis, head of sales enablement at Vidyard who worked at LinkedIn for more than a decade, and Aaron Davidson, an account executive at LeadIQ. 

If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator in your arsenal but have never taken the time to really learn how to use it to its full potential, you’re in the right place.

Keep reading for some actionable tips you can use to accelerate pipeline and even thrive in today’s difficult sales landscape. But first, let’s take a step back and take a quick look at what makes LinkedIn Sales Navigator such an effective sales tool.

Why do sales teams need LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool designed to help sales reps find and connect with prospects on LinkedIn, the world’s most popular social network for professionals. With advanced search filters, lead recommendations, real-time updates on prospects, and features like Account IQ, the tool makes it easier for reps to target the right decision-makers.

Sales teams need LinkedIn Sales Navigator because it makes their job easier, enabling them to find prospects based on specific criteria, increasing the chances of closing deals.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s dive into the tips.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator prospecting tips from Sam

• Be proactive on LinkedIn. In the ideal world, every rep would be on the receiving end of a continuous stream of inbound leads. Unfortunately, life is never that easy — which is why it’s so important for reps to create their own opportunities. “We have to be out there creating opportunities because we know that eventually not having that coverage, not having that pipeline is going to come back and kick us,” Sam says. “We need to make sure that we’re taking care of our future selves.” 

• Ditch the metal detector for the crane. The way Sam sees it, a lot of sales tools out there are like metal detectors. You might be able to find what you’re looking for while using them, but it’s going to take a lot of time. “Sales Navigator is a massive crane floating through the sky with a huge magnet on it, just pulling up all those riches,” he says.

• Represent yourself properly. First impressions matter, which is why Sam suggests spending time optimizing your LinkedIn profile. “Your profile as you represent yourself on LinkedIn — that’s your storefront,” Sam says. “If you don’t do a good job representing yourself, the internet will misrepresent you — probably much worse.”

• Develop a strategy for when to connect. LinkedIn was built upon a series of connections. That being the case, Sam advises reps to spend time developing a strategy for when to connect. For example, some reps might prefer volume, while others might focus on quality. “I urge you to just stop for a moment and think about when is the right time to connect with somebody,” Sam explains. “My general rule of thumb is if I’ve had a conversation with you, it’s now appropriate for me to connect.” 

• Leverage the first-mover advantage. As a big fan of Sales Navigator’s advanced filtering capabilities, Sam encourages reps to learn about “the magic of the saved search.” Not only will it save you from having to build the same search in the future, it will also notify you when new users match your criteria — enabling you to reach out at the most opportune times. “Anytime somebody new comes in on LinkedIn and changes their profile to match your search criteria, you get a notification, which we call first-mover advantage,” Sam says.  

LinkedIn Sales Navigator prospecting tips from Aaron

• Use tools that enable you to use your time wisely. As reps know too well, there are only so many hours in the day. That being the case, sales teams need to use their time as wisely as possible, which is why it’s so important to build the right tech stack. “Time is our most valuable commodity — we need to make the best use of it possible,” Aaron says. “By leveraging something like LinkedIn Sales Nav — especially in tandem with tools like LeadIQ and Vidyard — the idea is that it’s going to allow us to really boil the ocean down into something that we can tackle.”

• Diversify your strategy. Building pipeline is not an easy task. Unfortunately, there isn’t a silver bullet or panacea that can change that — which is why you need to try several different tactics to generate leads. For Aaron, LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been a great tool for diversifying how pipeline is coming in. “I like to think of it like an investment portfolio. We have some time-based plays, we have some risky investments, right? That may be a smaller percentage, but the idea is that we have a constant flow from different avenues and plays.” Different plays can reap rewards at different times, ensuring the stream of leads continues flowing. “Everybody loves a good month or a good quarter of having a big uptick in outbound, but a healthy business should be much more of a little ebb and flow curve that’s steadily growing as opposed to a huge roller coaster.”

• Use Sales Navigator advanced filters to pre-personalize outreach. Like Sam, Aaron is a big fan of Sales Navigator’s advanced filters. By using them heavily up front, you can make the task of personalizing outreach an easier one. “If you have 5,000 people in a search, my goal ultimately is to keep refining that and compacting it into 1,000 contacts, then 500, then 200,” he says. “By filtering and doing a lot of this work on the front end, you’re actually doing a lot of personalization and relevance at scale.

• Search for shared interests. As a musician, Aaron is always looking to connect with prospects who share his passion for music. LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes that process easier. “When filtering down personas I’m going after, I am looking for folks that studied music, are in a band, perhaps they are a nerd like me and like sci-fi books,” Aaron says. “Some people will post that in their LinkedIn, and if you can sniff that out and mention it in your outreach, it can really bridge a gap and lead, at minimum, to a conversation, which is where all of this pipeline is ultimately going to start.”

• Be yourself. At the end of the day, reps are most effective when they don’t try to be anything more than who they are. “Do not lose that unique personality and flavor in your outreach,” Aaron advises. “Whether you’re a bit more outgoing like myself or maybe more reserved, those can all factor into the outreach, Because, at the end of the day, this isn’t business to business. In pipeline, it’s human to human. You cannot forget that.”

Discover more LinkedIn Sales Navigator pipeline-building secrets!

If you’re looking to build more pipeline and generate more warm leads, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help make it happen.

But you need to learn how to use it effectively. 

For more tips on how to achieve exceptional prospecting outcomes with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, watch the entire conversation at the top of this page.