11 LinkedIn Sales Navigator Secrets All the Best Prospectors Know

Picture this: You’re a sales rep, armed with ambition and a quota to crush. You’ve got your eye on the prize – closing deals left and right. But here’s the kicker: while you’re busy chasing leads, half of them are running in the opposite direction of your value proposition. Talk about a wild goose chase!

Welcome to the chaotic world of sales, where 71% of reps are laser-focused on sealing the deal, but 50% of their prospects are about as interested as a cat at a dog show.

But here’s the reality: while most sales reps are using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, most aren’t maximizing its potential. It’s easy to throw away your day with little to show for it, missing out on valuable opportunities and wasting precious time.

That’s where we come in. We’ve compiled 11 LinkedIn Sales Navigator strategies that top-performing prospectors use to stand out from the crowd.

By the end of this guide, you’ll actually be excited to change your approach to Sales Navigator. You’ll learn how to find the right leads faster, engage with them more effectively, and ultimately, close more deals.

Whether you’re new to Sales Navigator or looking to refine your skills, these insights will help you take your prospecting to the next level. Let’s dive in and unlock the full potential of this powerful tool.

We’ll be going through:

• Why Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
• How to actually find your ICP with advanced and boolean searches
• Exporting your Sales Navigator lead lists in one click
• Enriching your contact’s data with valid email addresses and cell numbers

Why Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium tool designed to supercharge your sales prospecting efforts. But why should you consider using it?

Sales Navigator leverages LinkedIn’s vast professional network to help you:

1. Find and target ideal prospects with advanced search filters
2. Receive lead recommendations based on your preferences
3. Stay updated on prospects’ activities and company news
4. Reach out directly to prospects with InMail credits
5. Organize and track your leads more effectively

While you may have multiple tools at your disposal to drive growth, Sales Navigator is generally considered King. It helps you uncover updates in your prospecting lists, eliminate ineffective cold emailing practices, and track engagement rates with prospecting metrics.

The goal is to speed up your process for building relationships and growing your business through professional networking and lead generation. With targeted recommendations and powerful search capabilities, Sales Navigator ensures that your time and efforts are focused on promising leads rather than wasted on unpromising ones.

The key is understanding how to make the most of its features – which is exactly what we’ll explore in the following sections.

11 LinkedIn Sales Navigator Secrets All the Best Prospectors Know

While it may take some trial and error to get comfortable with Sales Navigator, its benefits are undeniable. Let’s explore these secrets one by one:

1. Use The Advanced Filter To Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

Applying advanced search with LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to sift through millions of profiles in one go and find your specific prospect types. With more than 30 advanced search filters, you can target specific keywords, set your criteria, and expand your search impact.

This allows you to narrow down your search results without tweaking other search factors, providing better output that includes:

• Potential leads who follow your business
• Decision-makers with their current positions
• Information about recent updates in your target audiences’ profiles
• Connections of people inside your network, and more

The benefit? You can be assured that your own parameters will yield leads that work for you, instead of generic leads that may not be convertible.

2. Apply Sales Navigator Boolean Search To Specify Searches

While using advanced filters in LinkedIn Sales Navigator is wise, sometimes it’s not enough to construct a more detailed and specific search result. This is where the Boolean search function comes in handy for prospecting on Sales Navigator and finding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) more effectively.

To find your most suitable leads and their accounts using Boolean search, combine your targeted keywords—such as job title, experience, and company name—with operators like NOT, AND, and OR. Ensure the operators are capitalized and enclose your keywords in quotation marks to get specific results. For deeper and more refined searches, you can use parenthetical searches.

Here’s how to use Boolean search logically:

• “NOT” searches: Type “NOT” and place it immediately before a search term to indicate what not to include in your search result. Example: “Sales” NOT “Executive” pulls up search results with all your targeted salespeople who do not have “executive” in their job title.
• “AND” searches: Type the word “AND” to extract results that include all specified terms in one place, but use it to limit search results. Example: “Web Design” AND “E-commerce” brings up results only with individuals who have included both these terms in their listed profile.
• “OR” searches: Type “OR” along with one or more items to see search results that match multiple criteria while broadening your searches. Example: “Sales” OR “Marketing” OR “Advertising” provides searches for people whose profiles have any of these terms.

Parenthetical searches: This is mainly used for complex searches. Example: “Vice President” NOT (“Assistant” OR “Senior Vice President”) showcases results of who’s VP but excludes assistant or SVP.

3. Save Searches And Save Your Time

Once you’ve used Sales Navigator to find your prospect list, you have:

• An ideal target audience
• A search feed to filter your ideal prospects
• A comprehensive idea on how to start interacting with relevant people

However, entering the same search queries repeatedly can be tedious. Thankfully, you can bypass this by saving your top searches.

Benefits of saving searches:

• Resume exactly where you left off and set up a hassle-free follow-up process with the same audience.
• Strategically run different outreach campaigns while targeting different sets of audiences.
• No need to repeat searches, as you can update your search list anytime by editing, deleting, or renaming it.
• Share search lists with your Sales Development Representatives or Business Development Representatives to handle them effectively when needed.

4. Use The Custom Button As Your Call-To-Action For Inbound Leads

To achieve success on LinkedIn, it’s crucial to focus not only on persistent outreach efforts but also on inbound leads.

According to sales statistics, 64% of sales teams successfully reach their selling quotas with inbound social selling, whereas 49% of sales reps who are not using it fail.

This means you can use your LinkedIn platform to convert profile visitors into leads, include them in your sales cycle, and more effectively fulfill your sales quota.

If you haven’t used it yet, you can start right away by adding a custom button on your LinkedIn profile and customizing it with your preferred URL. Using it as a call-to-action option can open your path to getting more inbound leads and conversion opportunities.

While any LinkedIn profile user can use a custom button, only members with a Sales Navigator premium subscription can use the call-to-action facility for better engagement.

To add a custom button:

1. Visit the super admin view of your page.
2. On the left menu, select ‘Edit page’, and turn on the toggle for Custom buttons.
3. Choose a name for the button from multiple options, such as “Visit my store,” “Book an appointment,” or “Request services,” and insert the appropriate URL.
4. Activate the toggle for “Increase button visibility” and select Save.

5. Use Alerts And Notifications To Know More

Finding new opportunities on LinkedIn with fresh leads and accounts is great, but what if you don’t know them as closely as you should? You may either lose their interest in your business or miss an important opportunity to understand their buying psychology.

However, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can set alerts on your saved leads and accounts to gain timely insights, understand their situation, and adjust your outreach strategy accordingly.

How will it help?

• Easily track who’s involved in the buying process, stay informed about their interests and behaviors, and make the most of it by reaching out to them at the right time with personalized offerings.
• By paying attention to your leads and showcasing care and empathy, you ensure you never miss crucial moments to strategically encourage them toward a positive buying decision.

6. Export The Sales Navigator Lead List To Your CRM With Surfe

Once you have a substantial list of highly qualified leads from LinkedIn, your next step will be to take them through your sales cadence. At this point, using a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Copper is an obvious choice to run a flawless process.

But how can you add them to your preferred CRM? How will their details be added to the CRM to build a buyer persona from scratch?

Not manually, of course. That would take forever! This is why you need to integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with your CRM using a third-party Chrome extension like Surfe.

Benefits of using Surfe:

• You don’t need to switch between building your lead list in CRM and Sales Navigator separately. Surfe allows you to perform all CRM functionalities directly on LinkedIn.
• With a single click, you can automatically add your prospects’ contact details, including their job profile, location, organization name, and more, to your CRM.
• With Surfe’s magic button, “Export to CRM,” you can instantly export the Sales Navigator lead list for further exploration to broaden your lead base.

Therefore, there’s no need to organize data manually, especially when your focus should be on building customer-centric strategies.

7. Enrich The Email List By Using Surfe’s Intelligent Waterfall Cascade

Whether dealing with inbound or outbound leads, you need to nurture them well to evoke their interest and make lasting impressions. One of the best ways to do this is by communicating with them through emails, as 80% of prospects prefer it.

However, spending time finding email addresses of your leads separately isn’t efficient. Moreover, all efforts can be wasted if those email contacts are outdated.

This is where Surfe’s Email Finder for LinkedIn comes into play:

• Surfe’s Chrome extension creates an overlay on LinkedIn that essentially embeds an email finder into LinkedIn. But not just one email finder… It’s actually searching the databases of 5!
• You don’t need to spend money on a separate email finder tool as Surfe runs the best of them one by one, such as Apollo, RocketReach, Hunter, Dropcontact, and People Data Labs.
• Most importantly, you can enjoy a high email deliverability rate as Surfe finds updated email contacts and helps your emails stay out of spam folders with just one click.

8. View Similar Prospects

Sales Navigator’s recommendation for similar leads and accounts is an excellent strategy to broaden your searches. Targeting high-value accounts one by one can be time-consuming, and there’s a possibility of overlooking or missing leads with similar characteristics.

That’s why the best prospectors use the ‘View similar prospects’ feature of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Here’s how:

1. Tap on the three dots next to the contact you want to check for similarity.
2. Click on “View similar” in the pop-up window.
3. Get your selected list with Sales Navigator.

9. Leverage Teamlink To Build New Relationships With Referrals

After getting your research-backed Sales Navigator lead list, you can use the ‘Teamlink’ feature to identify and engage mutual connections or referrals who are your sales goldmines.

With Teamlinks, you can access the top connections of every Sales Navigator seat holder at your company. From there, you can go through all first, second, and even third-degree connections without manual interference, ensuring you don’t miss out on any opportunities that may work well to build your resilient sales pipeline.

This is important as 20% of your advocates can drive 80% of highly influenced referrals, and leveraging the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing can also shorten your sales cycle.

10. Upload Your Book Of Business

Managing a long list of prospects can be overwhelming, making it challenging to prioritize and make informed decisions. While you aim to convert these contacts into loyal customers, not all of them are necessarily convertible.

So it’s a good idea to manage your book of business right inside Sales Navigator to cut through the noise and focus on those most likely to convert.

By uploading your book of business, you can streamline your efforts by highlighting specific saved searches and accessing buyer intent data. This allows you to adapt to a rapidly changing sales environment and make the most of your selling hours, eliminating wasted efforts, and enhancing your conversion rates.

Follow these steps to upload your book of business:

1. Go to the Sales Navigator home page and locate the “Book of business” section.
2. Under the dropdown, find “My current accounts.”
3. Click on “Upload accounts” and choose the CSV file you want to upload.
4. Match the data fields and click on “Finish.”

11. Generate Interest With InMail

To expand your value proposition, you need to connect with prospects who match your target buyer persona. However, not all prospects are automatically connected to you.

In this case, the Sales Navigator InMail feature helps you send direct messages to prospects without being connected with them. It allows you to send a certain number of InMail messages based on your account type. Just like a regular email, you can create engaging content for these messages with a catchy subject line and messaging that targets the prospect’s needs and concerns.

Let’s Wrap it Up!

LinkedIn is undoubtedly King when it comes to finding professionals, building trustworthy relationships, scaling sales operations, and creating authenticity to sell your USPs.

You now are the holder of 11 secrets that allow you to target decision-maker profiles inside or outside of your network, helping you take one step further, and close deals faster.