Lesson 15 - Find Contacts on LinkedIn

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In this lesson, you’ll learn how to configure LinkedIn Sales Navigator and TeamLink to identify key decision-makers and map connections to your target accounts. Your assignment will involve setting up your filters in Sales Navigator and practicing using TeamLink to find mutual connections.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to set up LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You'll also be setting up LinkedIn team, Link, feature, feature. Now this is one of the few episodes where I'm actually going to focus on a specific tool. I'm not going to do this that often, because a lot of times you'll be using different tools for different parts of the job, and you might not be using the same tools as other people in different organizations, but LinkedIn is a pretty universal one. It's very common for an organization, especially a sales team, to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find contacts. I would say that it is so crucial that it is worth doing an episode on so if you absolutely do not have LinkedIn Sales Navigator and management refuses to pay for it and you're not able to pay for it yourself, then you can skip this lesson. Otherwise, I would definitely listen to these tips because they are going to help you find contacts and find contacts that are more resonant to your pitch. So let's think about what LinkedIn Sales Navigator is first. It's basically a premium version of LinkedIn that allows you to set up advanced searches so that you can find leads that are relevant to your solution. So if I have LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I can look up marketing managers in the pharmaceutical industry in the United States region. I can look up manufacturing directors in the, you know, technology industry in the European EMEA region, right? I'm making these things up, but basically LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to get very specific on who you're finding so that you can start reaching out to people that are probably more likely to hear you out. So let's talk about how to set it up. The first thing you want to figure out when you when you think about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, is, what are the types of profiles I want to go after. And the best way that you can do this is to create a LinkedIn profile board where you screenshot and list or show all of the LinkedIn profiles, not all of them, but several LinkedIn profiles of people that have already purchased your solution. And don't skip this step. It might seem a little kitschy, but this is actually going to help you quite a bit. So get a list of screenshots of profiles that have purchased your solution as economic buyers that have purchased your solution as champions, or sorry, that have that what's the word I'm looking for? They've put forth, they've evangelized your solution as champions. And then make a list of LinkedIn profiles of end users, and then you'll start to be able to look at, okay, I can start to understand who's on my buying committee, and where I can get into my buying committee by looking at trends in job titles. So once you have a list of screenshots, or a visual of screenshots of all of your LinkedIn titles that you've sold to in the past, or at least several, then you can start writing down titles. Who are the titles I'm looking for when it comes to economic buyers, when it comes to executive sponsors, champions, end users, and you can start to kind of map that out, very similar to what you did when you were mapping out your buying committee. But in order to make this specific to LinkedIn, you really want to get specific with titles. Here. Once you've made your once you've analyzed your profiles, you can also, by the way, look for like industries, teams, keywords, maybe different certifications or methodologies that they follow, but you should be looking to see what do the people who are buying my solution have in common when it comes to their LinkedIn profile, because that's what I want to set up as my filter. Cool. Make sure that you're not just writing down one title for each of these, because you're going to set up your filters to look for multiple titles, and titles have different variations, right? You might be a director or a senior manager of something. It might be like a marketing manager or social media manager or PR manager, right? There's different different elements of similar titles. Once you have the titles that you're going after, it's time to set up your LinkedIn Sales Navigator filters. These tools allow you to use advanced search filters to narrow down your prospect list. And I will give you some links to LinkedIn help center so that you can show how to do kind of some of the specific things that we're about to cover. But here's where you want to get to set up filters for geography, for industry, for company size. Or seniority level, and for title. And you want to use those things. You can use Boolean logic in your LinkedIn, sir, I hope I said that right. You can use, I think it's Boolean logic in your LinkedIn searches to to put multiple filters in place at once. So you can, like I said earlier, you can say, you know, I want marketing manager or PR manager or social media manager, and geography equals Colorado, you know, or geography equals Austin, Texas or United States. And industry equals pharmaceuticals and manufacturing, right, or something like that. So you want to get specific here, the more specific, the better, actually, because at first, you do not want to cast too wide of a net. You want to be able to laser focus on the contacts that are most relevant to give you and start building that momentum. There are a few other types of searches that I have found to be very fruitful, no matter what industry I'm in. So let me go ahead and give you some tips on those. One look for previous customers of your solution who have moved to a new job. So basically, let's say that I'm again, we'll use Sprout Social. My name is Nick, and I'm Social Media Manager at Dell, and I'm using Sprout Social, and then suddenly I moved to IBM. Well, Sprout Social is going to want to know about that. They're going to say, oh, shit, this guy just moved from Dell to IBM, so maybe he'll be willing to champion us over there as well, right? And so it's really valuable for you to look for previous customers of your solution who have moved to a new job because they already know the value of your product, and they might be interested in implementing it at that new company, two recent job switchers. So search for people that have recently switched jobs into the titles you target, because they likely got brought in for a specific reason, chances are they are there to implement some initiative that your product or solution probably supports. So you want to be sure that you're understanding their new initiatives. And it's just a great time to reach out these guys or gals are looking to make a name for themselves. And you want to reach out and say, hey, you know, I see that you just got a got into the role as social media manager over at Barkbox. I'd love to talk to you about some of your priorities in your new role. I think that there are some ways Sprout Social can help. We've actually helped companies like yours in the past over at XYZ, so that can be a very quick and easy way to get in front of somebody. And then the last one is milestones. You want to identify people who are celebrating something, a birthday, a promotion. Maybe they recently posted an article on LinkedIn. Maybe their company just got celebrated in the you know, best places to work, or most innovative companies or something. Anything that you can celebrate with them is going to be a great reason to reach out. There are so many excuses to reach out to somebody, and we'll talk about that. But I forgot, I almost forgot that we're not talking about reaching out in this episode. We're talking about search results, right? So set up search results to look for people that have recently been promoted, people that have recently posted an article or celebrated a milestone, get creative with the way that you're searching. Once you have all of your advanced searches set up, you'll also want to set up LinkedIn team up. What are they called? Lead recommendations. So I have a feeling this, the name of this is going to change, but at the time of this recording, it's lead recommendations. Sales Navigator will provide you with lead recommendations based on your search history and your profile activity. Set it up. Let me go ahead and tell you, these are going to suck at first. They're not going to know what you're looking for. It's going to feel like a waste of time. But keep going with it, because the more you search, the more you engage, the more you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the better those recommendations are going to get review these suggestions regularly add relevant leads to your list that will help train it. Yeah. The next one, the thing that salespeople do not leverage enough is called Team link. Team link is a feature that helps you find mutual company, sorry, mutual connections between your company's executives or your company's colleagues, internal people that you work with, and people at the prospects company. So if you work for you know XYZ company, and your manager knows somebody at your prospects company team link is going to tell you that, and then you can go to your manager and say, Hey, I saw that. You're connected with this person that I'm trying to sell to. Can you reach out to them? And from there, you'll want to ghost write an email. We'll talk about executive to executive emails. A future lesson, but ultimately you're going to want to talk to the person that's connected through team link and say, Would you be willing to connect me with this individual team link is under utilized and very powerful, so I would encourage you to set it up. I think that's it. Before we go, there are a few other ways that you can maximize LinkedIn potential. So we're probably not going to do another lesson on LinkedIn, so let me just go through some of these other tips. One, you should set up company growth alerts. This helps you monitor companies that are experiencing growth or significant changes. These alerts can signal some opportunities for your solution. Two, you should follow company pages. Go to that company on LinkedIn and follow it if it's in. One, if it's one of your top most strategic accounts in your territory, plan follow that account on LinkedIn so that you can see what's going on there. Three, you can see who's viewed your profile if you have a premium LinkedIn account, so regularly check who's viewing my profile. What company do they work for? Reach out to them. They might be interested in your solution for competitor pages, go to your competitors LinkedIn pages. Look at their activity. What are they doing? What are their sales reps doing? I promise you they're looking at yours too. This is just part of the game. And then finally, join relevant LinkedIn groups. I think we talked about this in a previous lesson, but LinkedIn groups are actually pretty cool. I used to think they were, I don't know, lame, I guess. But after joining a few I got a lot of tips on my role and how to how to progress. So I would encourage you to participate in a few LinkedIn groups. You're going to find a lot of duds out there, but there are some really good ones too. All right, now it's your turn. Your assignment for today is set up LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Create a visual of LinkedIn profiles that have bought your solution in the past. Set up those advanced searches in Sales Navigator, those advanced kind of multiple logic searches to get very specific on who you're going after. Look up searches for previous customers, job switchers, milestone celebrations. Set up your lead alerts, follow the companies you want, and set up team link to see if you have any internal connections to those on your prospecting list, your study guide will walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time you.