Posted by Ben Kniffen in B2B Lead Generation & Sales Development
LinkedIn has become one of the most powerful tools at the disposal of sales reps. The key is in knowing how to use this tool the right way. In this blog post we'll highlight 3 features on the platform that we're extremely thankful for this year.
They say that what you focus on expands. I believe there may be some truth to that - and it definitely applies to sales. It’s one of the toughest jobs around. You hear rejection every single day. You have to talk to strangers and somehow convince them to trust you and eventually buy from you. It a tough job and more of a mental game than anything else. And yet, sales is what makes the business world go round.
So, let’s look at the bright side, especially when you’ve got practice, sales knowledge, and the right tools to help you. In that spirit, here are three LinkedIn features sales that we as sales professionals are thankful for at LinkedSelling:
Sales Navigator
Target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps business owners, sales teams, organizations, and individuals to build and nurture strategic relationships and provides extra features on LinkedIn to find, manage, and connect with those prospects than a free LinkedIn account does.
At LinkedSelling, we’re in Sales Navigator every single day when prospecting or building up our client’s databases of connections.
As you can imagine, the more actionable information you have about your prospects, the better your conversation, and the more sales opportunities you can create. This way, you can engage with your prospects at a more personal level by offering personalized and tailored content and offers.
The most important feature of Sales Navigator in our opinion is the search capabilities. The Advanced Lead and Company Search feature allows you to find the right people and organizations for your business. In other words, it opens the door to even more targeted search capabilities so you can search for the exact prospects you want to be talking to. Here’s what it looks like:
Beyond the ability to better find your ideal prospects and exclude Sales Navigator also provides users the opportunity to view more prospect’s in a month.
The free LinkedIn version has limits to the amount of profiles you can view in a given month. It’s called their Commercial Search Limit.
It isn’t a black-and-white number of profile views across the board for all users. But if you are serious about increasing your prospecting and connecting through LinkedIn, you’re likely to hit this limit and have to wait until the end of the month for the limit to reset.
With Sales Navigator that limit increases significantly so you are able to find and review many more prospects.
Lead Gen Forms
“Collect even more quality leads from your ads on LinkedIn with seamless pre-filled forms”
While both Facebook and Google have their own versions, I’ll focus on LinkedIn’s lead gen forms. These are a feature specific to ads and are a quick and easy way for prospects to submit contact details.
We’ve found Lead Gen Forms can improve conversion percentages up to 40% in some cases.
While we don’t run Lead Gen Forms exclusively on every campaign or funnel, it’s certainly worth implementing in an a/b test on any campaigns you are currently running.
Essentially, it’s a simple, pre-filled form that pulls information from your prospect’s profile to make it easier than ever for them to opt-in to your content or express an interest in your services.
Here’s how it works: When a LinkedIn member clicks on the call-to-action button on a LinkedIn ad with an attached Lead Gen Form, the form is automatically filled with their contact and profile information. They can then submit their information to you via the form without having to manually type it in. Afterward, it immediately takes them to a mini “thank you page” as well.
We love LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms to help make the lead gen process more seamless. The key from there is how you follow-up with the leads that have opted in for your content or offer.
LinkedIn’s built-in reporting provides decent tracking and monitoring metrics that allow you to measure your campaign cost per lead, lead form fill rate, and the specific audiences you’re converting into leads.
The ‘Active Now’ LinkedIn Feature
Knowing when your prospects are on LinkedIn gives sales reps great insight into when a message may be most effective. It may seem like a small thing, but this is a huge deal!
On LinkedIn, you can see which of your connections are currently active and reachable thanks to a green circle. This works for both the mobile and desktop.
Here’s what it looks like on desktop:
You’ll notice there are two different status indicators you may see in the bottom right corner of your connection's profile photo within your LinkedIn messaging dashboard:
- The presence of a solid green circle next to someone's name in LinkedIn messaging means they're currently on LinkedIn and will be instantly notified when you send them a message.
- A hollowed out green circle indicates that someone is not actively using LinkedIn but has push notifications enabled on mobile. They'll be notified instantly when you send them a message.
The colored indicators also appear when using LinkedIn messaging conversation windows at the bottom of your LinkedIn homepage, and on various pages across both the LinkedIn desktop and the mobile app.
If there is no green circle (a circle with no color), the connection is not currently active on LinkedIn desktop and mobile, or they have disabled the active status feature on LinkedIn messaging. Your message will still be sent but they won't see it until they access LinkedIn messaging on desktop or mobile.
Only your connections will be able to see when you're active on the LinkedIn desktop or the mobile app.
Note: Users can disable this feature showing to their connections. But by default, this feature is set turned On.
If you’d like to learn how we use these tools together in a comprehensive strategy to generate more leads and sales opportunities, book a call with our Director of Client Strategy below.
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