Episode 58 Leveraging LinkedIn Free vs Premium vs Sales Navigator for Bankers

Intro: I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from Ledger's to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants With Modern Bankers. 

Jack Hubbard:  Happy Thursday, everybody. Hi, Brynne

Jack Hubbard: Hi, Jack.

Jack Hubbard:  Well, this will be a fun session. Now, we both get a lot of questions about should I get the premium version or should I get a Sales Navigator? Should I get on for free? And that's what we're going to talk about. Now, LinkedIn, when we got started with it, was known by Microsoft, and there were all kinds of things you could do on the free version. In fact, I think the only paid version back then was the recruiter version. And since Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for billions and billions of dollars, profit obviously is very, very important to them. So they have started to migrate over to premium and Sales Navigator. 

What I mean by migrate, it's to take a lot of the features that were available on the free session, the free membership, and move it on over to something that you have to do for pay. So we're going to talk about that a little bit today. 

So, before we get started, I want to ask you a few questions about the free version and some of the things you're seeing and what people can and can't do. Some statistics are kind of interesting, and for those of you that are on here as bankers and, boy, we had a really nice group of folks signing up today, so please ask questions. This is your time to be able to do that. In 2023, LinkedIn had 176,000,000 people on the premium version. That's up from 154,000,000 in 2022. In 2023, at the end, there will be almost 8600 companies who use Sales Navigators. We've heard statistics, Bryn, you and I, that about 10% of the billion people on LinkedIn use Sales Navigator. and that's expensive. Now, of those, by the way, 304 of those companies are banks. they're not by far the first use of sales, navigator. Technology companies far and away run away with that. 

So, I'm curious, your take and what you're hearing about free. Let's start there. Why should I be on the free version? What are some things I can do and I can't do on the free version?

Brynne Tillman: Well, so being on the free version is being there, right. And so, hands down, any professional needs to at least have a free account. Now, if you're going to use the account, I can talk a little bit more about what you don't get that you might get with some other things. so I'm not sure I'll balance. So we'll go free to premium before we even go into Sales Navigator. We're not going to even touch the recruiter. But there are some different levels of premium. There's for job seekers, there's for business development premium. But here's some of the big differences. Nothing changes inside of your actual profile. It's more of the functionality in using the tool. 

So number one, there is a change in how many personal messages you can put inside of a connection request, and there's a change in how many connection requests we can make. I have searched LinkedIn's help center high and low, and we keep it up with what's going on from Kevin D. Turner, who is the king of new features, and I believe you even have him on Jack Rants. He's amazing. and so I don't have a definitive answer right now on some of these changes, but I'm going to tell you what I'm hearing, which is you only can have ten messages a month, messages a month in a connection request on the free. This kind of nauseates me, right? This is encouraging people to connect without a message. And then I believe, and again, there's nothing on LinkedIn that substantiates this. 

This is all caught in the wild, as Kevin would say, like, he's out there, right? Caught in the wild. So, I believe you can only do 100 new connections a month for free. While that doesn't bother me nearly as much as the messaging, I am not sure that LinkedIn is doing the things that will encourage people to go up to premium, which I think is the point, right? Like you said, they're trying to migrate from free to premium. So I'm going to make a statement out there, and I never want to bite the hand that feeds me. I love LinkedIn very much. I think the Sales Navigator is the most brilliant tool ever invented for sales, even more than the CRM. I'm just saying. But the big mistake here is with these new rules that affect the free only LinkedIn is, number one, encouraging connection requests without a purpose. Right? That's, I think, pretty dangerous. 

And number two, from the other side, people receiving what they may now perceive as spam because there was no message attached to it are getting frustrated with the platform. LinkedIn sells the data of the free people just under the free accounts, I mean, all the accounts, but because the free accounts are the majority of the accounts and the data, that's their product. So if they start to lose the people off the website, they are losing their inventory. Right. The reason we buy a Sales Navigator is to be able to filter and search the product, which are the people on the free accounts. 

So I do believe that there's a disconnect in the decisions that they're making here, but we'll talk about the benefits of premium next. But that's sort of my feeling on the free account. But if you are not using LinkedIn, you at least need to have your profile up there because people are vetting you.

Jack Hubbard: So, you made a couple of really good points here. The fact that you have a free membership in no way, reduces what's on your profile. So that still needs to be done and done professionally. One of my challenges is, and I've heard statistics, as high as 80%, if you send a connection request without a message, you're about 80% likely to get that rejected now, unless you know somebody really well, right? So that's a great point that you make. The messaging function is so important. and I'll tell you the other one, and maybe I'm so obsessed with LinkedIn that I need to back away from it a little bit. But I check who's viewed my profile several times a day, because if a second degree connection came to my profile, I want to try to connect with them if I find it appropriate. If a first degree connection comes to my profile, based on all the great things that you taught me, I want to send them a message. Hey, thanks for coming to my profile. Haven't seen you in a while. Anything I can do to help you? By the way, I thought you might be interested in this article that I wrote about or that Chris Nichols wrote about or on the free service. It's my understanding, and you'd have to tell me that you're limited to seeing. I believe it's the last five people that came to your profile. Beyond that, you can't. So I think you've got. That's another real challenge that I'm seeing.

Brynne Tillman: Yeah. And I was actually going to add that into the value of the premium, but I have to correct myself. There is one new feature on your profile that is only available if you're a premium member, which is in the featured section. You can highlight anything from any part of your profile, but it's a premium addition. And this is relatively new for a couple of weeks. So right now, I pulled from a recommendation on my profile in my featured section. So I forgot there is now one little new change that's premium only on your profile.

Jack Hubbard: All right. So premium and Sales Navigator is certainly not for everybody, but it's just important to note that if you are on the free, you may get a little frustrated, especially the more that you use LinkedIn. Now, before we leave for free, let me ask you one, ah, clarifying question. We always talk about content, and, when I do content now, because the visibility of content is lowered this year, what I'm doing is I'm sending personal messages, via the content so that my connections can see it. I'm curious, based on your comment about the messages. 

So let's say I've used up all my time, let me ask it this way. Is it possible on the free service to send as many messages to my first degree connections as I want to? Okay, great. That's an important distinction between the message from I want to connect with you message and the message you can send to your first degree connections. That's really good. All right, so let's talk about premium. And again, I want to clarify something you talked about that you were able to take your recommendation, a recommendation and put it in your featured section. On your profile, you have a Sales Navigator. If I have a  Sales Navigator, do I also have premium?

Brynne Tillman: You have all the functionality of premium, yes.

Jack Hubbard: Yes, functionality of premium. Okay, that's an important question. So let's talk about premium, that next level. Why should I go to the next level? And what are some things that I can do on a premium that I can't on free?

Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So I'm going to go back. You can see who's viewed your profile for the last 90 days. So that's the first big one. Now, if someone is in stalker mode or anonymous mode, you won't see them. but most people aren't. That said, there's no amount of money you can pay to see who's in stalker mode. But what's nice is sometimes you have the last five. If three of them are in anonymous mode now, you're only seeing 290 days. You get a nice look at who's viewing your profile. 

Now, what I find interesting, so if someone viewed my profile two weeks ago and they viewed it today, I would lose sight of what they saw two weeks ago. It will only show them one time. And I like this from my perspective, if I'm stalking someone, they'll only see me one time, not seven so I always want to throw that out. Another one is, we can use In-mail. 

Now, a lot of people call all of LinkedIn messaging in mail. It isn't. InMail is actually premium messaging that you can send to anyone. They don't have to be a first degree connection. You asked the question, which was a great question on the free can I send unlimited messages to my first degree connections? The answer is yes. But you can send zero direct messages to your second degree when you have any kind of premium. And there are different levels of sometimes you get ten a month or 30 a month or 50 a month, depending, and you can look into all those options, but you get this direct messaging with In-mail, and so it looks different, it has a subject line, and when someone receives it, it says, do you accept this? But it gives you the ability to send a message to someone without having to send a connection request before you.

Jack Hubbard: Go on, because there are a lot of other features, maybe you don't know. How many emails with the premium can I send per month? First part. And the second, do they accumulate?

Brynne Tillman: They will roll over for 90 days and then it can never be more than 90 days. and there are different levels, I think, of premium, right? So, there are job searching premiums and I believe, and I have to look it up because I apologize for not knowing because they're all different. The lowest level of premium is ten, and then it's 30 and then it's 50. So it's not just one premium package. You have choices. and the interesting thing, when I was doing research for today, just to get, just preparing, when I click through, try premium, it says not available, which I think is interesting. And I don't know if it's because I have a Sales Navigator, but I was unable to see, so I had to log out of LinkedIn to see some things that I couldn't see when I was logged into Sales Navigator.

What I'll say is, if you want to see what's available to you, and I'm going to guess right now that not everyone has the same things available to them. it's so strange, like you have to dive deeper to see what. I had a client that we could not figure out how to get to advanced Sales Navigator, where smart links, he could only get to core. We had to submit a ticket to LinkedIn in order for him to have a link to sign up. So they're very weird. LinkedIn is very weird. Like what you get is going to be different. What you want to do to see what's available to you is when you click on the me icon at the top, there's premium features. 

Now it's available to me when I just clicked in where it wasn't before. Look at that. But it will show you all the different options. So it says, build and nurture trusted customers as Sales Navigators, who's viewed your profile is another. These are just like different premium things, which I think is interesting. And at the end of this, you may want to just log out and Google LinkedIn premium products and identify which one is right for you because there are quite a few different options.

Jack Hubbard:  And we're going to talk about Sales Navigator. But one of the interesting things about premium that some people ask me is if I buy premium, how does it change the look of my profile when I'm on LinkedIn? It doesn't, it gives you a few extra features unless they've changed that Brynne?

Brynne Tillman: So the only thing that it changes is you have the option to have a little gold in your profile. you used to be able to have like an open to getting messages icon, and that seems to have disappeared. So that's really the only change. And it's an option. You don't have to have that. It's a badge. You don't have to have that.

Speaker B: And I'll assume that like, Sales Navigator or similar to Sales Navigator, if I buy premium, I can connect with more people, I can do more in terms of messaging. When I try to connect, I can see my 90 days, who's seen me and my profile for 90 days. So I guess my question to you is, if I'm a banker and I'm watching this and I'm on the free service, and I think premium runs $60 or $70 a month, something like that, whatever it might be. Why, Brynne, what's the catalyst for me to go from the free service to the premium service?

Brynne Tillman: Yeah, that's interesting. you kind of threw out there, more searches. So one of the things that's an issue in the free is if you do too many searches, you get stuck by what they call the commercial search limit. So it will say, right, you've hit your search limit for the month. It will reset the first of the month. Clearly you're either using this for job search or for business development. Here are your options if you'd like to continue. If you are in premium, I have heard that there is a limit. I have never talked to anyone that hit a limit on premium. So you can continue to search. You can continue to look at page 20 in a search like where you might be limited with the free. 

So if you are actively using LinkedIn and search and you hit the commercial search limit, it may be a trigger. That means you're using it enough that you may want to try premium. But before you invest in premium, and we'll talk about this in a second, really weigh out the difference between premium and Sales Navigator, which is more money. But if you are truly using LinkedIn as a business development tool, it may be worth skipping over premium and going right to sales nav.

Jack Hubbard: Yeah. And what I always tell people, and I might be wrong on this because you always guide me really well here, if I'm not as active on LinkedIn, I'm new to LinkedIn, whatever the case might be. I always tell people, get to know the free service first. Set up your profile, start making a few connections. If you get stopped and you're active to your point, you can go on to the next level. It's kind of like if you've got a 16 year old learning how to drive, and in your garage you've got a 1987 Buick and a $300,000 Maserati, which one are you going to teach them to drive on? It's an easy answer. So get to know the free, and then go on to the premium because it'll open things up to you. And now you're going to get the value for your 60 m dollars a month or whatever the case might be. Well, I want to go on to your favorite. Go ahead. One more thing before I go on.

Brynne Tillman: So I just will reiterate, there are people that invest and pay for premium for the whole year, and then two months in, they realize they really want Sales Navigator. I believe in most cases, Sales Navigator will take that balance and put that towards Sales Navigator. But my advice is, even though it's more money long term, start with the month to month. Don't invest in the whole year just because you think you're saving your 10%, because you will have a lot more options in changing that premium account or moving into sales Navigator. 

So invest month to month. Don't go all in, until, you know, maybe two months in, you're like, okay, I love this, I'm keeping this. Now, you can do that, but pay a little more in rent before you buy the House.

Jack Hubbard: Well, that's a great analogy. I want to move on to one of your favorite topics. I don't know exactly when LinkedIn started sales Navigator.

Speaker C: You probably a long time ago, longer than you might think.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting for me, I'm using 20% of what it can do. But talk about the difference now between the premium and Sales Navigator, because first of all, it looks so different when you go to sales Navigator. It's just radically different. What are some of the differences between premium and sales Navigator? Let's start there.

Brynne Tillman: Okay, so I believe August 2011 is when sales Navigator launched. So it's a long time, a lot longer than people think. Sales Navigator is a completely different interface. It's a different tool. You actually leave LinkedIn to go to sales Navigator. Now, sales Navigator is this interface that is pulling data from LinkedIn. The data, the profiles, all of that lives inside of LinkedIn. So when you search in sales Navigator, it's pulling from the LinkedIn data. So really, Sales Navigator is just a different interface. Right. So, if you're in software, you can imagine it's literally like, you've got all of this data, and you can pull that data into an Excel spreadsheet, or you can pull that Data into Lendovative, or you can pull that Data into different places and it presents it differently, but it's the same data. That's how I want you to think about this. 

Okay, so now we have a Sales Navigator, and guess what sales Navigator lets us do? It lets us manipulate that data in a way that is much more powerful and usable for us. So, for example, LinkedIn has captured all this data on how often someone is logging in. When was the last time they logged in? When was the last time they were active on LinkedIn? they have so many data points that they're not reporting in the Excel spreadsheet, which is LinkedIn.com. That's like the way I'd like to say that. Right? And then you get into Sales Navigator, and it's this robust system that allows us to pull data and use the data in a way that's much more meaningful and impactful. 

There are many more filters, there are filter combinations. just like premium has many levels. Actually, Sales Navigator has three levels. The first level that Sales Navigator has is core. And what that comes with that, the other two don't, is LinkedIn learning. But what it's missing is, the smart links, which is a product we've talked about before, absolutely love it. We'll probably talk about it again. and it is missing a team link. So it's an individual product that there's no ability to add other people in your team. So there's no one to search. The next level up, I believe, is called advanced. They've changed the name quite a lot. Advanced gives you both that smart links and the team link, which means we can share leads and leverage each other's data inside of, and that's everyone in the company that has agreed to be part of the Sales Navigator ecosystem. We can talk about that. and that's really powerful. But then there is the enterprise, I think they call it advanced plus, but it really is the enterprise where you are now syncing your CRM into Sales Navigator. And you have a lot of functionality, cross functionality between using LinkedIn and whatever you're, I think they support seven or eight different CRMs.

Jack Hubbard: Wow. So let's dive into some love. I'll just throw out a couple of things I really like and you tell me what you think. Yeah, I love the fact that you can put a list of accounts together and I think they've enhanced this so that even you can kind of see who's in the accounts and you can move some things around. You'll talk about that. I love the fact that you can put it together. I believe it's up to 15 lists, but maybe it's more, of people that you're trying to follow and know about, and save them on, a database, if you will, and you can separate those. So I have marketing, I have training, I have CEOs, I have heads of business and commercial, et cetera. So accounts, individuals, and then there's this thing called Persona. Let's talk about those three things first and get your opinion on some of the things that you like and some of the best practices you're doing with Sales Navigator.

Brynne Tillman: So I'm going to start backwards and we'll start with Persona. So, creating Persona, originally when I saw this and tried to use it, I was not a fan, but I wasn't using it in the best way. So there are limited filters in Persona. And then if you fill this out, so this is your ideal, your ICP, your ideal profile of who. And you can have five. I think I have three. I think you can have five. so you may have, I want, all the CEOs, I want all the CFOs. And maybe you're reaching out to different people inside an organization. maybe you want the person that's head of facilities, right? I don't know. You as a banker will decide what are the types of people that I would like to engage inside of an organization. 

So now you have this little toggle button that's inside of your search and you can't edit that. It is in stone. And to me initially it was missing some filters and I'm like, I don't need this, I don't like this. I'm putting it aside. And then my buddy Stan Robinson said, no, this is how you use it. And I went, oh, so Persona, leave out of your other filtered searches. But when you are in an account which you started to say, and I want, let's say there are 5000 people in the company that you're prospecting, I turn on a Persona, click, and all the people that meet show up from that account and I want that's magic, right? So Persona, when you are going after large accounts is magic because it will help you to really hone in on your ideal, I guess stakeholders or influencers inside of the organization that you're prospecting. Accounts you mentioned, you can upload your accounts. 

So if you have accounts that are assigned to you in your CRM, you can actually export them into an excel spreadsheet, upload them into Sales Navigator and it will actually map out your field. So you tell it, this is the first name, the last name, the email, whatever you want to do on that. And it will go into all of those accounts, it will save all of those accounts and it's going to present everyone in all of those accounts to you. And you go save, ignore, save, ignore. 

So it feeds you, it's probably an hour to, if you have, let's say you have 100 accounts, it may be a five hour ordeal over the next month, but you have now saved every account that's assigned to you. And why do we care? We care because Sales Navigator, when you save leads and accounts, has this custom newsfeed in the home page that only alerts you to things around the companies and the people that you have told it you're interested in. So about, for me, about 90% of my newsfeed is actionable. M but we don't miss anything when we take the time to upload those accounts. And that, by the way, is available in the advanced. You don't have to have the advanced enterprise CRM to use that.

Jack Hubbard: Well, we're coming up on time. I want to ask you two more things. You alluded to smart links. I love smart links. Can you talk about how you use it and why it's so powerful?

Brynne Tillman: So I use it for a lot of things. I use it for our onboarding hub, right? So when we have a new bank that comes on, we make it really simple. And what's nice is I can see who's looking at it. Did they look at it? They can't tell me that they did, and I know they didn't because smart links will report to me every time someone opens or downloads something. So that's number one. Number two, most of my proposals go out in a smart link. And I'm going to tell you what happened in, I think, October. I had a proposal out to a company, I'm sorry, I had done some training for a company two years ago, and the proposal was in a smart link. And then in October, like nine people from the organization started looking at that again. I had already completed the work and they didn't reach out to me. I just saw they were looking at it. 

So I reached out to them. It's interesting, hopefully it'll, but I reached out to them and I said, oh, and I was honest. I taught you how to use Smartlinks. Well, I practice what I teach. And I noticed you guys are hanging out here. Are you looking? They're like, we kind of had a big turnover in salespeople and we're looking to do this again, but we're not ready. And I said, okay, well, let's talk about the time frame and what you're looking to do. Well, I told them this is October, in November I said, well, our prices are going up in January if you're interested in looking at your old price. And they said, absolutely, we have been paid and it's still not scheduled yet. That never could have happened without Smartlinks. it'll get scheduled. They're trying to get everyone, all these new salespeople onboarded and then we'll get in. But think about the power of that. They wouldn't have even reached out to me till February, March, April.

Jack Hubbard:   Wow. The last thing I want to talk to you about is you are one of 16 LinkedIn international sales influencers named in last October, November, 37 total. That's just amazing. What a great honor. you may have some inside information, you may not. but I want to know if you can share.

Speaker B: What do you see coming down the line in 24 for Sales Navigator? What's going to be different?

Brynne Tillman: So I obviously is taking over everything, and the one thing I can share that I'm really excited about and got to see actually work and I think it's actually scheduled to come out in the middle of February. So right around the corner is chat search. So what does that mean? Like chat, GPT. You go in, you tell it something, and it gives you something. Well, Sales Navigator has a pretty robust search filtering system that is sometimes hard to navigate when you first start to use Sales Navigator. 

So it will have. I am looking for CFOs of manufacturing companies in the Detroit area that are directors, VPs and above. And it will bring you that list, and it will also show you all the filters that got turned on based on that. And I think this is going to make it, because then you can look at it and they go, hm, I want CFOs. So you could build on that. You know what? Show me from this list who changed jobs in the last 90 days. And it will do that. And so, it's a chat to search, maybe. I'm not sure what they're calling it, but that, I think, is the big thing coming down the pipe.

Jack Hubbard: It's not inexpensive. Let's just put it out there. It's over $1,000 depending on what level you are. But if you're a business development officer in a bank and you're out prospecting quite a lot, this is golden. This is absolutely no brainer for me to invest that money, because you're going to get it back. You talk about something. I'm not going to get this right, but you used to say that if I had to choose between making payment and what's the statement?

Brynne Tillman: Yeah. So in August 2012, a year in, I said I would pay my Sales Navigator bill before I'd pay my mortgage today. Sales navigator pays my mortgage, plus my vacations and my kids' college and everything else.

Jack Hubbard:  Yeah, it is absolutely well worth it. Well, great thing today. Great program today. Glad we got the guru of LinkedIn to be able to talk about some of these things. Ultimately, it's an individual decision, but I wanted to make sure that we were able to look at the three different options because we get a lot of questions about it next week. One of my favorite topics is content. And the title of next week is five types of content bankers should be sharing. I'm really looking forward to that. One final thing. I got a message today, and I don't know if this is true. Not true. It's my understanding that a lot of social media sites were recently hacked. It happens. all I'm going to suggest to you and Bryn, you can comment, too. Two step verification. Go into your settings and privacy, turn on two step verification. Things are going to happen. You need to protect yourself on LinkedIn. Brynne, any thoughts on that?

Brynne Tillman: Yes.

Jack Hubbard:  Great to see you. It's fun every Thursday. Love to see you.

Brynne Tillman: Love to see you, too, Jack. Thanks, everybody.

Outro:

Thanks for joining us for Jack Rants with Brynne brought to you by our good friends at Vertical IQ and RelPro. We're live on LinkedIn every Thursday at noon Eastern time helping bankers turn connections into conversations. 

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