Episode 88 LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Is it Right for Your Team?

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 ledgers to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same banking. So people business and I'll be talking with those people who make banking grade here and Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

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0:00:29 - (Jack Hubbard): Hey, it's Thursday. Hi, Brynne.

0:00:31 - (Brynne Tillman): Hey, Jack, how are you?

0:00:33 - (Jack Hubbard): Well, good. It's the middle of the summer. Golf season is happening. It's wonderful, and it's always a great day talking to you, and we're going to discuss a very important topic today. But before we do, just a couple of things. Number one, next week, next Wednesday, Jack Rants with Modern Bankers has been my friend for probably more years than she would admit it, but it's been a long time with my good friend and an amazing consultant, Mary Beth Sullivan, the managing partner of Capital Performance group. And we really talk very in-depth about a lot of things in banking. So I'm happy to do that.

0:01:17 - (Jack Hubbard): The second thing is next week if you have time and are interested. We have guest coaching for the modern banker, and we are very happy to help you get in and talk about your LinkedIn challenges. I think we have 25 people joining us, which is great. So if you're a banker, financial services professional, or someone who wants better things on LinkedIn happening, you can talk to the knowledgeable one. That's the one over there on the left side, my left side.

0:01:50 - (Jack Hubbard): And Brynne will be happy to talk with you about all of that. Today we're going to talk about Sales Navigator, right for you and your team. And one of the things I'd love to know is, for those on the audience, anybody using sales Navigator, love to hear about that. But, Brynne, there's a lot of directions that we can go here. You introduced me to Sales Navigator. I guess the best way to start would be LinkedIn has three different kinds of tranches if you will. If you take out recruiter of the way, you can interact with the platform, that's free premium or Sales Navigator. So let's start with Sales Navigator.

0:02:40 - (Jack Hubbard): What is it, Brynne? This is a great tool. You can explain better than anybody what it is.

0:02:48 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So sales Navigator is essentially a filtered screen that lives on top of LinkedIn's data. So it is not a separate platform, but a filtered platform. And so what that means is it allows you to use all kinds of filters that I know we're going to dive into today to identify people in the LinkedIn data that meet real high-quality results based on what we've asked it to tell us. So on LinkedIn, sometimes I call it the mothership.

0:03:41 - (Brynne Tillman): You have some filters and it allows you to find people on LinkedIn. When you put this overlay on top of LinkedIn, which allows you to filter and search data points not even closely available in the free mothership, all of a sudden, the Sales Navigator becomes an incredibly powerful tool. Does that make sense?

0:04:08 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah, it does. So I want to dive in with you on some of the key features of Sales Navigator, but the program title is intriguing in and of itself. I'd love to know, in your experience, what's the tipping point here? When do I decide, okay, I've gotten as much as I can out of the free LinkedIn. When do I decide to spend some money? Because it's not cheap, but it's well worth it. When do I decide to spend some money on getting Sales Navigator?

0:04:41 - (Brynne Tillman): What a great question. I think there are a few triggers. One of them is LinkedIn tells you you've hit your commercial limit. That means that you've made enough searches that they go, yep, you're doing this for business development or job seeking. Like, you're using this actively, and we're gonna cut you off for the rest of the month unless you pay us. That is a great indication that you're using it enough that it's worth paying.

0:05:11 - (Brynne Tillman): The other thing is if you've really committed to LinkedIn as a primary prospecting tool if you've really committed to leveraging social selling and digital for prospecting. Now, you know, I'm seeing a lot of banks now actually expand outside of their little local community. Some of the bankers that we're working with, may go statewide, even though they used to only go within 10 miles of a branch.

0:05:46 - (Brynne Tillman): So social is allowing them to do that. And Sales Navigator allows us to do radiuses of zip codes, allows us to find people who are now in our new geographic area industry. So that's another one. We have one banker who wanted to move more into, and believe it or not, the restaurant industry because they're in Cape Cod and they have lots of restaurants and they want either really moving in that direction, but it's not. So, you know, how do they search in a new industry where they may not know a lot of people? Right now, LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows us to do that exceptionally well.

0:06:35 - (Brynne Tillman): So really some great use cases. But to answer your question, when do I need to invest? I'll say when you are ready to invest your time. It's like a gym membership. I cannot tell you how many months I've paid for LA Fitness and not shown up and I'm just wasting my money. You need to know when it's leg day. You need to know when it's arm day. Right. So you've got to have a plan in place. You've got to know what to do and what to say on a daily basis and when you are ready to put aside 20 minutes a day and that's really all you need. But when you're willing to put in 20 minutes or 30 minutes a day just to focus on your prospecting efforts, then the Sales Navigator will pay for itself.

0:07:30 - (Jack Hubbard): I think that's right. We have a banker in the northeast who is a power user of Sales Navigator. And to your point, he actually sells a vertical product more regionally than just in his particular state. And coming to coaching every week, although he's very good at it, we've been able to help him put some lists together and put some targets together, etcetera, which I want to talk about. But I want to tell you a couple of things that I'll do on LinkedIn.

0:08:02 - (Jack Hubbard): So when I. One of the things I do in the morning is I'll go to the Sales Navigator. Now I'm geeky about this and I'm a crazy person when it comes to goals. I'll give you an example. My wife and I recently went to Michigan to teach at the Michigan Banker School. And I had a goal of getting to the campus five minutes before I got there last year. It's just me. I didn't drive crazy, but it's a goal. So one of the things that I do every morning is I can go right to my Sales Navigator and I can check my social selling index score.

0:08:41 - (Jack Hubbard): It's a goal for me. I have a certain number that I want to hit and how am I doing that helps me understand how much more activity I need to be doing on LinkedIn and how much more value I can be adding. But the two things I'm going to tell you about are pretty cool. Recently, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator added a bell. And every morning I get seven things that I can look at. I don't know why they picked seven, but it's every day at seven.

0:09:09 - (Jack Hubbard): Maybe you know why, Brynne? Because you're on the outside here. But.

0:09:12 - (Brynne Tillman): But it's every day seven.

0:09:14 - (Jack Hubbard): Every day seven. And every day I get to look at articles, and people who've viewed my profile. Somebody may get a promotion and then I can decide to interact with that. I just did a program I did, just before we got on, I did, Mary Beth Sullivan posted something and I commented on it. So it makes it easier for you to comment on relevant things. So that's, number one, that's pretty cool. Number two, a lot of banks don't have a CRM.

0:09:44 - (Jack Hubbard): And while the Sales Navigator is far from a CRM, it does give you an opportunity to add some notes. So I'll give you a quick example. We're talking to a particular organization and I was able through an email to find this, the person that we're talking to, the cell phone number, I was able to put that in notes, and right before we went on I left a voicemail that said, hey, if you're interested, we've got a great program on Sales Navigator.

0:10:12 - (Jack Hubbard): And oh, by the way, I'd love to check and see where we are, and get feedback on our proposal. So those are two things that are so cool and they're such a small part of the Sales Navigator. Brynne, there are hundreds of other things you can do on Sales Navigator. What are some other things that you think are so vital?

0:10:34 - (Brynne Tillman): So the first thing I'll say is you need to create a base search. What is your primary search? As close to the exact types of people that you know that you can bring value to, that you can solve problems of, right? Your prospects. Now you may do this search and it may be geographic, may be important to you, maybe it's you only want CEOs and CFOs, maybe you are looking, maybe there are two base searches and one is for your prospects and one is for referral sources like your cpas or estate attorneys or whomever those folks might be. Right.

0:11:14 - (Brynne Tillman): So you need your base search, you may do a search and it may say there are 800,000 people that meet that search. And you're like, yeah, where do I start? Now we need to do, and this is, I'll say in the honor of both the Cubs and the Phillies, we have to do a first base search. So now we take this base search and we add the filter first connections. So now our 800,000 becomes 27 and there are 27 people that we are already connected to that we should be talking to. So we save that.

0:11:56 - (Brynne Tillman): And by the way, on Sales Navigator, all you do is click a little toggle and the search is saved. Now we do a second base search. So we change our first base to first connections relationship, to a second-degree connection relationship. And now we get to see the friends of our friends who know who we want to meet. Now that you might have 27 first, and now you may have 1800 seconds. So you save that. Now this becomes one of the most powerful searches because you look at your calendar and say, I'm meeting with Jack Hubbard in a couple of days before I get on a call with him, I want to see who he knows on LinkedIn, that if the opportunity arises, I can run these names by him.

0:12:45 - (Brynne Tillman): So I take my second base search, and I add connections of Jack Hubbard, and my 1800 becomes 81. So now I save that, and I'm on the phone with Jack, and Jack's like, you're awesome. I got the capital I needed to grow this, and I could do that. And, man, your bank is amazing. Now is your opportunity to say, oh, Jack, I'm so glad we've been able to help you do x, y, and z. I hope you don't mind, but I noticed you're connected to quite a few people that I'm going to be reaching out to in the next couple of weeks. But before I do, can I run these names by you and get your thoughts?

0:13:26 - (Brynne Tillman): And that 81 can become two or three meaningful introductions and maybe even seven or eight permission to name-drop opportunities so that I am now gaining access to Jack's connections. A very happy customer, which I now come in at a high level of credibility. And the statistics of moving it from an introduction or permission to name drop where I reach out and I say, Jack and I were chatting. He said, hello, let's connect. And that turns into a conversation is 50%.

0:14:05 - (Brynne Tillman): So let's say I have ten total from Jack. Of his 81, five of them will become conversations. Think about how hard it is to get on five conversations with people at a high level of credibility, where they're open to taking your call because your shared connection said, you got to talk to that, my banker. And that's where a Sales Navigator can be incredibly powerful because it's not just drilling down to the exact types of people, but it's your relationships and pathways to getting to them that are absolutely game-changing. So that's the first thing.

0:14:47 - (Jack Hubbard): Can I jump in here? So I'm on my screen, and you helped me put together a base search for business banking. The Persona is business banking. And the titles that I've added are executive vice president of sales and executive vice president. And down the left side, there are a lot of filters I have right now in that this is my second degree. I have 5.5 thousand. But here's the other cool thing. Since I put this together, 444 new results have been automatically added to my list.

0:15:27 - (Jack Hubbard): So I want to talk to the marketing folks that are listening on this. One of the real things that I had to do as a marketer and you probably do is to buy a list. Somebody at a commercial will say, hey, get me a list of 40% of them are retired, 10% are dead, and 7% have sold the company. But these people on sales navigator are real living humans that are on Sales Navigators that are operating right now. I can do it by title.

0:16:00 - (Jack Hubbard): So if a bank says, okay, I want not-for-profits and I want to talk to the CFO of not-for-profits in this general area, this number of employees, it'll do it, Brynne, it is absolutely wonderful. So I didn't want to stop you because you had great momentum, but I did want to amplify what you're saying and how powerful this number one thing is.

0:16:22 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, so I'm going to. Yes. And what you just said, because you just brought up an amazing thought in my head that I just want to explain. LinkedIn is feeding you real-time lead opportunities. It automatically, when you save, that search, it will automatically update. So how did 400 more people get into Jack's list? Well, one of two things he connected with someone who knew lots of people who met that criterion or people he's already connected to, people he's now connecting with, people in his ideal network.

0:17:06 - (Brynne Tillman): So he made, he spent the time to put that search together once. And Sales Navigator, there's no other tool that will be able to feed you on a weekly basis new people in your very, very, very top of the funnel. Like, you know that new opportunities are based on your social proximity. Like, think about this, 400 new people who meet Jack's criteria with whom he shares a connection. And because of his reputation and his relationships, there are a ton of those that he can leverage where they'll say, absolutely, Jack, I'm happy to make introductions for you.

0:17:58 - (Brynne Tillman): Please use my name when you reach out. So even if every week five or ten of those 400 turn into conversations, it's a game changer. So those updated searches are very much under-leveraged. And sales navigator is the only tool in the world that will produce that based on your relationships.

0:18:23 - (Jack Hubbard): Absolutely. And remember, you have to do nothing. You do nothing except put the base search together. And that's why it's so important when you start this process to put the base search together. And I know somebody who if you decide to get into Sales Navigator as a banker, and you said, gee, I need some help here, I know somebody that can help you. And Brynne, you would be very happy to help, I'm sure.

0:18:51 - (Brynne Tillman): It's what I love. In fact, our wonderful friends at RelPro, next week I'm doing a Sales Navigator training for their team.

0:18:58 - (Jack Hubbard): Oh, that's great. That's awesome. That's awesome. Can we? One of the things I want to talk about, too, is the new AI feature of LinkedIn. I know you were probably going to bring it up at some point, but let's talk about it.

0:19:15 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah.

0:19:15 - (Jack Hubbard): AI is all the rage and the Sales Navigator has joined that party. Talk about the AI on Sales Navigator.

0:19:22 - (Brynne Tillman): So this is absolutely game-changing if you're selling into large companies, and what I'm about to say is in beta. So a lot of companies, this is not available for, but if you are going into larger companies that have a lot of public information. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a new feature called Account IQ. And what this does is it reaches out to the whole web and it searches what's going on with this company, what press releases are out there, what financials have been published, you know, what any kind of content, where have they been mentioned in the news?

0:20:05 - (Brynne Tillman): Were they mentioned in Forbes? Like, there's just, it's just out there pulling in all this data and then it summarizes what you need to know before a call. And it is absolutely incredibly powerful. I can not wait until this rolls out to the average company. Now, you're not going to get financials on a small company. That's just not the way it is. But you may get a lot of data. It could reach out through blog posts. This is what they're publishing. So when you can grab those insights.

0:20:40 - (Brynne Tillman): Jack, you and I talk a lot about how important social listening and social research are. This account IQ feature is a game changer for people who are spending hours doing research. It's now minutes.

0:20:56 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah, that's very true. I know you have other things to talk about, so I'll just ask you one question about another tool that's available only on Sales Navigator. And you talked about Relpro. One of the things I love about RelPro is you can go in and get the direct phone number, the cell phone number, this email address, and it's extremely accurate, which is great. On Sales Navigator, there's a tool called Inmail, and even if you're not connected to somebody on LinkedIn, you can send them an Inmail and it comes through as an email in their feed, even though you don't know the email address.

0:21:38 - (Jack Hubbard): I'd love to have you talk about the pros and cons of Inmail because it's not a perfect solution.

0:21:44 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So two things, right? So when you send someone an Inmail, it goes into their messaging, and it goes into the primary email that they've listed on their account. Sometimes that primary email is Fatcat 30 sevenahoo.com. and there's nothing you can do about that, right? It is what it is, but it does get through to that primary email and it's hitting their messaging. Couple of things on this, it does look different than a normal message.

0:22:21 - (Brynne Tillman): So it has a subject line and it actually has, I accept this message. So you may not have the same response as if you actually had their business email, like if you went to RelPro and you were able to grab that, but you definitely have a much higher response than, you know, a lot of other ways that you're reaching out. The other thing is, and this is what we found, even if they don't respond to the Inmail, we have found they're viewing the profile of the person that sent it. It, they're vetting it, so they're not ignoring it.

0:23:04 - (Brynne Tillman): Now this is where what you say in that Inmail matters because if it's a pitch, they're definitely going to ignore you. But if your profile is set up to be a resource where you're really bringing value, and then the message that you sent in that Inmail is of value, you are going to have a much higher acceptance rate, a much higher response rate, and all of a sudden this becomes a very valuable tool.

0:23:34 - (Brynne Tillman): A lot of bankers use it wrong. They use it like, hey, we'll tell you about our cd rates. And so they still get their profile checked out, but it becomes a negative experience versus a positive experience. So what I would say here is Inmail is fabulous. You've got to use it the right way.

0:23:57 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah, and I don't know the exact number, Brynne, but I do know that I have 149 credits remaining. So they do refresh. And if somebody accepts your message, you get credit for it and it comes back to you. You have to be really careful with Inmail. To your point about the look of the email and not pitching products, you have to be very succinct with your Inmail. The goal here is to get a conversation started or maybe get them to accept a connection request or something like that.

0:24:30 - (Jack Hubbard): Well, we've just got a couple more minutes and we certainly, given the vastness of the Sales Navigator, can't talk about everything. What else, what other really cool features as we wrap this up, do you really like on Sales Navigator?

0:24:48 - (Brynne Tillman): So many. All right, I'm gonna give two. The first one is when you save accounts and you save leads, meaning you say to LinkedIn, this is of interest to me. LinkedIn will, on a daily basis, send all of the activities that your saved accounts and your saved leads are doing on social. So your newsfeed in Sales Navigator should be close to 85% to 90% content you care about because they are based on the accounts and the people that you've saved and you can filter. So if I want to see accounts in the news, accounts that got funding leads that have shared content on and on and on, you can filter and engage specifically on the people and the companies that you've told Sales Navigator you're interested in.

0:25:52 - (Brynne Tillman): I never look at my LinkedIn.com comma, my mothership newsfeed, ever. So I'm either in my notifications on LinkedIn or I'm on the newsfeed in Sales Navigator because it's much more relevant to me and what I care about. And I'm not going down that rabbit hole. I notice when I start to [email protected]. I'm engaging in stuff that's not productive. But when I've saved accounts and I've saved leads and so all the information I am consuming is relevant to my business development efforts, it becomes incredibly productive. So the hours a week that I save from, like, going through my newsfeed is absolutely unbelievable.

0:26:44 - (Brynne Tillman): The next one I want to talk about is smart links and you. And I love smart links. I'm going to hand this to you to talk about because I know you love this as much as I do.

0:26:55 - (Jack Hubbard): Well, it is a way for you to put together. It could be a video, it could be a PDF, it could be a proposal, which we do, and you create a link. It's very simple to do. Even I can do it. You put it up on LinkedIn, and then when someone engages in that, you are notified. When you are notified, you can choose to do whatever you want to do. Sometimes I'll just, I'll just let it go sometimes. You know, we did a, we did a public workshop recently, and right during the public, and this is how easy it is, by the way, right during the public workshop, you said, hey, could you create a smart link or could you create a smart link where you would send the slides to the participants? Yeah, which I did.

0:27:48 - (Jack Hubbard): And now I can see everybody downloaded the slides. And that's another cool thing. You can decide whether to download it, have them download it, or not download it. But Brynne you've had some great experiences with smart links. It's just a wonderful thing for you to get notified that what you're sending might be of value to the receiver.

0:28:10 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And, you know, often someone viewing my smart links is one or two of my seven notifications. So not only can I, am I getting notified, but I'm getting notified again like it's in there. So I just tell a quick story. So you mentioned we put proposals in a smart link so you can see who's looking at it. Well, my. I had a proposal in a smart link, and my buddy Daryl Prale over at Vanilla Soft, who was not there now, but was at Vanilla Soft, and I sent a proposal, and it just never closed. It wasn't the right timing, it wasn't the right opportunity. He got a new job at Agorapulse, and I saw him look at the vanilla soft proposal, then I saw he was in a new company, and within three days, I closed that business.

0:29:00 - (Brynne Tillman): So. And he's my buddy now. I absolutely adore him, but he's a chief marketing officer. I don't know if he would have reached out to me or not. I don't know. Maybe. And maybe it would have been months later, and who knows? But the fact that he was in a new job looking at an old proposal said, ah, now's the time. So I could not have done it. And I have a few stories like that. Like, I could go just on proposals.

0:29:28 - (Brynne Tillman): Right. I had an old client look at a smart link where the deck was, and I'm like, oh, so they're discussing this. They haven't looked at it in a year. LinkedIn's back on there. So if you have content that's out there and you see a year later, someone goes back to look at it. Oh, yeah, that's a time to start a conversation again.

0:29:51 - (Jack Hubbard): That's awesome. Well, this has been great. Fast-paced as always. I learned something, which I always do from you, I hope. Pardon me.

0:30:02 - (Brynne Tillman): What did you learn?

0:30:04 - (Jack Hubbard): You know, I can't remember now.

0:30:06 - (Brynne Tillman): Okay.

0:30:07 - (Jack Hubbard): There was one. There was one thing you said, and I'll go back to it and I'll remember it, but just a wonderful show. And this is the essence of what we're trying to do here every week try to target something that might be of benefit to you. So thanks for being with us today, Brynn. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.

0:30:30 - (Brynne Tillman): Bye, guys.

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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. Don't miss an episode. Visit https://www.themodernbanker.com/tmbpodcast. Leave us a review, if you would. You can also listen to this program and the new Jack Rants with Modern Bankers on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and iHeartRadio. We're on YouTube as well. Subscribe at https://www.youtube.com/@TheModernBanker. Finally, don't forget to make today and every day a great client day.