If you’re like most people, you might think of LinkedIn as a way to find a job or recruit employees. However, LinkedIn is an extremely powerful sales tool. In fact, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is specifically designed to help salespeople and business owners find new leads and close more deals.
In this article, we’ll show you how to use LinkedIn’s powerful search engine and Sales Navigator to find your ideal target market and identify those most likely to engage.
Why LinkedIn
When it comes to business networking, LinkedIn is in a league of its own. With over 610 million users in over 200 countries, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. And because it’s a platform designed specifically for professional networking and business, it’s an incredibly valuable resource for finding high-ticket leads.
LinkedIn offers a unique degree of targeting and specificity that other social networks simply can’t match. For example, LinkedIn allows you to search for people based on their job title, company size, industry, location, and more. This means that you can quickly and easily find the exact type of person you’re looking for. And because LinkedIn is a platform where people go to network and build business relationships, it’s the perfect place to find high-quality leads. It’s like going to an event and every potential client was wearing a green hat so you knew exactly who to speak with and who had buying intent.
Because LinkedIn is a professional platform the people who use it are, generally speaking, open to meeting new and interesting people relevant to their field, which is another fantastic advantage that LinkedIn offers.
It’s a social network built for professionals and therefore professionals using this platform actively are in a different mindset to what you might find on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, which are much more social networks.
Whilst LinkedIn does offer some incredibly powerful search features, it can be a little daunting for those who are new to the platform. In this article, we’ll show you how to use LinkedIn’s search engine and Sales Navigator to find new high quality leads every month.
Understanding LinkedIn Free Search
Even if you’re not planning on paying for LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool, the platform’s free search functionality is still incredibly powerful. You can use it to find potential customers and partners by keywords, location, and a number of other criteria.
LinkedIn’s search function is a great starting point for any sales or business development professional. With a little practice, you can quickly learn how to find the people and companies you’re looking for.
LinkedIn also provides advanced search operators that allow you to fine-tune your results.
Of course, the free version does have some shortcomings, namely the fact that you won’t be able to save your lists or filters that you are using, meaning you will need to recreate your search every time you want to look for new results matching your search query.
Using LinkedIn’s free platform also restricts you to a certain number of connections in a time period. If you’re too trigger happy with the “connect” button you may find yourself restricted from adding further connections.
With that in mind, the truth is that to really make the most of LinkedIn, the cost of upgrading your LinkedIn account to include Sales Navigator will prove a worthy investment when it comes to finding your target prospects.
Understanding Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s premium sales tool. It gives users access to a number of powerful features, including advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and the ability to see who has viewed your profile.
Sales Navigator is a great tool for sales and business development professionals who want to get the most out of LinkedIn.
If you’re serious about using LinkedIn to generate leads, then Sales Navigator is definitely worth considering.
If you have already taken the plunge and upgraded your LinkedIn account to access Sales Navigator, here are some tips for you to get the most out of the platform.
Check out some of our top tips for getting the most out of LinkedIn search:
Advanced Search With Sales Navigator
1. Use The Right Keywords
When you’re searching for leads on LinkedIn, it’s important to use the right keywords.
For example, if you’re looking for leads in the marketing industry, some good keywords to use would be “marketing,” “advertising,” and “public relations.”
Remember to be as specific as possible when you’re choosing your keywords. This will help you get more relevant results.
You should also think about what to exclude. For example, if you are searching for marketing leaders, but don’t exclude the keyword, ‘recruiter’, then you will more than likely get a lot of marketing recruiters in your results.
2. Take advantage of Sales Navigator Advanced Search Filters
LinkedIn’s advanced search filters allow you to narrow down your results and find the leads you’re looking for.
You can also use the “Company Size” filter to find leads at companies of a certain size.
For example, you can use the “site:” operator to search for a specific company or the ” intitle:” operator to find people with a certain job title.
LinkedIn’s advanced search filters are a great way to narrow down your results and find the hottest leads.
3. Turn off the “First Degree Connections” option
By default, LinkedIn’s search results include “First Degree Connections” – that is, people who you are already connected to on LinkedIn.
While it can be helpful to see your First-Degree Connections in the search results, it’s usually more useful to see other leads.
To turn off the “First Degree Connections” option, simply click on the “More” button in the search results and uncheck the “First Degree Connections” option.
We recommend searching for “Second Degree Connections” first and foremost. These are people who are connected to your connections, but who you’re not yet connected to yourself.
Because you will know someone that these people are connected to, you are more than likely going to have
4. Save Your Searches
The ability to save the filters that you build within the LinkedIn search engine is actually a feature that is only available with LinkedIn’s premium offering, Sales Navigator.
However, there is a tricky workaround that you can use if you are still using the free search tool.
Once you have applied all of the necessary filters and found a list of leads that you’re interested in and are happy with the results you are seeing, you should notice that the text in the URL bar is significantly different to what it was before you started your search.
You can actually copy that URL, save it in a text document, and come back to it at any time in the future.
This is a great way to quickly find leads that you’re interested in without having to rebuild your search from scratch every time.
Of course, it’s still just a workaround. Premium Sales Navigator users can simply save their searches and will be able to quickly load up the results and see any new results that now meet their search criteria.
5. Use the Title search feature
One of the most powerful features of Sales Navigator is the ability to search for leads by job title.
This is a great way to find high-level decision-makers at the companies you’re targeting.
To use this feature, simply enter your target keywords into the “Title” search field. For example, if you’re looking for marketing managers, you could enter “marketing manager” into the search field.
You can also exclude terms in your search. So, for example, you could choose to exclude the word “assistant” from your search so that no “assistant marketing managers” show up in your search, ensuring that the results provided are in fact the key decisions makers you are targeting.
6. Use the Geography feature
The geography feature in Sales Navigator is a great way to target leads in a specific location.
To use this feature, simply enter the name of the city, state, or country you’re targeting into the “Geography” search field.
You can also specify a radius around your target location. For example, if you’re targeting leads in San Francisco, you could enter “San Francisco” into the search field and specify a radius of 50 miles.
7. Use the “Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days” filter.
One of the best features is the ability to narrow your search to active LinkedIn users who we know are using the platform and checking LinkedIn regularly.
There are a lot of people on LinkedIn, but not all of them are engaged with the platform.
The “Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days” filter is a great way to make sure you’re only seeing results for leads who are actively using LinkedIn.
To use this filter, simply click the “More Filters” button and then select “Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days.”
Use filters like ‘posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days’ or ‘changed job in last 90 days’ to find the most engaged LinkedIn users and increase conversion rates on lead generation.
This will then just show you results within your search field for profiles that have been active within the last month.
Ready to take your LinkedIn lead generation to the next level?
Book a call with our team, learn more about what makes us different and whether or not our strategies would be a good fit for your business.
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