davisbauer
Davis Bauer
Entrepreneur. I love building websites and brands. Founder of UA Campus Pantry, a college food bank and one of the most important projects I’ve ever done.
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My Experience with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
I had a very positive experience with LinkedIn’s Sales Platform, available with the monthly purchase of a Premium account. I can now give my review based upon my experience with the platform’s dashboard, lead generation, “InMail” feature, and pipeline.
First, the drawbacks: the only truly negative experience I had was the amount of InMail credits I received with the purchase. The InMail credits you’re allotted per month is 15. As a marketer and seller using social media daily, this number is pretty low, especially for the price you pay on this particular platform. However, this just means you have to make your messages concise, but most of all, MEMORABLE!
The dashboard that LinkedIn gives you is second to none. It’s very sleek and intuitive. It gives you the opportunity to build your “master” sales lists of sorts upon signing up for the package. First, you select the region you’re going to be prospecting, the types of companies you’re looking to sell, and the process is fairly self-explanatory. However, I can’t stress enough how important it is to pay attention to this process, because these are the leads that you’re left to prospect upon LinkedIn generating the prospect list for you. There’s no “going back” after you’ve done so.
Aside from the dashboard and other cosmetic features, the sales navigator covered all of my bases for lead generation. However, I wish the system was intelligent enough to “vet” leads that it generated for you. If it gave its’ customers a chance to pursue leads that were worthwhile, I think this feature will take off even more for LinkedIn. Think about it. If I’m selling online, I only want to message active users that use LinkedIn on a consistent basis. It would be cool if the company sifted out all of the leads that hadn’t logged onto their profile for the last month. Since the company doesn’t seem to have any features to denote whether a prospect is even worth spending an InMail credit on, you have to stalk their profile. There may be clues to see if they’re active users, but again, you never know.
If you’re skeptical about your sales message even making it to someone’s email address, there is good news. To counteract the fact you can’t tell how active users are, LinkedIn sends your message directly to their email, so it’s guaranteed that it will be received by the prospect. Upon receiving your initial sales message, the prospect can “accept” or “decline” your message. If they outright decline the message, they still see your pitch-sadly it also means that they are not interested. Receiving this instant feedback is still helpful. If you receive a reply to your message, it will show up in your dashboard, along with the prospect’s comments to your message. From there, you can bookmark worthwhile leads into your sales pipeline.
To give you further insight into how the cycle of messaging a potential buyer goes, I messaged a mid-size real estate company in southern Arizona. I sent a direct InMail to the Vice President of the company. It took a month to get a reply. Except, I didn’t hear any word from this person. However, I did notice that he took the time to look at my profile on LinkedIn. So even though my InMail got ignored, you still need to take the time to reach back out to someone like this in a new way the second time around. For the next touch, I would probably call him and talk to him a little more about who I was and try to break the ice with him a bit more.
I had messaged 15 leads and 5 of them replied to me. I consider that a fairly good rate for mining leads straight from one website like LinkedIn, so I would say the purchase is worth it. Try it for one month for yourself like I did. Just understand the critiques you’ll have to potentially make to your online selling style to better engage buyers.
Are there any other customer relationship management (CRM) tools you’re utilizing for your business? Is it having a positive impact? I’d love to hear about it, so send me a message and tell me about it!
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