Episode 10: Leveraging Sales Navigator Relationship Explorer for Sales Engagement

Stan Robinson, Jr  00:00

Welcome to the Sales Navigator live show with Stan and Brynne. Join LinkedIn expert and sales professional Brynne Tillman, and me, Stan Robinson, Jr, Chief coaching Officer here at Social Sales Link, as we bring you the best tips and strategies for leveraging Sales Navigator for your sales success. Enjoy the show! Hey, Brynne, Happy Monday.

Brynne Tillman  00:40

Stan, happy Monday. How are you?

Stan Robinson, Jr  00:44

Very good. Thank you. Very good. Looking forward to talking a little bit about Sales Navigator. [inaudible] Explore Yes. Imagine that. 

Brynne Tillman  00:58

On our Sales Navigator show.

Stan Robinson, Jr  01:01

Yes. Well, at least we're consistent. 

Brynne Tillman  01:04

There you go.Yeah, you know, this is interesting. I'm gonna let you introduce it. But what we're going to talk about you have, I don't yet or some of it, you have, and I don't yet. So I got to experience it this morning when we were kind of practicing for today and I am so excited about it. And hopefully, as you know, we have folks that are joining us today and then in the replay, and then in the podcast, but in time this is out in the world, everyone will have it but I'm going to hand it back to you to introduce what this mystery thing is.

Stan Robinson, Jr  01:39

Yes, it it is rolling out. I mistakenly assumed that everyone would probably have the new view of it. Now, we're talking about Relationship Explorer. And this is a feature that you'll find when you click into any account on Sales Nav and it's designed basically to help you better understand the structure of an organization, or at least that's how you can use it. Now this is not, don't get too excited. It's when I say I understand the structure of an organization, the AI is not to the point where it can do an org chart chart for us yet (we tried.) Yes, some day because that's that, I'm sure that's where things are headed, they'll just be able to say, hey, here's the org chart or maybe not because of privacy concerns, who knows. But it does give you among other things, a chance to map out the decision makers within an organization as you see them. 

Now I'm kind of getting that head of myself just a little bit. So let me slow down. When you click into an account page, you've got your basic contact information website and so forth at the top. But above the fold, you don't even have to scroll, you will see Relationship Explorer. Now, what they're rolling out is a slightly new view of Relationship Explorer but whether you've got the old or the new version, you'll still see a relationship explorer right at the top. And what that is, is a view of employees within that account, that you can filter by personas, if you've already set up personas, so this is yet another application for personas. 

So if you're looking at like an ADP or something with 1000s of employees, and you want to start to narrow things down to your ICP, the decision makers you're after. If you've set up a buyer persona in advance, you can filter by that if you haven't set one up. You can set it up right there. So go ahead, Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  04:10

I have it. I did not have it this morning and I have it now. (Oh my goodness.) So maybe it is rolling out to everyone. So this is exciting. What I love. So if I can rewind two weeks ago, we talked about setting up persona and when we set up personas it really helps us to use almost like you know one click for quite a few filters so that we don't have to do them over and over and over again. And while I still believe there's not enough filters in Persona, there are quite a lot and actually the way that we're using it here makes sense, right? Because if I use too many filters in a Persona like location, and then I pop into a company, and I choose that persona. It's going to kill my search. So now that I see the vision of where LinkedIn is going with persona, I think it's fabulous. So, you know, if you go in and did you say we can have five persona now? Correct.

Stan Robinson, Jr  05:23

That is the last count that I've seen. 

Brynne Tillman  05:27

Okay. So this means that we can go in from a strategic perspective, and build out, maybe you build out the C suite, maybe you build out your, your buyers, or you know, your decision makers or your wallet holders. Maybe you have your influencers or your shoppers who are going out to find information, and buy, but when you click through, so now I'm playing and I'm inside of Oracle. And when I get in there, and I go to my sales leaders, that's my persona. And I have a couple of other filters on seniority level, and region. I am getting and this is amazing. So I'm searching for all of these people. And it's also showing me my mutual connections. And by the way, I'm seeing a ton of people that worked at Dun and Bradstreet, Stan and I both work there at different times in different locations, but it's showing those areas that we have in common. So I'm gonna hand it back to you to talk about, but I will go a little more tactical, but I really want to look strategically how this can save an enormous amount of time for people that are hunting.

Stan Robinson, Jr  06:50

Yes, exactly. Exactly. So when you get in there, you'll see things organized by people, by buyer intent, by insights and then at the very bottom alerts. Now, it's funny, Bryynne and I were talking before this, and we were saying, Okay, where can we filter this by? What spotlights because one filter that is super, super helpful, is posted on LinkedIn within the last 30 days, because you can see who's active and likely to respond and likely to engage. Up to this point, I haven't found an easy way to do it. Brynne, one of the things that Sales Navs does is they refer to things like shared connections and education, shared experience. Sometimes that's a little bit conflated and some of their support, people may call it spotlights, but it's not exactly the same thing.

Brynne Tillman  07:59

Yeah, it's slightly… it's not it's not the complete thing. We’ll say that.

Stan Robinson, Jr  08:03

Right? Exactly.

Brynne Tillman  08:07

Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry.

Stan Robinson, Jr  08:09

I was just gonna say and we're biased, because the one that we just use over and over again, is posted on LinkedIn the past 30 days but there are others, like when people have changed jobs, which leads to opportunities, both their past company and the company that they've moved to if you're already connected to them. So before I move further down the page, we talked about people, and we're going to get into a little bit further down where there's a relationship map. which they're adding some cool new features too, as well but we talked about people, we also talked about intent. Now buyer intent. You may or may not get results on that, because their LinkedIn is looking at things like people in your company who have connected with folks at your target company. Whether people at your target company have followed your company, and other metrics, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is there about 180 different things that they look at, to determine buyers.

Brynne Tillman  09:24

And we get to see three or four of them occasionally.

Stan Robinson, Jr  09:27

Yes, occasionally.

Brynne Tillman  09:29

Let's talk about that account map, though. I think that's an important one.

Stan Robinson, Jr  09:33

Yes. Now the account map. One thing I noticed recently in playing with it is the account map is where you can pull in decision makers into what looks like an org chart or a map. So say you, you interact with the sales organization and you say okay, well, you've got a chief revenue officer. So at the top, now who reports to them, well, maybe VPs of sales, and then maybe directors, managers, etc, you can actually pull those people into your map. When I say pull the people, it's basically, you know, you select the person, you can click add to the map, and their little profile picture appears there and then you can also attach people to them. They don't make it extremely intuitive, unfortunately, because you kind of have to do things in reverse. For example, if you pull in the CRO, you can't say, Okay, let me put in the people that report to the CRO, you've got to put in people that you think report to the CRO, and then add basically, managed by. So I'm not there now but so you have to play with it a little bit to see how to attach people your reporting to.

Brynne Tillman  11:15

So this is so interesting right now and so I don't have the update here on the bottom half. I still have tier one, tier two and tier three and so that's how it's been for a long time, right? So you save a lead. And then you add a lead and you decide what tier. This update, which I don't have yet, I got half the update, this update that I don't have yet in the buyer mapping piece. I think ultimately what's going to happen, the org chart. So I think that's the ultimate goal. 

Now, we don't have a ton of information on this. So I actually like the idea that you can still add people and then as we're having conversations internally, we can start linking them appropriately as we learn more. But I think it's a move in the right direction for sure. And I do think that if we start to use this well, it's really going to help us socially surround a company. 

Now there was something else you were sharing that I don't have either where you could actually mark them, and they were color coded in champion influencer. I can't see it on mine.  Tell us a little bit about what that looks like.

Stan Robinson, Jr  12:41

These rollouts are fascinating in terms of how they do it, then what they do and don't do. So when you're looking at, say, all employees on a list and in relationship explorer, you'll just see the profile, but once you add a person to the map, you will see a drop down. Now the default will be no role. But as Brynne mentioned, as soon as you click that drop down, you'll be able to choose from decision maker champion procurement influencer. And there's one other that will come to me when I stop thinking about it but the point is, you'll be able to start to clearly delineate, Okay, where do each of these people fall in the buying process?

Brynne Tillman  13:39

So I love this. Yeah. So now I'm going to throw in a strategy. I want you guys to start thinking about creating smart links for each of these Personas. So that you are prepared with content for the influencer, for the champion, for the procurement, right, like we want to start thinking about when we identify the right people that we have the right content. Remember, we're working with collaborative buyers today. I mean, every time we see a new statistic, there are more people involved in a purchase. And I love that they're including procurement here. While procurement, their biggest role is to negotiate a lower price. That's what procurement's role is right? But if we can start to share value early on with procurement, we may have a better shot at in our negotiation, right? 

So finding these different roles and categorizing them allows us to reach out with the right content at the right time. And I think it's important so now what? Now we know we have this tool, what are we going to do with it? You know, as a team lead, or even if you're an individual doing this. I want you to start by looking… and once you have this, I still have when, I do the drop down, I still have tier one, tier two, tier three. 

So as they start to roll this out, start to define these categories for you. Identify who is it that you're speaking with? And what content can you develop and create in a SmartLink that can ultimately bring value to these folks so that when we are reaching out, we've already curated content that will bring value to them in their particular role. And by the way, this is something that very few people are doing, but you can upload a short little video, a welcome video, welcome procurement professional, you know, we're really excited to be considered to got to, to be considered as a new vendor for you know, for your sales team, below or so and then walk them through, below are some pieces of content that I think will help you understand a little bit about our value proposition and what we're bringing to your team. 

And then you have one, hello, sales leader, hello, right, whatever. And you can literally have this content hub ready for them. So the one thing  that I would love and wish that Sales Navigator Smart Links could do is that you could copy a hub, when it was point drive, you could literally copy it. And so you could add something that had their logo in it instead of having to re-upload everything every time and you can share it with other team members. So I'm going to throw out that that's the next thing I want Smart Links to do.

Stan Robinson, Jr  17:02

Yes. So that is our latest request and the Sales Navigator has gotten better about listening to what we're asking.

Brynne Tillman  17:13

I am loving this, this Sales Solutions team. They're fabulous. So very exciting.

Stan Robinson, Jr  17:20

Yes, indeed. And they are, in the process of transitioning to the slightly new look. So as you play with the tool, don't get frustrated. Everything will come and it will be in place. Okay, there are things that they need to do. They do need to make it easier to move people to the account map. You should just be able to drag the person from people into the account map instead of having to type their name in and then hit Add to add them in their user experience. 

So one thing Brynne, I looked at it and I misspoke. When you're putting together the account map, you do want to start with the highest level person, which, you know, intuitively logically makes sense and then as you add people below them, each person you add below them, you'll have the option to Add manager and when you click on Add manager, you'll get a list of the other people who are in the account map and you just select the one that they report too so that's why you want to start with the highest level person, then add the others. 

Now, originally, when they came out with this account map, it was just three tiers. As a matter of fact, I think you could only put three people on a tier in the beginning and they quickly got the word that we need more than three people on a tier because of how things happened and they did that. They've also just from what I've seen, expanded the levels. So it used to be three. I've gone out to five. I haven't had time to see if it goes beyond that but you can at least go five levels deep in an organization and in most cases, you probably aren't going to go much beyond that, quite frankly, for org charts but play with it and see what you find and let us know also.

Brynne Tillman  19:32

Yes, please. We would love to know. So this is just you know, another great feature rolling out from Sales Navigator, and we'll keep you updated with other new ones as time goes on.

Stan Robinson, Jr  19:46

Yes.

Brynne Tillman  19:47

Well, thank you, Stan. I think you know as we wrap this up, guys, take advantage of Sales Navigator, we believe it is the most amazing sales tool when you're using it the right way. And you know, if you have a Sales Navigator license, and you're underutilizing it, and you have a light pipeline, maybe it's time to start really thinking about what you can do to use Sales Navigator better. We have every single month, Be our guest to coaching. So if you go to socialsaleslink.com/events and scroll down, you can join our coaching on our Be Our Guest to Coaching, bring your Sales Navigator questions and Stan and I will be thrilled to answer them. So Stan, any last words before we roll this out?

Stan Robinson, Jr  20:44

That is it for today Brynne. Of course more to come always Sales Navigator just keeps adding great new features and we will be staying on top of them for you. 

Outro 20:57

Thanks for listening and join us again for more insights on Sales Navigator and social selling strategies that will differentiate you from your competitors and accelerate your sales success. In the meantime, you can go to socialsaleslink.com/library for free content on LinkedIn Sales Navigator and social selling.