Episode 2: Which Should I Use? Personas or
Base Searches

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. 

Hi there! Stan Robinson Jr. here. I'm the Chief Coaching Officer here at Social Sales Link. And we're excited today to be talking about buyer personas, and what we call base searches. And you may be wondering what those are and I have with me Brynne Tillman, otherwise known as the LinkedIn whisperer, and of course, LinkedIn expert and sales professional as well. So Brynne, how are you today?

Brynne Tillman  01:08

Oh, I'm great, Stan. And I am so excited to talk about these two features really on Sales Navigator, because a lot of folks miss sales preferences, which is something that went away about six months ago. And so talk to us a little bit about the things that we're going to talk about today.

Stan Robinson, Jr  01:31

Yes. So for those of you kind of Sales Nav old timers, as Brynne mentioned, you may remember sales preferences and how you're advised to set up your sales preferences, when you set up your Sales Navigator account to get the algorithm working for you, and so forth and so on. Well, as Brynne has mentioned, they discontinued sales preferences, but just so you know, sales preferences were still there for a while. But you couldn't they removed a little toggle that allowed you to enable sales preferences in a search. And I was told that well, by Sales Navigator, go ahead and set up your sales preferences anyway, because it will help the algorithm. So even though you can't, you couldn't filter your searches by the sales preferences, you took the trouble to set up, it would help the algorithm finally they took them away altogether, which makes perfect sense. And now we have buyer personas. 

Now one thing I didn't know is that sales preferences did not really influence sales, navigators lead recommendations. I kind of assumed that they did because why else would you have them? Right? But in reading about why buyer personas are different from sales preferences, they said one of the things is that those didn't influence the recommendations, whereas buyer personas do but buyer personas and basically it's a way that you can pre filter at a very basic level. And we're going to talk a lot more about how basic this is. You can pre filter some of your searches and indicate to Sales Navigator exactly who you're interested in. And basically there are four filters. 

So you have function, super prod, sales marketing, operations, and so forth. You have job title, which can be very, very helpful. You also have geography and seniority. Now, those are the only four filters and that's nice as far as it goes. But as we all know, Sales Navigator has a lot more filters. So maybe someday in the future, they may add some of the additional filters to buyer personas, which we are delighted about but right now, it is what it is. Now one nice thing about buyer personas though, even though the filters are very basic, is that they're extremely easy to get to. 

Any page you're on in the Sales Nav. You can just go to a bar on the right, I think it's just to the right of save searches. And click personas. You can set up up to five buyer personas. That's the max right now. Sales Navigator was saying that they do have two default buyer personas, which are kind of set up for you but truth be told, I never found them. So I looked, I said okay, you're telling me their defaults, but I don't see them here. So don't worry about it. You can set up a maximum of five and go from there. The last thing I'll mention, and then Brynne, I'll ask if there's anything else you had on sales, the buyer persona, before we kind of jump into more of a secret sauce is that you can also, of course, use them as a filter in your regular searches. So if you're doing a search, you can use buyer personas as a filter to kind of narrow things down in the beginning, that only applies to leads by the way, what we're talking about when it comes to buyer personas does not apply to account searches. Only lead searches.

Brynne Tillman  05:40

Oh, that's interesting, for sure! 

Stan Robinson, Jr  05:43

And if you're on an account page, like say, you're on ADP or anyone's account page, and you have the insights, and so forth on that page relationship explorer that you can kind of scroll down, you can filter, the people within that account, using any of the buyer personas that you've set up. So it will show you there's a tab for buyer personas on the account page and you can see, okay, how many people fall into this category that I set up within this particular account? And Brynne, anything that comes to mind?

Brynne Tillman  06:31

So I thought you would cover it all but now you just like I had this moment that was so intriguing. And in a sense, in that company page, when you go into that, and you click on buyer persona, there may be filters that you've chosen in that buyer persona, that will contradict the results you're looking for. So for example, you said industry was one of them, right? What was introduced? What are they?

Stan Robinson, Jr  07:07

So the the for function, job title, geography and seniority

Brynne Tillman  07:12

So okay, so the location isn't there. So that's good for this particular case. Because you're in different companies in different states and different areas. So if you create a buyer persona, so interesting, I didn't love the buyer persona before we just had this before I just learned from you. I thought, Boy, there's just not enough filters for this to be helpful or useful. But they are the right filters. If you're hopping from company page to company page, and you just want to take a quick look at who are the right people inside of that company. So they just kind of got elevated in my mind, I still think from a toggle in the search filter. It's just not enough. So that's where we're gonna jump into our secret sauce. So you open it and then hand it to me, and I'm happy to chat.

Stan Robinson, Jr  08:22

Good deal. So we do have a secret sauce. I'll mention one other thing, just so I don't forget it because I suffer from delayed intelligence. I always think of the answer that I was looking for five minutes after the conversation was over. So if any of you are using a LinkedIn product called Sales Insights. Now, if you've never heard of it, ignore what I'm about to say but if you're using it, and you say, Okay, we're talking about buyer personas, we're talking about Insights is a tab within account pages. How does this all fit together? Sales Insights is a totally different product from Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is for the sales professional, the sales reps, who are looking for opportunities, LinkedIn Sales insights, is a product for the sales operations team.

Brynne Tillman  09:18

Yeah, and you know, this was new, when we were in the green room chatting today. I didn't even know that this was an opportunity out there for operations. And this would be obvious if you were a much larger company, you know that you'd have this but it's interesting because it helps you to estimate market size and uncover whitespace in industries, like that's amazing. And it helps in designing territories in sales planning. So, you know, that's all part of that, you know, kind of advanced operations, Insight through Sales Navigator, but it's definitely caught my attention and I'm going to do a deeper dive. Yeah and by the way, you must be contagious because I have delayed intelligence as well.

Stan Robinson, Jr  10:16

Yes, I don't know, I don't say its age. The last thing I will mention, and thank you, Jenny Rock Great to see you here is in terms of what you can do with the buyer personas when you are, and I'm not quite sure, okay? When you are in an account page and you're scrolling down, there's a way that you can look at growth in the number of people who meet your buyer persona criteria within a company. So obviously, it's only going to be really relevant for larger companies, if your buyer persona is such that there are many people that fit that criteria. Sales Nav can tell you if the headcount has gone up or down or stayed the same over the past three months. 

Brynne Tillman  11:07

So I think that's a huge opportunity for lots of folks, I'm gonna throw out some industries that can really take advantage of that, or at least it traditionally, if you are a payroll company that handles larger businesses, right, and they move now from 100 to 200 employees over a certain amount of time, you can come in with, you know, the value proposition of, you know, once you get over this certain number, you need a payroll company that understands that, right? You could be a real estate company that is a commercial real estate company, and they may be looking for office space, right? You know, there are so many things that that data can help with. So I love that idea. Here's my perfect buyer. And are they in a company that's growing or shrinking? Are they in a department that's growing or shrinking? That's amazing.

Another filter in that, which, when I go into base search, we'll talk about this again. We're kind of overlapping, but it is posted in the last 30 days, that activity is also amazing. So I think because I'm going to talk about that in the base search, let's hop over to the alternative to persona. Although I'm going to take back the alternative, I'm going to say this is really a second option. It's no longer persona versus base searches. Now that I understand how we use persona in the company page, you don't have the option to do that with base searches. So what's the base search, literally, we go in and we do a lead search, in this case, lead searcher could be an account search as well. And we choose the lowest common denominator filters. So it's really like I want to bring this down. Maybe it's by title, maybe it's by location, if your territory is geographically located, maybe it's by size of company. So really, you're going through, and there's a lot but you go through every single filter, and really choose first of all, is this relevant to my search? There are some filters you might completely ignore. 

So if it's relevant, is this something that would be an almost every single solitary search that I do, right? So let's say I'm selling to the head of HR, in companies between 200 and 5,000 employees. And I have a territory of maybe, you know, five states, right, and I want a certain, you know, so I have a certain size company, I have all the HR titles, I'm doing this search. And maybe because my searches are huge. I only want people in growing companies or shrinking company, or I only want people that are active on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. Or in some cases, I only want people that have switch jobs, if you're a financial professional, and you have 401 K's to rollover. 

So whatever your base searches, you create that without relationships, it's just based search and we call it first base. Now the other one and sometimes we'll actually We, I said without a relationship button, but we may actually add that one with first degree connection. So you can decide, we're gonna go through. So let's say our first we have all the filters and our first degree connections, which makes first base make more sense but you know, now we're looking, and we have seven people that pop up. Okay, it's small. But I still want to save this because over time, that's going to grow. And this is a dynamic search. So now I'm going to come in, and now I'm going to pull in that search, and I'm going to change it from first degree to second degree. Now I'm going to identify who in my network knows my ideal people. And I am going to save that as second base. 

 And so as you know, as we go through, we have these base searches that we can pull up every single time. Now, sometimes my clients will say, you know, I only want I have Georgia, and I have South Carolina, and that's all I've got, well, you may want to separate them out, or you may even separated based search based on city, when I'm in Atlanta, I want to pull up everyone I know, or I want to know, in the five miles or 10 miles of where I'm going to be, you don't have to create a new search every single time you pull up a base search, and you just make those adjustments. And so you don't have to put in all the titles every single time and the company size every single time. You just pull up your base search and make some adjustments and I typically will use that over persona all day long but with this new information, I'm going to use persona differently than I thought it should be used and I'm excited to learn from you, Stan, what a great thing.

Stan Robinson, Jr  16:55

Same here. So yep, this is definitely a both and situation rather than an either or when it comes to using the buyer personas, and all the other filters that we have access to. And so Brynne, when you're doing those the first base and the second base searches. So you set up the search, make sure it gives you the results that you want. Save it, save the search,and then you can jump right back into your safe searches easy to find. 

Now, this is something that may have changed, but the last time I tried saving a search, and then going in and making some changes in the existing Save Search. You've got to save it again. So you're gonna wind up with two searches to save searches, not not one. So just be aware that sales nav doesn't always make it easy for you too. Well, I just want to, I want to edit this search and keep it the same name.

Brynne Tillman  18:07

Correct. But I'm okay with that. And you know, and I see both sides. But for me, that's why I call it a base search, I pull it up, and it's exactly the same every single time. So I'll tell you, here's one of the things that we do now I have my perfect base search. And I'm going to throw in one of my absolute favorites, which is connections of. So now I'm going to go see a client and I want to know, so I pull up my base search and filter “connections of,” now I can now receive that search. And I can say first base, Stan Robinson, right or second base, Stan Robinson, if I want to call that. But what I typically will do is move from this dynamic search that I couldn't control. It's really just who you know, to a static search. So I'll review and I'll say okay, so 47 people came up that Stan knows. And I'm gonna go through and now from the Saved Search, I'm now going to save leads. 

So I'll go through and identify here's this big list, I'm going to bring it down to a smaller list, identify exactly who Stan knows that I'd like to meet. And I'm going to save the lead under Stan's connections. So now I've eight or 10 or 12 saved and when I hop on the phone with him, I can quickly open that up and go through and when you save searches, you can take notes, lots of things you can do so Stan might say of these eight here are the four that I know these are the two I'm happy to introduce you to and you can drop my name on with the other two. And so we have a system in place around that when you start to embrace Sales Navigator searches. It's so fast, I pull up my second base search connections of Stan Robinson and I've got my list. It's that fast. So creating that base search will save you an enormous amount of time when you're out prospecting.

Stan Robinson, Jr  20:18

Exactly, exactly. So good. And over time, as we do more of these, we'll be diving deeper into all the different types of filters, the alerts. And so just to tease in terms of what's coming next, I'm not going to run through all of them. But yeah, but there's a lot to look forward to,

Brynne Tillman  20:43

oh, give us one or two.

Stan Robinson, Jr  20:45

Smart Links will be another one. Smart Links is one of those underutilized tools that's there. And we'll do a session on some of the filters that are in there but most of us don't either know that they're there, we've just kind of overlooked them. Sales Nav just expanded a category under Accounts called technologies used. So if there's certain products that tend to collaborate or work with your product, for example, and you would love to talk to companies and you know, software's is an example of this right off the bat. You want to talk to companies that already have SAP or Salesforce or Oracle or whatever the case may be. Now you can look up, okay. What technologies can you search by technologies used, which for some people will be a goldmine.

Brynne Tillman  21:45

Yeah, oh, I can't wait to discuss all these things. And I can't wait to discuss how we respond to the alerts that we're getting? So all good stuff. I think we have covered pretty well, I believe the topics for today. And I certainly had a whole lot of fun.

Stan Robinson, Jr  22:08

Yes, same here. So thanks, everyone for joining us. Let's see Liz shell, Jenny rock, I know we need to catch up. So thanks to all of you who are joining and to all who will be watching the replayand of course join us again, same time next week. And we look forward to sharing more tips with you.

Brynne Tillman  22:32

Yeah, inside No wait, because Stan and I are going to be together shortly in real person. And we'll have to have some kind of something to share with you. All right, guys. Thanks so much for joining us. We will talk soon.

Stan Robinson, Jr  22:50

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.