Episode 7: To Save or Not to Save, That is the Question (for Sales Navigator)

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! And there we are. How are you doing, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:29

I am good. Can you believe it's been a week since we were here?

Stan Robinson, Jr.  00:32

The time does fly. I don't know if it's the summer or what the deal is.

Brynne Tillman  00:38

Either way, it's certainly not a week since we've been together back at LinkedIn last week. Having a wonderful time. But this is such a great topic that we're talking about today. Because most of us do it wrong, including us. So this is gonna be fun to talk about today. Why don't you get us started?

Stan Robinson, Jr.  01:01

Yes. So we were just talking about this backstage or off mic so to speak, or whatever you call it in the green room? To save or not to save? That is the question. And one of the features of Sales Navigator is that you have the ability to save accounts and to save leads. Now you can't do this on LinkedIn. And when we're talking about saving accounts and saving leads in this context, this is different from saving searches. Okay, when you save a search, you can get email alerts, and so forth. This is related, but this is not that. 

This is when you come across a particular prospect that meets all your search filters, and it looks great. Or you see and say you have a list of target accounts. You're using account based sales and I have to target this, this and this accounts, so I can save them. And one of the things that saving leads and accounts does is it drives all the activity on your Sales Navigator homepage. So that's one of the reasons why it's so important. So any thoughts before I go beyond that? Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  02:24

Yeah, you know, the last thing you said is really important. What we save drives our news feed. The accounts that we save the people that we save but one of the reasons well, I don't want to use the word but one of the reasons I love Sales Navigator so much is because we have this personalized news feed. When we're on linkedin.com, the mothership in the homepage, we have two filters, top and recent. That's it. And then it's noise upon noise upon noise. When we get into Sales Navigator, we have the opportunity to completely customize what we're seeing but if we do this wrong, which believe me, I have, and continue to do. So this is a work in progress is that we create a news feed that becomes noisy, like the linkedin.com news feed. And it's not as purposeful. 

So I'm going to start with the goal of the saved leads and accounts is to drive a news feed, I'm going to make up a number that is 90% actionable. Meaning nine out of 10 things that you see in your newsfeed are a value to your prospecting efforts, or are something that you should or could be doing that is effective and productive. If you're scrolling through your Sales Navigator newsfeed and its reverse one out of 10 is actionable. We need to clean it up. So our save or not to save conversation is also unsaved. So that's sort of my mindset and getting started here.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  04:37

Yep. Great. Awesome. Yeah, and what Brynne mentioned about Save Leads and Save  Accounts drive your homepage activity. That is the beauty of Sales Nav. We love LinkedIn. Brynne and, I love LinkedIn with a big heart. But when it comes to the time that you're spending selling, you want to get as much as you can, from that time in terms of productivity. And that's where Sales Navigator is a beautiful thing. 

So I realize that some of you are listening to this are Sales Nav Pros, some may be just getting set up in Sales Nav. I guess to both audiences, one of the things you want to make sure of is that you do save your existing clients in Sales Navigator and add them to a list because saving accounts and saving leads, yes, it signals the algorithm, it drives the activity that you'll see. So that's how you talk to the algorithm in terms of your own activity and which you do. And we'll talk more about lists  in a future episode. In the next week, we'll talk more because these go hand in glove, saving endless, because lists will allow you to really leverage. 

So when you're saving, you're talking to the algorithm with the list, those are for you because you can use the list to include, exclude accounts and leads from your searches and we'll go into all of that but those were the main things that I wanted to mention. 

Now, from a tactical standpoint, we mentioned you can save both leads and accounts. When you save a lead Sales Nav automatically saves the associated account with that lead as well because I was experimenting and said, Well, this is what it's supposed to do but why didn't that happen? But usually, that's what you should expect.

Brynne Tillman  07:01

You want to check it though, because sometimes I have more than one current position. So I'm on the board of a chamber of commerce that I have listed as a position. So LinkedIn is going to make its best guess to tag you to the right company. So it will automatically do it. It used to ask you which company would you like to connect this lead with? It doesn't do that anymore. It takes its best guess. So just double check. That's all.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  07:39

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So. And usually

Brynne Tillman  07:43

Ohh, wait, can I say one more thing? This is an opportunity where you may unsave. So maybe you saved me as a lead? Sure. That'd be awesome, right? And it automatically potentially saves me under the Chamber of Commerce because you know, that's what LinkedIn decided to do today. 

Social Sales Link is not saved. However, that's probably the account that you're prospecting, because I have no power over the Chamber of Commerce decisions, right? So what happens now is okay, I recognize that it's saved to the wrong account or Social Sales Link was not saved. So I'm just going to check and if you visit the Social Sales Link page, it will let you know if it's a saved account or not, you'll be able to tell. If it's not, you want to save that but you may want to unsave the Chamber of Commerce, because that's what that content is what's going to present too much noise in your newsfeed where that becomes something that's never necessarily actionable. 

It's okay if you forget to do it at the moment but when you see that in the news feed, you can actually unsave that account in real time. So there may be nothing that comes over from the chamber but six months from now you're like, Oh, I've seen three things from this chamber. I want it out of here! You can unsave that. So that’s a save or not save. I saved accidentally, how do I fix it?

Stan Robinson, Jr.  09:33

Yes, yes. So thank you. Yeah, because there's so much and very shortly we're going to be talking a little bit more about unsaving and kind of cleaning up to make sure that your newsfeed stays relevant. One small thing is we're used to the fact that when you look at someone's profile or someone looks at you, you can see who's viewed you on LinkedIn, which is wonderful. Now, when you save a lead, though, they don't know that you've saved them, they never get notified that, hey, Brynne just saved the lead at Aramark, or whatever the case may be. Okay, so there's no notification, you don't have to worry about that at all, it's not the same as Oh, who's viewed your profile scenario. 

So one of the things that we were talking about is okay, a lot of us have a tendency to get, I don't know what to call it, a happy prospect. And, it's so easy to save. What we tend to do a lot of times is save too many leads and accounts. Or sometimes you may change territories and your focus may change but a lot of times, it's easy to forget that, you know, I'm working with Sales Navigator trying to get it to be a great tool for me to stay focused. to signal the algorithm. You want to remember, if you're changing territories, your account, focus your product, focus, go back and do some cleanup in Sales Nav, so that it's not feeding you old information. And as Brynne mentioned, you can keep your news feed current and relevant.

Brynne Tillman  11:24

I love that. I really, that's so great. So you know, one of the things that you can do is filter by all accounts. So I think that's a good thing, right? You could go in and quickly look through all accounts, you can do a few things right, you can remove alerts, or you can unsaved an account. Now, if you go to unsaved an account, it will actually ask you if you want to unsaved the entire account and all the leads associated with that account. So if you do it from an account perspective, it can actually really clean it up. You know, I'm curious, I have to think through this if we did this from a leads perspective, and we go to unfollow a lead if we unsaved a lead. I think it is just unsave the lead, it does not do the account itself. I'm going to double triple check that but I'm pretty sure that's the case. So you may want to do this, if you have things that change, you may want to start on the count basis, what happens is maybe you've saved four or five leads in account, you no longer have this account, you're not prospecting this account, and you're gonna get noise. So yeah, so that's a great recommendation, Stan, I like that.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  12:57

Yep. So our whole goal is to reduce the noise so that you can stay focused on the sales opportunities. And one golden nugget that Brynne gave you at the beginning of this, which is just a great way to kind of check yourself. If you find yourself scrolling through your Sales Navigator news feed. And you're not seeing opportunities to start sales conversations based on the information that you're seeing. Something's wrong.

Brynne Tillman  13:34

Yeah, right. That's so important. So if I go through 567 I guess shares or why can I think of the word in the news? Yeah, yeah, the alert, right? I go through five. And I'm like, huh, Stacy shared content, but I don't feel like engaging on that, or I don't need to engage with Stacy. Rethink Stacy as a lead. If you go through that and say, yep, I see her. She's shared content. And if I'm not so this is something Stan, we talked about, you know, Marie Kondo, right?

Stan Robinson, Jr.  14:17

Yes. It’s been a while.

Brynne Tillman  14:20

So yeah, in the middle of the pandemic, it was the biggest Netflix thing ever. She was the organizer, and I took away so many little fun things from her from a business perspective. I also invested tons in closets, organizers, but that's another story for another day. But from a Sales Navigator perspective, she really inspired me right? So part of her concept was you take all your stuff, and you hold it and you say does this bring me joy? And if it brings me joy, I'm keeping it. And if I'm like, it's gonna go in the maybe pile. And if I'm like, Nope, it goes in the goodbye pile. So when you are going through your Sales Navigator homepage, which is supposedly completely customized to what you want to see, and you're starting to see things that people, things, people, and shares and triggers and alerts that don't bring you joy, unsave.I mean, it's that simple. Like, yep, this is no longer a priority. If you're going to skip over them, they're not a high priority for you and it's probably taking up too much brain space to go through. 

Now, that being said, let's say, Okay, there's still a prospect, but they're not a high priority. And if it happens, that's great. But you're not going to actively go after them. That's totally fine. You can actually keep them saved but hide the alerts. So you know, so you're not constantly seeing them, but they're still saved in your prospect world. We've talked about filters and searches before but when you save accounts into lists, Stan, you mentioned this earlier in your searches, you can include or exclude those saved leads. And that's it. That's a big deal, right? Like that's important. So you may want to keep people saved, especially for exclusion. So you just just tagged them the right way.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  16:54

Yep. Yep, exactly. And exclusion. When we talk about lists, we'll talk a little bit more about the ability to exclude, which is another wonderful feature of Sales Navigator, it's not always obvious how powerful the exclusion filter is but once you start playing with it, you say, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense.” So, yep, so Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  17:20

Yeah! You know, I could go on and on about this but how far did we get into our points?

Stan Robinson, Jr.  17:27

So, truth be told, we're almost about to wrap up in terms of, believe it or not, in terms of to save or not to save. The philosophical part was Marie Kondo and cleaning and when you pick something up, it's Can I not part with this? Or do I have to think about whether I cannot part with this, or I'd never want to see this again. 

Brynne Tillman  17:57

And categorize it, right, make sure you categorize it. There are some times not to throw too many wrenches in this, but there is the maybe pile. And you may want to actually create a list called maybe. I'm not ready to delete them and unsaved them but I'm not sure. And so you can save the people in more than one list. And you can have a “Maybe” list that you can go back to, but you want to clean out your LinkedIn closet, quarterly. Really take a look and clean it up. You will also in the time doing this find opportunities, you'll be like, “Oh, I forgot about that.” So lots of good stuff there. I will hand it to you to put a bow on it.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  18:53

Yes, so thank you. We've kind of been teasing you a little by mentioning lists a few times. Because that is a natural segue from the ability to save your accounts and your leads, just so that you don't forget about them as Brynne mentioned, if you don't want to see as many alerts you can hide the alerts but keep an account or lead still saved. So that you can include or exclude them from searches and so forth. So with that, stay tuned. Now just a heads up. We are going to be traveling. So you know just keep your ears peeled in terms of the time which which may change next week for those that are used to to joining as Live.

Brynne Tillman  19:46

Definitely a different time, live. If you're listening to this in podcast or recording. They won't matter whatsoever but we will be at a different time next week, but we'll create an event and we'll let you know.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  20:03

Exactly, exactly. So we'll give you plenty of notice as far as that goes. All right and that is it for today. Brynne. Thank you. I love Marie Kondo, the philosophy side of it, because that's something we can all relate to.

Brynne Tillman  20:24

Awesome. Thanks, Stan, we’ll see you next week.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  20:28

Yep. All right. Bye, everyone. 

Outro  20:32

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.