Episode 8: Sales Navigator Lists for Organized Prospecting

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  00:43

I'm good. I'm excited about today's program.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  00:47

Yes, today we're going to be talking about Sales Navigator’s Lists Feature. And even though it doesn't sound that exciting, once you start to see what you can do with it. It is exciting.

Brynne Tillman  01:02

I agree. I'm thrilled. And even you know, in the pre show, when we're sitting down and writing down this list, I'm like, I need to do that more. I need to do more of that. This is so powerful. So it was a great reminder for me too. So let's get started. Let's dive right in.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  01:22

And, yes, so lists. Lists apply to both accounts, and leads. Now once you've saved, this all starts with saving an account, or saving a lead. Once you save an account or lead, you can add it to a list of your choosing. And you create your list. So how you choose to set them up, we're going to be making some suggestions but it's up to you. And you can add a lead or account to more than one list. So you can kind of slice and dice your leads and accounts as it makes sense based on what you're trying to do and we're going to talk about a few scenarios in terms of organizing your lists, but lists. They help you stay organized. They help you manage your activity. So Brynne, any thoughts just as far as the whys of lists. 

Brynne Tillman  02:26

Well one other thing when you're saving leads, whether they're in a list or not. But typically, when you're saving a lead, we want you to put them in lists, because it does help to organize. But now LinkedIn is aware that this is a prospect of yours and because they're saved their activity, and any activity inside of that organization is now going to be fed to you in your news feed as as triggers to start conversations. Although we're not going to talk a lot about that trigger, we've done that before, we've had those conversations about how to use the news feed. Really, to your point, Stan, and I love this, we control who's in this list, right? When you do a search on LinkedIn and you save a search, it's dynamic, right? If you connect with someone new today, that may very much change who's coming up in that list based on their network. So we don't control a saved search, we do control the same leads that go into our lists both accounts and leads. So that's my input. Let's dive into some of the tactics.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  03:46

Yes, there's so many variations. Now, one thing that you'll see once you start creating lists, and here I'm talking specifically about lead lists.When you go to the tab that shows you all of your lists. So when you click on lead, you'll see all of your lists and one thing you'll see are system generated lists that come up just automatically and you may say, “Well, I didn't create these were these from?” and basically there are three categories of them. One is called recommended leads. And these are clearly marked as system generated. So you know that Sales Nav have created it for you, you didn't do it. That's why it's there. And what we understand from LinkedIn is that they update this list. Brynne is that every Monday?

Brynne Tillman  04:43

I think so. I think every Monday this list gets for everyone.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  04:50

Yeah, and as the name recommended leads implies, these are leads that Sales Navigator is recommending that you look at based on your activity, what you've saved in the past buyer intent signals and so forth. Okay, so you'll see that.

Brynne Tillman  05:08

Is it typically 100 a week, it seems to me that it's about 100 a week.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  05:14

Yep, it’s up to 100 a week, every week. So it's like Sales Navigator is feeding you potential leads. The next one is new executives at saved accounts. And what they're defining as executives is C suite, and VP level. So they are, again, trying to help us with opportunities for sales conversations, and just staying on top of what's happening in our saved accounts. So when a new CEO, C suite executive joins the company, or VP level, you're getting a list of those for your saved accounts and then the last one is a list of recently accepted connection requests. So when you have invited people to connect, and they accept, and responses to your InMails. So it's just a quick way for you to see, okay, who's actually responded to my invitations to connect, and when I've sent in mails, so they're trying to make your life easier, as far as follow up.

Brynne Tillman  06:25

I love this. And this opportunity. These are new folks that have accepted or responded, gives us  very easy way to send welcome messages. They've accepted your invitation, and tells you how long ago they accepted it. But at that point, we can save them in a list if they haven't been saved, yet, there's a good chance some of these folks you just connected with on mobile or on desktop, and you weren't consciously thinking about Sales Navigator at the time. And so now we can go back through all these new connections that we made, and save them to appropriate lists.

And this has been huge in my world, because I tend to be quick, you know, looking through my connections . Sometimes I always send a welcome message and ask them how they found me but I'm not really organizing the follow up side to this. And so the fact that there should be every Monday, we can see everyone we connected with the week before and Sales Navigator, it allows us to remind us to follow up. It allows us to categorize so I think this is something that we all really should be using because I think that everyone is guilty of “connect and forget” a little bit, right. And so this helps us to really stay in touch with those new connections. And we connected with them for a reason. Let's keep that conversation going. So I love that one.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  08:13

Yep, that is such a great point because everyone's busy. And know someone accepts your connection request. You send them a response to keep the conversation going. All of that is great but then the Sales Nav helps to remind you to organize it. So yes, both stay engaged, but also organize it for future follow up. So that's such a great point.

Brynne Tillman  08:41

Yeah, and I'm underutilizing that this year. One of the things that I'm actually going, boy, I know this, why am I not doing this? And that was one of the things today I'm like, you know, I'm this high on my list to take advantage of because I until I'm talking with you, Stan, and I learned from you every day. I've been relatively ignoring those system generated lead lists because I'm like, I'm really good at building my own lead lists. Why do I need their recommendations? But it's not helping me and I may never look at those 100 I don't know like this system generated based on my sales process but I know that every Monday I'm now putting it on my my activities list to go to those new connections and accepted In-males.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  09:42

Yep, thanks. Thanks. Yep, I know! When I see  “system generated”, that's almost like an automatic turnoff for me. And now what we're trying to remind everyone is look at those because they can help you

Brynne Tillman  10:01

I love it. And there's one more you mentioned.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  10:04

So the ones we talked about were the recommended leads.

Brynne Tillman  10:08

Those I pretty much ignore. I just will say, I'm chatty right now. But if you are really looking for leads, and you don't have a great list, like I have a very purposeful list, and I have so many on that list that I don't want, like the recommended leads for me are like squirrels, right? Like I lose, right? So if you are in a situation where you're like, I don't have a [inaudible] well, if you reach out to us, but if you're in a situation where you don't have a great list, this is not a bad place to start. But as we mentioned, the second one, the recently accepted connections and InMails. Huge. And the third one, I think is really important too.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  10:55

Yes, yep, the new executives at your saved account. So that's a list of executives, and they come up, because they are new to accounts that you have saved. 

Brynne Tillman  11:11

Yeah! Absolutely. And you know, I'm looking at mine today based on this conversation. And I have two major prospects that have two major decision makers that have just started working there. And, you know, just reaching out and introducing myself welcoming them, talking a little bit about how I've worked with a couple other people inside of their organization. If we didn't talk about this today, I would have missed this too. So we have a lot more to talk about around lists. But this is a big one, make sure that every Monday you're looking at –at least those two generated lists.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  11:51

Good deal. Alright. Next week, we wanted to talk about different categories of lists, and you create your own lists categories, apart from those three system generated categories we talked about. So one super important one, that's actually easy to forget, is your list of clients. You have an existing book of business, you have clients that you're already working with and a lot of times our tendency is to say, “Well, I'm already working with them, I talked to them regularly. Why should I put them on a list?” I know who they are, I have to move my CRM, etc, etc, etc. But there are reasons. 

One, and this is one that Brenda has mentioned when we were talking before, is because it helps you keep up with staff changes. And that's one thing that, again, Brynne mentioned we learn from each other because it's like, oh, yeah, I never even thought about that. But that's the power of LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. Anything you'd like to add just about the importance of client lists.

Brynne Tillman  13:01

Yeah. So it's interesting. And this is a question, Stan, to your point that people will say, and I save my accounts, save all the people that you work with that you talk to the influencer, the buyer, the users of your product or service. One of the reasons and my primary reason is it will trigger activity. So you mentioned you know, if there's staff changes, so if my buyer leaves, I want to know that right away. If someone else is hired in a position, maybe my buyer's boss, I want to know that right away. I don't want to be blindsided when I come back to sign my contract next year, and they're like, who are you? 

So that's one thing, the other thing is your buyer is probably going somewhere else. So that also opens up an opportunity into their new company and the sooner you can talk with them, the more likely they will be to put you in their overarching plan if you've brought them value when they bought from you in the first place. So I'm keeping up with those things that are really important. The other thing you might see are mergers and acquisitions when your client buys a company or is purchased. All of this is just insights that can help you attract and retain your current clients and I mean attract in a way that…

So there are new people in the organization. Maybe you can cross solve all the way through and have other opportunities. I had an opportunity a few years ago that came through Sales Navigator, the CEO left. I never got that prospect. I'm sorry. not the CEO, the CRO, left from one client. And I had been prospecting for a while, went to a new client. I congratulated him. We chatted and within the first two or three weeks of his new role, I was training his team. Never sold them at the other company, but I did it at this one, so shout out to Darryl wasn't at Vanilla Soft anymore and now he's with Agora post, and we're thrilled that Agora post became our client. So, anyway…

Stan Robinson, Jr.  15:45

Yeah, that's such a great example because most times, and Brynne, you can let us know what your experiences are but most times when people change companies, they don't ping you. They don't ping the person that's been prospecting them and say, “Hey, by the way, I'm changing companies.” but they will update their LinkedIn profile. Yeah, that's how you get the signal that hey, I need to talk to this person.

Brynne Tillman  16:15

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love Sales Navigator so much!

Stan Robinson, Jr.  16:24

Yes, and, and so by the way, I know we jumped into talking about these different categories. These apply to both accounts and leads. So we started with a client list. So your client accounts, and the stakeholders within those accounts.Next is prospects. And the same logic applies to them, save your prospect accounts, and then save the people that you're dealing with and want to deal with within those accounts as leads. So account list is one prospect list is another. And of course, you'll be continually updating these as you come across new prospects. Just remember to save them to appropriate lists. 

Now, one of the things, Brynne, that you are talking about is subcategories. Where which can tie in whether it be industry geography. Can you talk just a little bit about okay…

Brynne Tillman  17:37

Why do you want to do that? Yeah, so I mean, you can do these subcategories with clients and prospects but I really want to focus on prospects right now, for a moment. Let's say you're working with five or six different industries. And you know, we work with a lot of bankers, we work with a lot of insurance people that sell potentially to partners or to wealthy families, or to, like they've got all these different categories of the people that they're prospecting. So saving them in appropriate lists based on those categories. Makes it really easy when you find content that you want to share, based on an industry that we can pull up that list and we can easily share that with everyone. 

Geography - Now there you can for sure, pull up a list. And then search geography like you can use those saved lists in a search but if you let's say you have clients that have people all over the country, or wherever that might be, you may want to save each of them in their own where the city that they sit, not necessarily the headquarters, but the city where they sit. So if you  have a headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, but they have 17 offices around the country. And I'm going to Reno Nevada, I want to look at what prospects I have saved that are in Reno. 

And so I can save them in a specific geography if I want to. But there are lots of different carriers. And that's not for everyone. You may say, Nope, the search is enough for me or the industry searches enough for me. But the way that we work is that we are often sharing content with specific folks, that's a lot of how we nurture our prospects is through value. And so by making it easy to pull them up in one list and not have to do a deep search and figure it out and all this stuff, we've got one place. It's a simple task. 

Now one last thing on this list. I put out a poll at least once a month, if not twice. And part of my strategy in a poll is to invite people to vote on that poll. But it's got to be the right people. So if I put out a poll, let's say I'm going after insurance, right, we've been or technology, right, or the, or channel partners, or whatever that is. And I, let's say, channel partners, because that's a group that we work with closely. 

So we can say, “Channel partners, what do you do to attract? In a poll, what do you do to attract distributors?” And we're gonna have a poll. And now we can go right to our list of all the channel partners that we've been in engagement with and say, “Hey, I'd love your one click vote on this” And they're all right there. So it's really categorizing, making this simple, making it seamless. These lists can really do that. I kind of went all over the place on that, Stan, but hopefully, I made sense.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  21:10

Yep. Yep, that that was the point. Because all lists help you stay organized, they help you make great use of your time, so that you're not spending a whole lot of time looking around and sales nav, you can easily pull up what you need, based on the occasion. 

Now, it's funny, another category of lists a lot of times that it's easy to overlook, is putting your competitors on a list. Because one thing that you can do with lists, and I'll go ahead and mention this now, is you can use lists. In your search filters. When you're doing searches, you can include a list in a search, you can also exclude a list from your search. So if you're prospecting, there's no need for you to see your competitors but.. Brynne, you are talking about some other ways that you use a list of competitors for business insights in this type of thing.

Brynne Tillman  22:18

Yeah, so there's a few ways. So one of them is once I save them I can see if there's movement. Now, Stan, your perfect example. That you know, you came from another organization and as soon as your non-compete was up, we know you're working with us. Well, I knew that you switched, because you were saved under a competitor. So we'll start with recruiting. Great opportunity, number one. Number two, I'm right, right? 

So number two, what initiatives are happening? What's going on? Are they buying companies? I found one of our competitors. Totally separate, is switching complete. They're going from social selling training, to software pipe. I give him a shout out if I can remember… Jamie Shanks, love you, Jamie are awesome. Switch it. He's like pipeline triggers. And he's also doing sales and marketing support stuff. So he's made a shift, I found out through triggers. And in my homepage, I reached out and I'm having conversations, we may be able to leverage his new businesses. So that's another thing but just keeping, you know, I like to go in and just see what's going on. 

Sometimes I'll pull up competitors. And then I'll pull up, you know, posted in the last 30 days, and I can see what's going on. So most of the time. It's for collaborative reasons. Some of the time. It's just for just insights and what's happening in your industry. We are in an industry where high tide raises all ships, we've always been incredibly collaborative as an industry. In fact, Stan and I now we're at LinkedIn with all of our competitors hugging and taking selfies, right. So it's a great world to be in but if you're in sales, keeping tabs on what's going on in the industry is pretty important.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  24:47

Yeah, yep. Exactly. Exactly. And then the last thing we wanted to mention is those of you who have access to Team link, if you've got an advanced Sales Nav license. As you start to put together lists, you can also easily share them with your colleagues who are under the same line if you have, yeah, under the same license, right? Yep. So, so and for in some organizations, an SDR may be working with an account executive. And so you're collaborating with one person, one may be doing prospecting, the other may be out in the field. And it makes sense to save some of these lists and share them internally. And so Sales Nav makes it very easy for you to do that. 

Brynne Tillman  25:45

I'm gonna share one more thing. The other thing is you can take notes in that list. So I have a list, I share it with Stan. And we're gonna go to market together on this, we can put notes in there, and it can work a little bit like a mini CRM, based on campaigns and things that we're going after. So I just wanted to share that. Yep.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  26:06

Yep. So it just makes the collaboration internally. Even easier. So good. That is what we had for today in terms of lists. Hoping this was super helpful. Every time we look at these topics, I know I learned something new. So it's always exciting. Brynne, any final thoughts that you had in terms of this?

Brynne Tillman  26:36

Thank you for your brilliant insights. And, you know, I love how together the sum is greater than its parts, and it's, I really I learned from you, you learn from me, and then we teach all of you. So thanks for your time. I really love today.

Stan Robinson, Jr.  26:55

Yep, same here and we will see you soon. 

Outro  27:01

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.