How sellers can leverage Sales Navigator's AI features

Published by Dean Seddon Need sales training to get more calls and leads from LinkedIn? DM me for more details.

Sellers have been using Sales Navigator for a long time, but whenever I meet sales teams, the often tell me that there is a huge gap between finding someone on LinkedIn and knowing what to do next.

I spend me time, helping sellers, not just use Sales Nav, but building an effective process around it to engage, outreach and book calls.

For many, Sales Navigator has felt a bit pointless - an overpriced tool, for what is essentially a searchable directory. They really don't know, beyond search what to do with it.

LinkedIn is realising that they have to do more if they want their product to be an essential sales tool.

It has to help the seller win deals.

3 ways Sales Navigator will improve sales performance

So, LinkedIn is paying attention and stepping up to not just provide a tool, but to give guidance to sellers in how to outreach and engage prospects.

Account IQ

This has been around for a while. But it's getting rolled out more and it's getting better intelligence for sellers.

What I'm seeing is that the key to getting replies is making it clear that you've done your homework and understand a prospect business. Account IQ helps you do that.

One of my clients gets a 30% meeting booking rate by spending 5mins crafting very personal outreach messages mapped to solutions to challenges faced in their business. Rather than sending templated, we-now-this-industry-has-this-pain-point messages, he's taking specifically to their business. It's paying off big time.

Account IQ is helping him do that.

Not only does it give you a quick overview of their business, it helps you see some of their business priorities and challenges.

This allows sellers to think and plan their outreach and messaging more intelligently. To look for and think about how do these challenges impact on my prospects and their priorities.

It makes outreach far more intelligent.

And let's face it, the majority of outreach thus far, has been more of a throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

How to get the best of it:

• Map these challenges to your value prop
• Dig into how these affect the departments you sell into.

Account IQ+++

In 2024, LinkedIn added products into Sales Navigator.

This allows you to hook up your website to Sales Navigator, so LinkedIn's AI can review the Account IQ, your services and give you clues as to how they might fit.

So, I can jump onto a company profile and check how my services would address their business needs. I can toggle between different services and I get a quick pointer into how to align my offer to their needs.

Having done sales training for a decade, I meet a lot of salespeople who don't understand the value proposition of their business.

They rely on cue cards or marketing collateral to tell them.

In this saturated world, that kind of low-skill selling will be replaced by AI. Unless they up their game and do the work.

But this tool, does allow sellers who want to do the work to win business, to not rely on their own instincts and can quickly see how the the value prop can translate for that prospect.

For companies this means, you need to create service pages which speak to the challenges, pains and solutions of your markets, so LinkedIn can see the value prop and ties that back to business challenges.

Then your sellers can use it as a tool to make their outreach and efforts more efficient and effective.

How to get the best of it:

• Use it to tailor assets / outreach.
• Check how it aligns to your use-cases.
• Prepare case studies which match up to similar challenges.

AI Assisted Outreach

I'm a fan of AI helping sellers be better, but much of the current outreach basically replaces the seller. Why do you need an SDR if all they are going to do is send automated emails?

Makes no sense to me.

I do have some worried about this one.

I think it will be used blindly at first.

Sellers will assume the AI knows best and just go with it.

But, just like how AI content is pissing people off on LinkedIn. So will AI outreach.

So, whilst I love LinkedIn's AI assisted outreach. It still needs humanising but it will help sellers be more relevant and play to the best practice.

You can bet your bottom dollar LinkedIn is tracking response rates and refining it's model.

The AI generated messages are okay... but they feel a bit LinkedIn 2020.

A bit formal.

But, they can be a useful prompt for a seller to write or adjust to something better.

How to get the best of it:

• Use them as a framework, not a final message.
• Generally a relevant opener is good thing to lead with.
• Think about as a first draft, don't let people send them (they are 30% shit)

On the whole these features will help sellers be better.

They provide a foundation.

I really think there is an opportunity for sellers who want to be better humans, by leveraging AI and it's clear LinkedIn is thinking that way too.

We're going to go through an AI wave which in the short term may make outreach harder.

The novel tools that will write and send 200 emails a day personalised with individual references will make it nosier. But just like the pushback on AI content, fully AI-written outreach will not last long either.

But at least for now, until the robots fully take over, the key is to be an AI-powered seller.

LinkedIn's features will help you do that.