Advanced Prospecting with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Leadfeeder

At Leadfeeder, we define high-quality sales prospects with the following five criteria:

• They fit your target demographic.

• They’re a decision maker.

• They’re aware of their need(s).

• They know of you and your organization.

• They’re willing to listen.

In theory, the goal of every successful prospecting strategy would be to only target prospects that you can confidently say meet all five of the above criteria.

But that’s not likely to happen in practice.

Sales teams have quotas to hit, and that means sales development reps (SDRs) will be prospecting to the best lead list possible, whether or not they fit all five criteria.

But our five criteria are still relevant to gauge the likely success rate of a prospecting campaign. The more of the criteria you can hit, the higher response rates you’ll get.

Over the past year, Leadfeeder's sales teams have been pairing LinkedIn Sales Navigator with data from Leadfeeder to target SDRs and sales teams. It's made prospecting better, faster, and with greater success.

We think the difference between prospecting with Leadfeeder is so powerful that we’ve coined the term blind prospecting to describe the current methods and targeted prospecting to describe how you can do it Leadfeeder and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

This is not a binary scale but a spectrum:

In this article, we’ll explain why you should your sales prospecting with LinkedIn Sales Navigator using the data from Leadfeeder to support your sales outreach.

Note: Want to see Leadfeeder’s powerful buyer intent data to see which companies have visited your website and when to improve your LinkedIn sales prospecting? You can try Leadfeeder free for 14 days here.

Prospecting with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Ever since launching onto the scene in 2014, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is, in our minds, one of the most powerful tools for salespeople.

That’s because its advanced search filters let you move from largely blind prospecting to more targeted prospecting.

With LinkedIn’s search filters, you can search for prospects based on the demographics of your ideal customer that you’ve already identified.

Using the Premium version of Sales Navigator, you can apply filters such as company size, years of experience, seniority level and much more.

Now, this is a great start to creating a targeted prospecting strategy. It moves you from left to right on the prospecting scale, but we wanted to challenge ourselves to go further.

For the savvy readers amongst us, you would have noticed that — for as powerful as LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be — you will only be able to locate prospects that pass, at best, three of the criteria needed for a high-quality prospect:

1. They fit your target demographic.

2. They’re a decision maker.

3. (Maybe) On the off chance that they regularly post updates on their LinkedIn page you might be able to discern whether or not they have a need for what you’re offering.

There are still two critical elements missing, that, if added, would really move us further to the right of the targeted prospecting spectrum.

• How exposed to your company is the sales prospect?

This will affect your messaging to them dramatically. Has the company heard of you? Have they only heard a little or have they combed through your whole site? How many times have they heard of you or been to your site?

• What products, features, or solutions are they interested in?

Our customers often sell tools that solve a variety of problems or have very different features, use cases, or applications. Knowing what resonates with people at prospective companies changes your entire messaging to them.

The BEST Way to Prospect with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With Leadfeeder’s buyer intent data in our dashboard, you can see which companies are visiting your website (inside Leadfeeder).

And, if you view a specific company profile within Leadfeeder, you see contacts from within that company and their LinkedIn profiles.

This immediately starts to add more targeting to your prospecting strategy.

You can now see:

• How exposed is the company to your brand?

• How many times have that company has visited your site?

• What pages does that company visit the most (i.e. what are they interested in)?

Leadfeeder also lets you get alerts when a company returns to you site.

This feature allows you to add a time element to your sales prospecting so that you can send relevant follow up messages when you know they are engaged or thinking about your brand.

Contacting a sales prospect when they’re in that mindset greatly increases your chances of closing a deal.

Leadfeeder will show you exactly when a company is in that crucial stage of the customer journey and let you get out in front of the competition.

Now, your sales team can devote their time and energy into targeting leads and closing deals at companies they already know are warm.

We’ve already started using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Leadfeeder together to gather more data about our sales prospects before reaching out.

You can immediately review the details of every company that visited your website, from what demographics they’re in to other relevant company data.

You can also take advantage of key features of Sales Navigator such as being able to find any mutual connections, access to their extensive database, and the ability to tag and track prospects.

How to Take Advantage of Leadfeeder + LinkedIn Sales Navigator Today

Step 1 - Log into Leadfeeder

Simply log into your existing Leadfeeder account (or sign up for our free 14-day trial here) and you’ll immediately be taken to our dashboard.

Step 2 - Make sure you’ve integrated with Google Analytics

Connect your site’s Google Analytics account to Leadfeeder by clicking the “Add Website” tab on the top right.

Step 3 - Log into LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Next, log into your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account. If you don’t have Sales Navigator yet, LinkedIn actually lets you try it it for free!

Step 4 - Start your sales prospecting!

Once you've got your buyer intent data from Leadfeeder, you can use this to guide your sales prospecting on LinkedIn.

For example, in Leadfeeder, I can see that FedEx has visiting my company's website.

And, I can see that the visit came from an organic Google search. Plus, I can see they spent more than 2 minutes on our Lead Generation software page.

If I scroll down in the company profile, I can also see the names, job titles, and contact information for employees at FedEx.

I can also segment the contacts at FedEx based the location, seniority level, and department.

Then, use this data to create custom lead filters in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You’ll be shown additional information for each contact at our target companies and send InMail.

Even better, using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator view, you’ll also be shown any mutual connections between members of your team and a prospect, as well as recommendations for who to contact.

And, you can set up custom feeds in Leadfeeder to track companies coming from LinkedIn.

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator & Leadfeeder is key to a successful sales prospecting strategy

The key to any successful prospecting strategy is making sure that you’re hitting all five criteria of what makes a high-quality prospect—a goal that is surprisingly hard to achieve.

Ever since the introduction of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s gotten a little easier. Salespeople are now better today at identifying high-quality prospects than they were ten years ago.

But, combining it with Leadfeeder can make it easier than ever to target those high-quality prospects. What it all really comes down to at the end of the day is this:

Are you sure they are a high-quality prospect?

Note: Want to see Leadfeeder’s powerful buyer intent data to see which companies have visited your website and when to improve your LinkedIn sales prospecting? You can try Leadfeeder free for 14 days here.