Skip to main content

Hi Community members,

 

I’m excited to bring you the next best practice of the Community Challenge: Learn to Become a Top Seller with Sales Navigator in 9 Weeks.

 

Top sellers prioritize their focus on the accounts with the best opportunities. And how do they identify them? They concentrate on accounts with existing relationships, recent growth, and firmographic data. Leveraging dynamic data can effectively improve this effort, and Sales Navigator provides the resources to achieve this by:

  1. Prioritizing existing accounts by leveraging Account Hub.
  2. Searching high-priority accounts and use search filters for size, recent growth, and buyer intent.
  3. Saving searches.

If you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, I recommend this recent blog post on How to Best Prioritize Your Accounts in Sales Navigator: 3 Ways That Work. And if you need some additional guidance, explore these additional resources in Learning Center on using Account Search and how to save your searches.

 

Week of May 8’s tasks: 

Completing one task below will count as one entry for the first drawing of this challenge. Remember that you must complete all the steps in one task for your entry to count.

There are two tasks this week: “Master the best practice” and “Community action,” and everyone has the equal chance of two entries from this week.

 

🔲 Master the best practice:

  1. Visit the one-pager on our Learning Center to understand the activities that help you to focus on top accounts.
  2. Try the search filters listed in the one-pager and save the most relevant search in Sales Navigator so you are notified when new accounts fit that search criteria.
  3. In the comments below, share one benefit you have seen that resulted from adding new search filters and saving your searches or a tip with your peers.

 

🔲 Community action:

  1. Explore the categories and previous posts in the Community or by searching for ‘buyer intent’ or ‘advanced searches’ using the search bar at the top left corner beside your profile picture.
  2. Subscribe ⭐ to topics you are interested in to easily find them later by clicking on your profile and “Subscriptions” and comment on at least one of them sharing your insights and best practices or asking your questions.

 

Reminders:

If this is the first time you’re hearing about this Community Challenge, visit and subscribe to the intro post for how the challenge works, the challenge schedule, how to win prizes, and any updates we’ll be sharing.

We will also be adding all 9 best practices posts to the “related posts” section on the challenge’s event page so they are easily accessible in one place. Please note that you don’t have to click “attend” to be able to participate in this challenge and that you may choose to join at any point during the challenge timeline (May 1 to Jul 3 11:59pm PST).

 

If you have any questions about the tasks of the second week or the rules of this challenge, don’t hesitate to let us know. We look forward to hearing your tips and wins around how you can prioritize the accounts with the best opportunities.

After I have added different filters as recommended in the One pager, my account list got smaller, so it allows me to focus. However, I think I will tweak the filters so the search will render me more results. 

So I think that it depends on your context, how you choose the filers, nevertheless this guided practice is very helpful👍.


@cosmina.coman I love to hear that you found your own way of using the filters and that it can improve your focus. I think saving different searches until you find the best combination is also a great way to explore the possibilities with the tool. Do you also use this method? I’m also curious to learn what filters work for you the most. 


Similar to @cosmina.coman, I’ve been changing to filters to make the lists smaller and larger. One particular filter is the 1st degree connections, so that I can see just the accounts where I have such connections. I was a little surprised that filtering by 2nd degree connections wasn’t option. I think I’d use that filter to identify potential accounts where I could utilize a referral.


@Dustinlevy It’s great to see you diving into the second best practice and play with the filters to find the sweet spot in your searches. I really like what you said about the 2nd degree connection filtering option. Would you like to submit it to our Product Team for consideration? You can directly do that on the IDEAS page by clicking on “Create a product idea”. As best practice I recommend you to do a quick search for existing ideas and if you don’t find your recommendation, create a new one with a brief explanation on how this feature would benefit you so the Product Team can understand it more. 
If you’d like to learn more about submitting, searching and upvoting ideas, please refer to this article


@Dustinlevy, I wanted to correct my previous comments, apologies for the confusion. There is an option to filter for 2nd degree connections under “Best path in”. Can you confirm if you can see the option?

You can filter for the followings under “Connection”:

  • 1st degree connections
  • 2nd degree connections
  • 3rd degree connections
  • Teamlink connections (available for Advanced and Advanced Plus plans)
  • Executive Teamlink connections (available for Advanced and Advanced Plus plans)
  • Group members

Nevertheless, you can use the Idea submission option to add your suggestions and see what your peers are looking for when using Sales Navigator as mentioned above. 🙂


Hi Zita, I see the 2nd connection option when searching leads, but not accounts.


@Dustinlevy Thank you for clarifying! Do I understand correctly that you’d like to have a filter under Accounts search where you can see accounts with 2nd degree connections? I’d love to see, what the Community thinks about this idea. Would you like to submit it here?


Account searches are a great way to hand pick the companies you are trying to get in touch with. Being able to save Account’s to different lists and then search the individual Leads at each account is my primary use case.

1) Do an account search for specific targets. I like to use the keywords search to find “hard to find” niches. For example, I was searching for Managed Service Providers (MSP) the other day. I was able to create a really specific list by searching keywords “Managed Service Provider” OR “MSP”.

2) Save these target accounts to an Account List (you can save up to 1000 accounts per list, but I usually start by saving the first 4 pages aka 100 accounts)

 

  1. Create a Lead search and Include your newly made account list. Now you will see ALL of the individuals working at those target accounts.
  1. Refine your search by searching for specific job titles. For example, you can search for the VP of Marketing by adding “VP” AND “Marketing” & “Vice President” AND “Marketing” to the job titles.

On a side note, one of my favorite ways to filter for higher priority accounts is through an indirect filter - Number of Followers.

I’ve found that if you are searching for enterprise accounts it’s best to search 5001+ followers. If you’re looking for SMBs, you might find a sweet spot for the more established SMBs to have between 101-5000 Folllowers.

 

Great way to filter for established SMBs

 


Hi @christopher-cozzolino, it’s great to see you! Thank you for joining the challenge! 😊

I love the thorough answer and your tips on using the keyword search! I’d also add here this previous Community post on keyword and Boolean search (point 3) in case someone has the inspiration to explore this further:
 

 


@zita Yes, I do use saving different searches as a method.


🥁 We have the first winner of the Challenge, check it out here!

Don’t forget, we have 2 more drawings in 3 and 6 weeks again, and that is just one way to win prizes! You can also become an author of an upcoming Member Featured article or a Roundtable speaker in the Community! 


Reply