Your organization asked you, as Program Manager, to pilot Sales Navigator with the sales teams and you probably wonder what are the best practices to plan and deploy the pilot program to ensure success and duration. We gathered some of the most frequently mentioned tips from our Community members to help you design and kickstart your program with the right mindset, goals and activities in mind. 

1. Craft a plan with the entire organization in mind 

Every project starts with a vision and eventually a plan that will be the beacon to work on the implementation. Our Community members shared the most important tips to keep in mind when planning:

• Understand what is the problem, or gap that needs to be solved in order to strategically tackle it.
• Know the pace of the organization that will help aiming to keep realistic timeline.
• Have a clear outcome that is aligned with the organization.
• Be realistic and clear.
• Outline the plan and communicate it to differentiate it from requests. 

Member insights:

• Go with a plan, not just a request. Everyone has requests, but not everyone has a plan. 
  – alejandro.cabral (Full quote here)
• We’re looking at gaps of where the organization is now versus where it could be. Once we know this, we can come up with solutions.  – justyna.brownbridge (Full quote here)
• Understand the pace of the organization - how quickly things get done. It’s very important to have the alignment across the organization e…] and have a clear outcome of what what you want to be able to achieve. – @Vandana Singh (Full quote here)

2. Start with the right mindset as a PM

When it comes to mindset, there are many different approaches and perspectives. We collected a few key points to keep in mind while working on the pilot program:

• Have the learning mindset, be open and curious.
• You will become the expert of the new tool yourself and the best advice you could get from your peers is to focus on progress and not perfection, and on continuously adding value.
• Use the right wording to position the program so it gets the attention it needs.
• The program is about helping people and the organizations, so it’s better to start with as much collaboration as possible.
• Create an environment where users understand and want to use the tool rather than doing it as an obligation.

Member insights:

• Progress instead of perfection through adopting the learning mindset.  – justyna.brownbridge (Full quote here)
• You will be helping tons of people so bring as many people as you can form day 1. Make it as collaborative as you can. Don’t be afraid of bringing in people who can shake things a bit.  – alejandro.cabral (Full quote here)
• Communication is key with your >…] pilot participants and get their feedback, see what’s working for them as well as what’s working for the organization. – Caitlin Kinler (Full quote here)
• Lean in. If you look at it as a pilot, the odds that it’s being successful and enduring go down exponentially. But if you say this is part of who we are, you’ve got a much better chance of seeing the results because you’ll treat it like part of the fabric of your company.  – Mike Fleming (Full quote here)
• I suggest using @Mary X​ (Full quote here)
• They shouldn’t feel that it was imposed when they have to use it. They should feel they have to use it because they are seeing some results out of it. u...] Every day ask your team and yourself to utilize Sales Navigator 15 to 20 minutes so that you get habituated – Maithily.akkinapally (Full quote her

3. Remember to keep the program and trainings diverse

When implementing a program, you might want to think through what different digital and LinkedIn literacy levels are in the team, the learning styles that might influence the adoption and don’t be afraid to build your own training.

Member insights:

• Understand how your sales team learns — Ask how your team likes to learn and allow them to try what they’ve learned. Consider creating your own sales training program — While there are many successful training programs out there, they most likely weren’t built with your team in mind. When you design your own training program, you’ll be able to include customized stories and visuals and your team’s different perspectives and backgrounds as well.– Eva_Community Program Manager (Full quote here)
• You don’t want to be bias, you want to give the same opportunity to people who don’t have the same background and are familiar with LinkedIn or aren’t familiar with LinkedIn.  – nadia (Full quote here)
• One size doesn’t fit all, so it should be different – Maithily.akkinapally (Full quote here)

4. Create a sense of belonging and teamwork

One of the ways our members created a good team effort is to open their own sales community to share materials, surveys and success stories with each other. It’s also important to keep the level of excitement and inspiration by sharing the successful use cases.

Member insights:

• We have created our own little sales community. We have a group where we keep encouraging people, we keep sharing different training materials, and to understand the level of engagement what we have.  – Maithily.akkinapally (Full quote here)
• There's nothing more inspiring for the users of the program then to seeing someone else doing amazing things with the tool.  – justyna.brownbridge (Full quote here)

5. Have fun and excitement with competitions to drive adoption

While we have shared the best advice on Gamification and Competition in a previous edition of the Member Insights Series, it is worth looking into why and how other program managers add competitions to spice up their program to drive adoption. One of our seasoned program managers in the Community shared that they created certifications and badges that take 6 months to complete and involve the most enthusiastic team members to their internal champion program. As a reward, we also learnt that people prefer facetime with their leaders rather than swag. 

Member insights:

• We launched a full program that has a full certification and badging process in 3 steps / stages. Reps going through it need to graduate out of each stage into the next one and only after finishing the 3rd one they get their full certification. The key to it? It lasts 6 months, which gives them enough time to actually learn and apply what they learn. – alejandro.cabral (Full quote here)
• We did a competition where we had winners from the main service line, based on usage. We also provided gift cards for those who completed a survey. This accomplished a few goals: significant uptick in activity, also provided a lot of qualitative and quantitative data for us to go back and report management on.  – @Mary X​ (Full quote here)
• Most of the people want to have facetime with their leaders – @Vandana Singh (Full quote here)
• By highlighting the people who are using the tool, people are interested in what’s working for you, why you are doing better than me. – lquinn (Full quote here)
• Forget about top performers. We are talking about people #…] who are willing to take the next step and are ready to share that by giving them some visibility to management. – alejandro.cabral (Full quote here)

6. Tell the success story to each other which will be your story to tell to leadership

While it’s difficult to measure the impact of sharing success stories, it definitely creates inspiration amongst the teams to reach higher with each other's help. You can think of setting up an email alias to receive all these stories, or interview people walking others through their steps they took. 

Member insights:

• My company has relied heavily on peer-to-peer "storytelling" to drive adoption. At each of our quarterly sales meetings we ask one or two of our top sellers to share their experiences with Sales Navigator and how it has impacted their success. With very few exceptions our top sellers will almost always credit the use of Sales Navigator with one or more of their recent deals. – bryan.vaughn (Full quote here)
• As part of the monthly email that goes out with the stats ywe send] best practice and the result that person got. This is what I used and this is what I got. – lquinn (Full quote here)
• An easy way to do this is create an email alias where the success stories can be just rolling in.  – @Conor Bradley (Full quote here)

7. Create a playbook to help the team to implement the new tool to their existing process

Member insights:

• The best thing we did to help them to turbocharge their use of it and actually put it into practice we started to pull the two system together (Sales Navigator and their CRM) so we built a playbook a...] that allowed them to to pick three of their current accounts and three of their top prospects and I’m going to build messages and InMails for them specifically. We drafted that content together and gave them strategies.The playbook was a huge step forward for us and making it that step-by-step easy to follow guide that allowed more people to play and start to recognize the value and the benefit.  – Mike Fleming (Full quote here)

8. Drive adoption with trainings

The best ways for organized learning are group and one-on-one trainings and office hours. In the latter you can focus on the individual and what is the appropriate usage for them based on their role’s objectives. 

Member insights:

• We make licenses available for our senior hires and do training with them. g…] Office hours that were very effective during the pilot 0…] We continue to have periodic workshops which were very helpful and recorded and we can just share with our new joiners. As I get more familiar with the product and I do one-one-one trainings and refreshers.  – @Mary X​ (Full quote here)
• It’s not using the tool, using as you should require it for each individual – Maithily.akkinapally (Full quote here)

9. Measure the impact to prove that the program solves the problem

When you start a pilot program, it means that the process is new to the team. You might want to include metrics that were not measured before. Hence, the key here is to not rush into the conclusion too early. It was pointed out, that once you are ready to share the data, share it broadly to give visibility for the success. The one thing you also need to keep in mind is that users will mostly care how Sales Navigator makes their life easier and how the tool helps them to skyrocket their results. So tell them the story of success with your chosen metrics. 

Member insights:

• oWhen] trying to figure out the return on investment for Sales Navigator is to don’t rush it, don’t try to draw a conclusion from it in at least the first three months. These 3 months will be dedicated to administration like getting the seats and licenses, making sure everyone is activated and if everyone is trained up. Just focus on the engagement metrics and outcomes.  – @Conor Bradley (Full quote here)
• We decided to do a survey each semester for people to quantify and share their successes. With this we do a big communication to share broadly the results. It's about showing the ones that are not using it that they are missing out on the boat. – juan.mejia (Full quote here)
• People want to see results. They want to be able to know why am I going to work differently. What is it about this solution that’s going to make my life either easier or more efficient or more effective, whatever is the outcome we are trying to achieve.  – lquinn (Full quote here)
• The biggest ones are that they log in, and the proof of usage, the ability to save more leads and build more contacts, some sends of InMails are the lead measures. Are you using the system? Is there evidence of some kind of pull through and let’s look at atheir] trailing six months in otheir] admission activity and referral activity versus the last three months to see if your productivity is up by 11%. If we can, it’s a very easy ROI.  – Mike Fleming (Full quote here)

10. Engage leaders as they will help the program to be successful

Member insights:

• The folks who were the most successful had their leaders who are the most engaged and the most active.  – Mike Fleming (Full quote here)
• It’s crucial for the leaders and managers for being on board, because they are the ones who are going to drive the vision and get the end users through the process – @Vandana Singh (Full quote here)
• Not pushing it heavily is having a much better effect as my users are starting to share best practice now, rather than retreating into themselves to "win" an incentive/prize.\ – lquinn (Full quote here)