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Hi Community members,

 

Are you a brand-new Sales Navigator user? Or, you’re not new, but you still think there’s more for you to know about this platform? Then, this is the right post for you! 

 

Today, I’m sharing the top 4 main things you should know in order to get started in Sales Navigator! These are the most important steps you need to complete, so that you can fully set up your Sales Navigator license and ensure you’re using it to its full potential. 

 

So, how do you start? Just go through the steps below:

 

Step 1: Start with Activation and Set up 

The first thing you, and your colleagues, need to do is activate your account. Here’s how you can do it:

  • If you haven’t activated your account yet, first, check your inbox and look for an email with the title ‘’Get started by activating your account’’. 
  • Once you find it, you need to click ‘’Activate your account now’’ 
  • You might be prompted to add your work email address to LinkedIn.com, if you don’t have it in your account yet. We’re asking this to make sure we’re assigning the license to the right person. 

 

Step 2: Set up your Sales Preferences

Once you activated your account, the next step is to set up your sales preferences. These preferences are the criteria you set to let Sales Navigator know what types of leads you want to see based on region, industry, function, and seniority level. You can select multiple preferences and Sales Navigator will use saved preferences to surface lead recommendations based on your interests.

 

Here’s how you can do it: 

  • In Sales Navigator, hover over Discover and select Edit your sales preferences. 
  • Scroll down to the Sales Preferences section. Enter or select your target Geographies, Industry, Company Size, Function, and Seniority level. Click Done in each category to save your updates.
  • If one of your selections no longer applies, uncheck and click Done.

 

STEP 3: Access your Sales Navigator Coach

Sales Navigator Coach is the easiest way to discover and learn how to use Sales Navigator's most powerful tools and features. This will include a progress meter that measures your level of Sales Navigator mastery. The 5 levels are: 

 

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Proficient
  • Advanced
  • Expert

 

How can you level up your coach meter? 

  1. To start leveling up, select one of the recommended action items and click Try now. Complete new actions to progress to the next level! 
  2. Not sure how to complete an action? Click Watch video to view a quick demo
  3. To view all possible actions within Coach (and to see which actions you've already completed), click See all actions

 

Visit your Coach dashboard!

  1. To view your Coach dashboard, click See all actions from the Coach module in the homepage or click here
  2. The dashboard shows you all of the possible actions within Coach in a single page. You can also filter by actions you've completed (blue) or have not yet completed (white)
  3. Click Learn more next to each action to view a tip sheet for that action

 

 

Step 4: Sign up for training!

 

The last thing you should do is make sure you’re signing up for an introductory training that will help you learn how to get the most out of Sales Navigator. 

 

  • Complete the free Learn LinkedIn Sales Navigator Course on LinkedIn Learning hosted by the incredible @Donna Alexander​ 

 

Once you’ve completed all 4 steps, you’ll feel more comfortable and ready to start using Sales Navigator on a daily basis. 

 

Let me know if these steps helped you activate your account and, additionally, if there's any other step that we’re not including here, but has made a positive impact in your Sales Navigator adoption.

 

Thank you and enjoy!

Nádia

 

Still not a fan of Coach really, but I'm sending people there all the time @Nadia Vieira​ !

Really? And why is that, @Alejandro C​? Would love to understand what you think we could improve!

Well, I was probably one of the first to actually say "this is not a great idea, but I see it's potential". And I probably wasn't exclusively nice about it now that I remember it, but here's what I think. (short disclaimer: this is one of those things I have a strong opinion about, which doesn't mean I'm right at all of course).

 

  1. It creates a scale that for me it's not very accurate. If you just spend the 5-7 minutes in total those videos add-up to, you're suddenly an expert. This is the worst one for me as it's misleading. That doesn't make sense from both a usage & effectiveness perspective. I would say an expert is one that through the usage of the tool accomplishes certain things, or one who's knowledge is beyond basic. Coach is basic.
  2. It only shows you where stuff is, but I've come to accept that as a simple "point at stuff" method to show people around. Great to get people started actually as it lives within the platform. Through the years though, the sales solutions team has struggled with its training programs, inStruct being the top one (and potentially the only official) but not accessible to everyone, and when you look at the structure of those trainings there's a certain depth and progression in knowledge that coach doesn't allow. You just watch short videos. That's almost micro-learning at its best. Still lots to do.
  3. There's no progression. You can watch videos any way you want and again, you become an expert. I believe a curriculum needs to be developed sometimes. I would actually divide coach videos into sessions / classes, pretty much as what Lynda / Learning offers. Adding self-evaluations or custom ones would help.
  4. I can tell how mature a user is by looking at their activity. I can't do the same by looking at their progress using coach. Actually, I can't tell anything but how many videos they've watched. I still export stuff into excel and look at activity, compare the rates I get with my KPIs and then define if a user has made real progress or not.

 

Those are the top ones I guess!

Alejandro

Thank you so much for your feedback, @Alejandro C​. I know I mentioned this before, but it's really important for me and our team to understand what our members think of all Sales Navigator features.

 

After reading your comments, I think there's 3 main points that we should definitely consider:

 

1.To level up your Coach meter, not only you need to watch the short videos you're saying, but you also need to complete new actions in Sales Navigator, like for example, sync your your calendar to the Sales Navigator mobile app or send an InMail to a potential prospect. Your Coach meter will progress one level for every 3-4 actions you complete. So, this means that users need to keep completing a set of different actions, in order to be able to get a more senior level on Coach. It's important to understand that viewing the video or tip sheet alone will not increase your Coach meter. Users have to take action to level up.

 

2. As a Program Manager or an Admin, I would definitely recommend to keep track of your users Coach level (based on my point above). However, just like you said, it's important to understand how your reps are using the platform. For this last one, you'll need to check # days active, # searches Performed, # profiles viewed, # leads/accounts saved and # InMails sent. And, by performing these actions, users will be increasing their Coach level. I believe the best of both worlds, would be to have a report where you're tracking all of this.

 

3. Nevertheless, I'm a strong believer that we can always to better. I like your idea to have some sort of self-evaluation. But, my question is, if we had that, do you think Admins and Program Managers could make that a mandatory task for their users and would those users have time to complete that?

 

As always, love the interesting discussions we have here in Community! Thank you for brainstorming with me on this, @Alejandro C​. 😊

@Nadia Vieira​ great answers, and I was prepared for them 🙂 Here you go:

 

  1. All the actions that accompany those videos are again, basic. Some of them are a one-time thing like setting synchronizing the calendar. The coach meter only shows how many things you've done, it doesn't (I don't see how it could) measure expertise, only activity completion. I think we can agree that completing those actions does not end up in new pipeline for the company.
  2. You know I'm tracking all of that 🙂 Again though, coach level doesn't explain maturity at all. I've seen users at expert level who never send inMails and when asked why their answer was "because the times I tried I didn't get answers". That's not an expert's answer. Coach levels are not indicative of knowledge implementation either I guess. The fact is that anyones that watches videos, and to your point completes a set of actions will now be called an expert within a program...and that I believe, is not accurate. When those results are matched with pipeline our CRM performance, they just don't match.
  3. I can't speak for other admins or program managers, but this would be a fantastic link to sales enablement people who are usually left outside all of this. I'm actually having all of our sales enablement people in the US trained, and they manage an amazing structure to evaluate knowledge in the front lines...this being one of the things they can't quite evaluate, simply because there's no mechanism that's not manual to do so.

 

Would love to hear from anyone who's in sales enablement in the community! @Vian C​ your input here would be great too!

All great points, @Alejandro C​. I was already expecting that!

 

I understand your feedback and I believe, according to what you're saying, and what Coach is actually capable of doing, this would be a good onboarding initiative. Going through Coach's videos and actions can help new users to fully understand all the features they have available and how they can use them. And of course, depending on the company's strategy and each sales rep's approach, the way they will use Sales Navigator might differ, since, for example, what works for one rep, doesn't necessarily works for another one. I know there are different factors here. 😊

 

I definitely agree with the necessity to link knowledge and expertise with pipeline. This said, how are you and your sales enablement team matching this? Or, in case you're not, what would you need to have from Sales Navigator's side in order to do it in a more automated way?

 

Maybe, @Paul L​ or @Liam Q​ or any sales enablement Community member might be able to share some interesting insights on this topic!

 

 

@Nadia Vieira​ I've asked our sales enablement team to step-in actually, and our CSM trained them yesterday. That's step 1. Now that they know what this is about my expectation is that they can help us create a curriculum around this that goes beyond what we did last year + coach. That should help!

That's exciting news, @Alejandro C​!

I would love to hear from you and/or your sales enablement team about the curriculum they're putting together!

Hi @Nadia Vieira​ & @Alejandro C​ 

This is a great chat!

I agree with Alejandro. Coach just tells me that they've done the orientation and know where the tools are.

The rest comes from activity and results.

I think the main problem with Coach is the language. They're not experts when they've completed the tests, they're onboarded on just 100% on coach.

The expert tag is completely wrong and gives the wrong impression to everyone.

 

Thank you so much for your feedback, @Liam Q​!

I completely understand your point of view. What you're saying is that once they complete Coach, they'll be 100% onboarded, but that's not entirely the same as being a Sales Navigator expert, right?

Just like I asked Alejandro, I would love to understand how you and your teams are evaluating your reps in terms of Sales Navigator expertise. 😊

@Nadia Vieira​ 

Absolutely :)

 

I track :

Accounts saved

Inmails sent

Messages Sent

Overall SSL score

 

tied into their overall bookings.

This sounds great, @Liam Q​! Thank you so much for sharing.Do you pull this monthly and share the results with your sales and leadership teams?

Yes, at the beginning of the month

That seems like the right approach, @Liam Q​!

Hi, I just signed up to Sales Navigator and found your post.
Step 1 was easy and is completed.
Step 2 is confusing as you say:
“In Sales Navigator, hover over Discover and select Edit your sales preferences. “.

I do not see “Discover” or “Sales Preferences” anywhere.

 



Please advise.

Thanks.

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