Dux-Soup and LinkedIn Sales Navigator
With over 930 million users, LinkedIn is a popular and effective place to connect with prospects and discover new leads. And with 16% of these users being active on LinkedIn every single day, there’s plenty of opportunity to be engaging with your ideal prospects.
Why choose Sales Navigator?
Sales Navigator is a premium platform offered by LinkedIn to assist professionals in finding, engaging and building relationships with potential customers.
Here at Dux-Soup, we think that one of the top benefits of Sales Navigator is its advanced search capability, allowing you to create highly targeted lead lists from its additional search filters. This feature alone has enabled our users to get response rates as high as 80%!
Add to that the increased volume of activity Sales Navigator allows, its InMail capabilities, lead lists (and auto-populated leads lists) and team collaboration possibilities, and Sales Navigator is a great choice for those looking to step up their B2B lead generation game.
Top tip: If you’re undecided as to whether you need a Sales Navigator account or not, we suggest thinking about how much you use LinkedIn. Regular LinkedIn will limit how many profiles you can view, how many searches you can run and how many connection requests you can send each month. If you’re using LinkedIn automation for lead generation, then you’ll probably want to opt for Sales Navigator to gain full advantage of your LinkedIn automation tool.
The best LinkedIn automation tools, tried & tested.
Dux-Soup & Sales Navigator
When combined with Sales Navigator, Dux-Soup can make your lead generation even more powerful. By automating the outreach, connection and initial engagement process - you’ll fill your pipeline faster, and win more customers with ease.
From a technical point of view, Dux-Soup works with Sales Navigator the same way it does with a free LinkedIn account. However, in this blog, we’ll show you some awesome additional features that are enabled in Dux-Soup if you have Sales Navigator - such as accessing extra lead filters, sending InMails and saving profiles as a lead.
If you're not already a Dux-Soup user, you can sign up for our free trial which gives you access to ALL of the features that we cover in this blog.
Additional Sales Navigator lead filters
LinkedIn contact data is structured in a format that allows you to specify search terms for specific fields. Sales Navigator offers more search filters than Regular LinkedIn which is great for lead generation.
Sales Navigator will also show you 2500 search results compared to only 1000 search results in Regular LinkedIn
In order to keep your LinkedIn account safe, we always recommend that you stay as targeted as possible with your LinkedIn lead generation. A scattergun approach to your LinkedIn outreach could result in more people rejecting your connection invitations, stating ‘I don’t know this person’ which isn't great for your conversion results, or account safety.
The good news is, Sales Navigator’s advanced search filters allow you to define your audience for a more targeted approach, boosting connection acceptance rates.
LinkedIn Search and Filtering Masterclass
How to search and filter with Sales Navigator
To begin a search in Sales Navigator, enter your keyword into the Search bar and select “search for leads”. You can use Boolean search terms in your keywords here to be more specific.
You can also go straight to the “All filters” section:
In addition to the regular LinkedIn filters, you can apply the following additional filters in Sales Navigator:
- Lead Lists
- Past Lead and Account Activity
- Role & tenure filters, like seniority level, function, years of experience, etc.
- Company filters such as company headcount and company type
- Other filters such as LinkedIn Groups, posted content keywords, etc.
These additional search filters can save you valuable time as they will help target the most relevant connections. You can also pin your preferred filters so they are easily accessible for any search.
Once you have defined your target audience and set an outreach message template, click on the Dux-Soup icon and select “Visit Profiles” - now you can focus on other business and sales tasks (like scraping more data or directly messaging your 1st-degree connections) while Dux does the rest!
How to write LinkedIn connection messages that get results
Note: For the number of daily connection requests, we always advise sending connection requests to 3-5% of the total 1st-degree connections number no matter what type of LinkedIn account you have.
Sending InMails with Sales Navigator
InMails allow you to send direct messages to contacts that aren’t a 1st-degree connection, a feature that isn’t available with Regular LinkedIn.
With Sales Navigator you get 50 InMail credits each month, allowing you to reach out to your top prospects.
With Dux-Soup Pro, Turbo, and Cloud, you can automate personalized InMails, saving you lots of time over manually writing each one.
How to send InMails with Dux-Soup & Sales Navigator
We’re going to walk you through how to do this, using the Dux-Soup ‘expert’ user interface.
First, ensure that you've activated the "expert" settings in the Options section found under the User tab.
Sending an InMail is a feature that’s often needed if you’re on the hunt for leads. The free version of LinkedIn doesn’t allow users to send InMails. But with Sales Navigator, you can reach out and build relationships with leads outside your direct network.
To create an InMail template, head to the Options, Actions tab:
Create your message using the personalization markers underneath for First Name etc.
Once you have done so, go back to the lead search result in Sales Navigator, click on the Dux-Soup icon and select “Visit Profiles”. Dux-Soup will visit everyone on the list and send an InMail if you have enough InMail credits.
How to send InMails without using up your InMail credits!
Purchasing extra InMail credits can be an expensive option.
But here’s a good hack - sending an InMail to ‘OpenLink’ members doesn’t cost a credit!
Dux-Soup can skip profiles who are not OpenLink members - how cool is that? The option to skip non-OpenLink members is located in the Skipping tab:
When turned on, Dux-Soup will automatically target just ‘OpenLink’ profiles, saving your InMail credits.
If you are a Turbo user, we’ve got great news! You can also set up an InMail campaign for Open Profiles!
Drip Campaigns
For Turbo and Cloud users, you have the drip campaign functionality available so you can create a sequence of up to 12 actions (including InMails, so you can just add these here, rather than using the method above) and directly enroll prospects from your Sales Navigator list(saved search or lead list)
By default, the campaign starts from the connection request, however, you can re-arrange the sequence. You also have the option to add InMails, Visit or Follow actions before the connection request.
Here’s an example of how your campaign can look like:
You can also choose which platform you want Dux-Soup to operate in by choosing a "target" for your drip campaign.
Once your campaign sequence is ready and saved, you can start enrolling prospects.
For those of you who like to keep it simple and prefer using the regular UI instead, you can enroll your prospects by clicking on the Dux-Soup icon and selecting the Enroll button:
Save visited profiles as a lead in Sales Navigator
Another neat trick with Dux-Soup is the possibility to save visited profiles to a Lead list in Sales Navigator. This option is located in Dux-Soup Options, Actions tab:
Once you hit the “Visit Profiles” button, Dux-Soup opens a profile, clicks on the “Save” button and selects “My saved leads” option:
When you open the Lists page in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, your saved leads appear at the top-right corner:
Note that these leads weren’t added to the “Custom Lead List” yet. To do that, you can open “My saved leads” page and manually select the profiles you want to move the custom lead list or click on the “Select all” button and choose “Save to list”:
Tip: You can manually save your one page search result by simply clicking “Select All” and “Save to list” at the top of every page.
Data gathering
You can gather data from LinkedIn using Dux-Soup by scanning lists in Sales Navigator. Scanning profiles offers a significant time advantage compared to visiting them individually as Dux-Soup can quickly work through 100s of profiles in minutes.
First, you need to make sure you have the “Record profile data” option enabled in your Options>Browser tab:
This will ensure that Dux-Soup records the data of profiles that you scan or visit using the tool. Once you have scanned a list of profiles, you can download the data to csv.
Note: There are two sets of data you can download once you click on the Download Data button:
You can download the data of the profiles you have visited in the past or the data you have scanned, the difference is visit data is extensive as Dux-Soup opens the profile and gets all the information available.
Extra Tip: You can scrape regular URLs in Sales Navigator using Dux-Soup
If you manually open a lead profile in Sales Navigator, you’ll notice that the URL has a different format compared to Standard LinkedIn. In the image below you’ll see we opened a profile from a search result in Sales Navigator, and the URL contains /sales/people in between:
If we open the same profile in Standard LinkedIn, the URL will look like this:
LinkedIn won’t let you open a Sales Navigator URL without a subscription - i.e. you’ll be asked to subscribe in order to view the profile. That’s not good news for many lead gen, marketing or digital agencies who used one Sales Navigator subscription to scrape leads and share lead lists among other team members - so they could then engage with the profiles from their Dux-Soup account.
But - Dux-Soup again comes to the rescue and can help you retrieve a regular URL in Sales Navigator if you use the “Scan Profiles” function. The regular URL is available in the CSV file among other scraped data.
Tagging profiles on Sales Navigator
As we have mentioned before, LinkedIn has recently removed its tagging feature. Don’t worry though - Dux-Soup has its own tagging system that works the same way that Standard LinkedIn and Sales Navigator used to. Here’s a quick tutorial showing you the Dux-Soup tagging system in action. You can also read more about tagging and untagging, on our support pages.
If you use an auto-tagging option (located in the Actions tab) or if you’re adding a tag manually, the tag is recorded in Dux-Soup Tricks, the CSV file and is also added to the Search by Tag tool at the same time.
It’s also worth mentioning that once Dux-Soup adds a tag in Sales Navigator, it actually records a profile with a particular tag using a standard URL. So, when you re-engage with profiles using the Search by Tag tool, the profiles scraped from Sales Navigator open up in Standard LinkedIn. This is great for those who don’t want to keep paying an expensive Sales Navigator subscription!
If you want to re-engage with profiles using Sales Navigator, you can use the Dux-Soup Revisit Data tool instead.
Summary
According to LinkedIn, an average user makes 250% more connections and has a 7% higher win rate using Sales Navigator. If you’re serious about lead gen we recommend using Sales Navigator to more effectively expand your network and enable the full potential of Dux-Soup.
If you're not already a Dux-Soup user, don't forget to click on the button below!
If you have any feedback, questions, or comments - we’d love to hear them. Leave your comment here or feel free to contact us at info@dux-soup.com and we’ll be sure to get back to you!
Further reading:
How to use LinkedIn for recruitment
How to use LinkedIn automation effectively
