With over 875 million users LinkedIn is a popular and effective place to connect with prospects and discover new leads.
Sales Navigator is a sales management tool designed to help you tap into LinkedIn’s extensive network more effectively and land more deals. Its impressive premium features provide you with the ability to use the advanced search, create custom lead lists, send InMails and more.
Used with Sales Navigator, Dux-Soup can make your lead generation even easier by automating the outreach, connection and initial engagement process - helping you fill your pipeline faster with interested connections.
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 talk about the extra 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.
As leads can no longer be tagged in Sales Navigator we’ll also focus on the Dux-Soup tagging system which can be used as an alternative.
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.
The biggest advantage of the LinkedIn platform is that the contact data is structured in a format that allows you to specify search terms for specific fields. You can read our LinkedIn Search and Filtering Masterclass blog to find out more.
At Dux-Soup we always recommend that you stay as targeted as possible to keep your account safe. A scattergun approach to LinkedIn outreach and connecting with prospects could compromise your profile and will also waste your time. Use LinkedIn filters to define your audience for a more targeted approach and create LinkedIn connection messages that get results.
To begin a search in Sales Navigator, enter your keyword into the Search bar and select “search for leads”. You can also go straight to the “All filters” section:
Apart from regular LinkedIn filters, you can apply the following additional filters in Sales Navigator:
These additional search filters can save you valuable time as they will help target the most relevant connections. 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!
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.
The blog article displays an expert user interface. If certain functionalities referred to in the post are missing, there's no need to fret. Simply ensure that you've activated the "expert" settings in the Options section found under the User tab, and that should resolve the issue!
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.
In order to send an InMail with Dux-Soup, first, you need to create an InMail template in the Options, Actions tab:
Then, 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.
Purchasing extra InMail credits can be an expensive option.
But here’s a good hack - sending an InMail to OpenLink member 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:
As we have mentioned before, LinkedIn has recently removed the 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.
When you do your outreach campaign in Sales Navigator (using Dux-Soup) you can also save profiles as a “Lead” on LinkedIn. 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 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.
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 “Visit Profiles” function. The regular URL is available in the CSV file among other scraped data. Note, that using “Scan Profiles” won’t generate regular URLs.
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!
Handle your entire sales pipeline, track your performances, and in the end, close more deals.
