What Is Sales Navigator and How to Raise Money for a Cause With It

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an advanced sales enablement tool that’s designed to help organizations target, engage, and build relationships with potential buyers on LinkedIn as easily as possible. 

For nonprofit organizations, Sales Navigator can provide a powerful way to find and connect with organizations that are particularly likely to donate to your cause. This is everything you need to know about Sales Navigator, including how you can start using it to find and connect with potential corporate donors as soon as possible: 

What is Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a subscription-based sales solution. As a deep sales platform, it connects your existing CRM to LinkedIn’s first-party data on over 950 million members and 63 million organizations worldwide. Sales Navigator provides extensive options for using this data to find and engage with prospects on LinkedIn. 

Nonprofit organizations use Sales Navigator to develop customized, targeted corporate donor engagement strategies on LinkedIn at scale.

What does Sales Navigator do?

Sales Navigator’s features are designed to help users accomplish three critical tasks:

Target

Efficiently identify individuals and organizations likely to donate to your nonprofit with the help of features like:

• Extended network access: Sales Navigator provides users with unlimited searches of LinkedIn’s global network. Searches can also be saved and re-accessed at any time, allowing you to keep track of search parameters that have yielded especially helpful results.

• Advanced searching abilities: Sales Navigator users have access to over 40 advanced search filters, which you can use to surface ideal prospects, pinpoint the right decision makers, and discover key connections to inform and streamline your approach.
  

• Buyer intent signals: Sales Navigator will automatically score your lists of target prospects based on buying intent signals, such as if they follow your organization’s LinkedIn Page or have interacted with your content in the past.

Understand

Uncover relevant information about targeted prospective donors by tracking relevant activities and interactions with your organization’s content. Receive updates on key developments within target organizations, such as job changes or other indications of donor intent. 

Sales Navigator’s features for deepening user understanding allow you to do things like: 

• Prioritize and qualify opportunities: Sales Navigator search results use a function called Sales Spotlights to automatically highlight noteworthy segments. Spotlights show you recent LinkedIn activity, job changes, and more, giving you natural opportunities to guide intent and reach out.
  
  

• Keep track of people and companies: Save promising leads on Sales Navigator to receive real-time updates and alerts when they take predesignated actions. You can also build Custom Lists and record notes to share across your team from inside the platform.
  
  

• Uncover shared connections: The TeamLink option allows you to see shared connections between you, your colleagues, and individuals within your targeted companies. Leveraging these connections for warm introductions is a natural way to start building relationships.

Engage

Engage with decision makers and prospective donors at the right time with personalized messaging by tapping into LinkedIn’s messaging and content-sharing capabilities. 

Sales Navigator’s engagement features include: 

• Relationship Explorer: Relationship Explorer identifies up to eight best connections within a prospective company for you to reach out to, automatically providing information you can use in your outreach, such as if they changed jobs in the past 90 days.

• InMails: Unlike other messaging options on LinkedIn, you don’t need to be connected with a prospect to send them an InMail (direct message). Personalization options allow you to break through crowded inboxes by crafting the right message for the right moment using contextual information surfaced by Sales Navigator.
  

• Custom feeds: Your Sales Navigator hub page will curate a customized feed detailing how people in your prospect lists have been using LinkedIn recently, making it easy to interact with them in a meaningful way on an ongoing basis.

How to raise money for a cause with Sales Navigator

There are lots of different ways to use Sales Navigator. Here’s one example of a four-step approach you can take to find new corporate donors on LinkedIn using the solution: 

Stage 1: Upload your list of current donors

Upload your current list of donors directly to Sales Navigator in one of three ways:

• Use the “My Current Accounts List” prompt on the homepage

• Link your CRM to use the auto-generated list “My CRM Accounts” 

• Manually save accounts directly to an account list 

Stage 2: Identify major donor prospects

Use your current donor lists to make lookalike audiences of similar organizations on LinkedIn. Sales Navigator search results will highlight especially good finds.

Find and save the most valuable of these organizations to a new list to start tracking them. This will allow you to learn even more about what they want and when you should reach out.

Stage 3: Track engagement and map relationships

Map out the organizations you’re interested in with Relationship Explorer. This will show you up to eight likely champions within each organization.

You can also set up Sales Navigator trackers on these high-interest targets. Tracking can tell you when they post, change jobs, connect with someone you’re connected with, or engage with your content. Timing is vital when it comes to raising money, so acting on these prompts can give your nonprofit a big edge. 

Stage 4: Personalize outreach at the right time

With all of these insights in hand, you’ll have everything you need to reach out to prospective donors at the right time with the right message. 

For example, you could wait until the organization you’re targeting hires a new executive, as they may be looking to make a statement by launching a new partnership with a nonprofit. Or, you could act on a notification that the organization is participating in GivingTuesday or another type of fundraising event. 

When you decide to connect with a target decision maker, you might reference a mutual acquaintance, or personalize your LinkedIn InMail using information Sales Navigator will help you surface. Speaking to what people actually care about is how you get heard, and the fundraising tools within the platform make it seamless.

To start using Sales Navigator, get in touch with our sales team today.