Episode 36 Sales Navigator Activities That Bankers LOVE!

Jack Hubbard  00:00

I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from Ledger's to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants With Modern Bankers. 

Welcome to Jack Rants With Brynne, brought to you by our friends at RelPro and Vertical IQ. I'm Jack Hubbard, managing partner of The Modern Banker. And every week at this time, my friend and partner Brynne Tillman, the CEO of The Modern Banker. Discuss all things LinkedIn for bankers, Hi Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  00:35

Hi Jack, I'm excited to be here with you.

Jack Hubbard  00:39

Thank you. This is a great program and we always get a lot of requests about how do I use Sales Navigator. I think it's such a great tool, and so underutilized. So today, we're going to talk about “Three Sales Navigator Activities that Bankers Love,” and just in time to get ready for 2024. But before we go into that, I wanted to give you a couple of program alerts. The first one is next Wednesday on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. I've got a really special program with a very good friend. His name is Neil Stevens. Neil is the president and CEO of Oconee State Bank. And for those community bankers out there who think they can't do some innovative things, you got to listen to this program and what Neil has done with his $650 million organization. That's next Wednesday, at noon Eastern time. 

I'm also extremely excited to tell you that on November 15, Brynne, and I, mostly Brynne, are going to present a great webinar, Heading off 2024 Headwinds, we're going to talk about what's new, what's now and what's next for LinkedIn and that will be at noon Eastern time, as well. And I gotta tell you, this is going to be a full program. We have just done some initial messaging out there. And based on the sites that we have more than 250 bankers are going to join us to this point. So it's one of those things that bankers are really interested in, and Brynne up in the corner, there is an opportunity for somebody to register pretty easily. 

Brynne Tillman  02:23

It is and I'm really excited. If you just pick up your phone, open up your camera and scan, click attend. And then there's a link for you to actually register and it's free. Share it with all of your bankers and your banker friends because we are really going to talk about how are you positioning yourself to absolutely do phenomenally well in 2024, even if there are challenges to overcome.

Jack Hubbard  02:51

No doubt, and I got a call this week from a banker who said, you know, I've known you for a long time, kind of disappointed in you. And I said, Well, what do you mean? He said, “Well, all you talk about is LinkedIn and that's not the sales process.” And I said, that's the exact point. I like to talk about LinkedIn as part of the sales process. It's a way to get in front of people. It's a way to have a conversation, and so that that webinar on the 15th is going to be outstanding in that particular regard. Well Brynne, let's dive right into our subject today, three Sales Navigator activities that bankers will love. Let's talk about the first one. Several bankers that are using our mastering LinkedIn for bankers programme, which has a one hour really great in depth program, study curriculum on Sales Navigator. And when we do our coaching on Tuesday, it's really fun to watch these bankers talk about and the aha moments they're having when they're using Sales Navigator. So I really want to talk about three things with your Brynne. The first thing is that Baker's using Sales Navigator can easily identify their ideal prospects, and they can do it by title, by location, and they can even get it down to their zip code. This is really a great thing Brynne.

Brynne Tillman  04:15

It is and in LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a very robust search engine. The amount of filters that it has that can help you to identify the exact right people is absolutely essential for every banker. And you're right, the zip codes. If you could have one zip code, you could have a radius around a zip code, you could have five zip codes, you can put in town names like the ability to really focus in on location is absolutely outstanding, which is great if you are responsible for a bank or a few different bank branches. To be able to socially surround your organization or your branch and the businesses or prospects around those branches is phenomenal. 

One of our clients in coaching, in our membership Mastering LinkedIn for Bankers is opening a new branch in a town that they haven't been in before they are known in the area. And so now what we've done is we have really brought it down to all of the entrepreneurs and business people and business leaders that she has in that zip code in that exact town. And the outreach right now is for her to say, you know, we're very excited, we're opening up a new branch in Q1. I'd love to connect and invite you to the grand opening. Once we have that scheduled, it's simple. And she's starting to engage based on just a very tight zip code. And that's very powerful.

Jack Hubbard  05:49

You know, I love what you say about socially surrounding, that's such a great turn. And we've had a banker who does work internationally, on our programme. And one of the things that he found is that LinkedIn is not a flat programme. In other words, it just gets us don't do a bunch of clicks here. You use that strategically. So he was going over to Frankfurt, Germany, and you were able to show him Britain, some towns right around Frankfurt, where he got a couple of appointments that he would have never gotten had he not learned how to use Sales Navigator effectively.

Brynne Tillman  06:26

Yeah, and some of them were people he was already connected to that he forgot. And a few of them were people that his connections knew that he could leverage to get introductions. So you're right. I mean, there are many layers to LinkedIn, onion, right? Like, you just keep pulling back and like, oh, look, there's another layer, and you can do more things there. And it's really very valuable. The other thing, and I don't know if I'm skipping ahead, and I apologize, but persona, did we have percent on this list? Okay, great. So I'm just gonna talk about it for a second. Similar to search, you can create up to five persona. 

Now at first, when they rolled this out, it took the place of an older feature. And I was like, you know, it's really limiting, it only has a few filters. Why would I want to do that? And then I found out why. Unfortunately, we have to go do these deep dives, because LinkedIn will roll it out, but not tell you how to use it. But persona now when you go into an account, so let's say you are you're a commercial banker looking to reach larger customers, when you go into an account that might have 300 400 1000 employees, you click on persona in that company page, and it will bring out the CFO, the CEO, the CEO, that are at that location that you know, and that are active on LinkedIn, and you can actually really dive down deep in the Persona, now they have the persona as a link in the search. And my advice is don't use it there. It could be frustrating, because it's not enough. And you can't edit it. But it is perfect. To put these are the exact people If I pop into an account, what are the titles of all the people I want to talk to me, you know, and do they have a treasurer? Do they have an accountant, you can put them all in and with one click, you can find those folks in the company page. So I'm now in love with this feature. 

Jack Hubbard  08:43

Yeah, and I think it's interesting, you get a lot of these things before a lot of other people and I get the privilege of talking to you about them. And some of them, some of them when you look at them initially, you go oh, that's not so good. But as you work with them, you start to notice how much better these things really are. And it brings up a point that I always talk to bankers about because what happens is LinkedIn will want to sell you Sales Navigator and that's fine if you want to buy it. But don't go out and buy 100 licenses for people if they really don't understand how to use the basics of LinkedIn, because they're not going to get on Sales Navigator. If you don't know how to do the basics, you're not going to jump on Sales Navigator. So a few licenses and then really teach your people how to use this effectively. Now one of the other things to use effectively and you may have kind of touched on this with personas is social proximity to your prospects. And you can do that either by your connections or the connections of your coworkers.

Brynne Tillman  09:50

So I love it. So let's start backwards connections of your co-workers. There is a filter. That's a team link. Now team link He needs to be socialized within your organization. So you may have and I don't know the minimum, it might have 25 licenses to be able to get a team link. But what's really valuable and talk to your LinkedIn rep, because they are free, these team links. Licenses are free. And what it does is you send it out to coworkers, board members, anyone who's committed to helping your bank grow, they don't have to have your bank's domain, they can be part of your team link community. And then when we create a search, and we say, wow, there's 823 people in this town that I'd love to talk to. And you click the team link, extend it's sorry, it's called Team link, extend when you click on the team link, toggle, it'll show you all of those people that said, I'm giving you permission to look through my connections, even if we're not a first degree connection. 

And so I go, Oh, one of my board members, no seven people I'd love to get in front of now, in most banks, board members, whether it's a kudos and a pat on the back, thanks for bringing in new business, or sometimes they have contests with trips. I mean, it just depends on the bank that you're on the board of those board members want to bring in business. They are, that's and sometimes it's hard for them because they're running their own business. So now with Team link, and I often, you know, the board needs a little bit of 30 minute training to understand how this is going to work. But now they can team up with one of your business bankers, and make some introductions to their banker now is coming in at a high level of credibility. And the board member doesn't have to do the work, just by allowing the bankers to get to see their connections to this team link extend. Again, it's free. It's amazing how leveraging that social proximity, right, and that board member may never have thought of introducing them to their connection. But now we can do that through great search. 

So yes, that's really powerful. The other one is your I guess, was that just your natural market? Yes, your connections. So your connection. So this is interesting and the Sales Navigator rollout allows us to search in many different ways. But you create this perfect search, and we have these 883 people, and now we click second degree connections. And there are 29. So now there are 29 perfect people that we can map to one of our connections. So we can leverage that relationship to say, Hey, I'm, I'm looking to connect with Joe Smith over at ABC company, I see you're connected. How well do you know him? Do you have any insights you'd be willing to share? And that can naturally either turn into an introduction or permission to drop their name when you reach out? We could go one step deeper and say, Okay, I see you know, I look in. I see this connection. 

We have this relationship with this particular person, but we can go, I'm sorry, one step deeper and look at our clients, or our referral partners. I lost track, I was so excited. But we look at our so now this was a general connection that might know me and network with me, and maybe I see chamber meetings or whatever that might be. But let's go deeper. Maybe we start with a CPA that has referred us in the past. Let's take a look at who else does she know that she might be open to referring or maybe we look at clients and by the way, client, you could have three, four or five different people inside the CEO, the CFO, maybe you've worked with the CFO, there may be maybe they have a payroll person that you've been working with whatever that looks like, right? But each of these are referral clients, each one on their own. So we can use Sales Navigator to really hone down exactly who they know in the zip codes. We want to meet size companies, all those fun things and go to those clients or those you know, and just say hey, you're connected to a whole bunch of people I'd love to get in front of. Can I just run these names by you? Don't ask for introductions until you've had the conversation.

Jack Hubbard  14:31

Outstanding. It was great stuff and and I don't say this often enough that Brynne you know she is a sales influencer one of the 16 for 2024.

Brynne Tillman  14:45

37 globally,

Jack Hubbard  14:45

all around the world. She knows she knows she forgot more about LinkedIn than most people know.

Brynne Tillman  14:54

I don't forget a thing, Jack

Jack Hubbard  15:00

One of the things that I really liked about her is that she's always been open even before we got in business together, being able to answer questions. So email [email protected]. If you've got a question and you say, well, I use sales, I've tried Sales Navigator, but it didn't work for me. Can we? Can we have a short conversation? Absolutely. Absolutely. Happy to be happy to do it. I'm sure you would say the right, brynne?

Brynne Tillman  15:28

Absolutely. And the other thing is, I'm trying to see if we have this here, the monitor. Yes. So if you join the modern bankrate.com/public library, there's also a 24/7 community where you can ask questions there to please reach out to me directly. But if you're like the middle of the night, and you're like, I have a question, stick it in there. Within 24 hours, Jack and I are both notified. And one of us if not both, we'll jump in and give you our thoughts. So either way, but regardless, joining this is totally free, it's free forever, we're never going to charge you for it. It's themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary. And it's great resources, but also that community to ask questions.

Jack Hubbard  16:15

Yeah, no doubt about it. Two more things on Sales Navigator, because we said three, but we're going to do it for a bonus. So alerts, you know, one of the things that I like to do is to have kind of a routine around LinkedIn, one of the things I'll do is I'll look at Sales Navigator every morning, I'll look at my SSI score. Maybe I'm obsessed with it, and I shouldn't be but I do. And then I always look at my alerts. And you can look Brynn at your alerts from either your prospects, clients and CO eyes, as well as their accounts. So you can see both what's going on in a particular organization, as well as some of the people that are involved in that organization. Talk about that.

Brynne Tillman  17:00

Repeat that again. I apologize. I hadn't looked at the comments really quickly. Last thing, talk about

Jack Hubbard  17:06

Sure. Alerts.

Brynne Tillman  17:09

Oh, yes. Okay, sorry, I had a chat going on here in the live. And I should stop doing that. But we've got lots of people chatting. 

Jack Hubbard  17:19

So that's good news, too. That's so weird, because I don't see any of them.

Brynne Tillman  17:22

They're not for some reason, they're not, this is the challenge. They're not going to restream. But I'm on LinkedIn. So that's why I'm slightly distracted, and I apologize. So alerts are amazing for many reasons. As mentioned, right? These are alerts that are specific to you and what you are looking to achieve, which I'm very excited about because 90% of what's in there is irrelevant. But what we have to do is know how to start conversations with those folks, we need to know what to do when we see these alerts. So we have different alerts, like lead shares, so the lead shares something and it goes into your alerts, what do I do with this? Engage, right? This is a perfect time to engage, look at what they shared, read and consume and engage. Now how do we turn this into a conversation, that's our goal. 

This is where we take it one step deeper. Let's say they shared content on interest trends for 2020. For outlook. You go in and when maybe your bank already has something on this, if you've got that's great. If not, you can google and find other ungated content on the same topic. And now I reach out to them. Like even if this is where we can use an InMail or a connection request. Jack, I really enjoyed your post. Yeah, Jack, thanks so much for posting on industry trends of interest rates for 2024. I recently came across another article with a similar but slightly different spin. If you're interested, let me know I'm happy to send you this link. And all of a sudden, we are having a normal, natural human to human conversation about selling products and services. It's not about getting you a line of credit yet, right? That's not where we are. Where we are is let's start rapport and start conversations. And Jack's like, Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, I'd love that. And then I might say, terrific, here's the link, or is there anyone else in the economic world that you follow? I'm always looking for great thought leaders. 

Here are people that I follow when you've got your own content, maybe it's a poll. Maybe it's an ebook you want to quote for. Maybe it's a post you just want to comment on. You can now reach out To them, because you've built that rapport and say, Hey, I'd love your perspective on this. I'd love your one click vote on this. So I know a lot of bankers are going, Okay, that's a lot. It's really not any more than any kind of relationship that you would build. It's not. It's really about that rapport building. And that alerts allows us to see what's happening. Lots of other work alerts, like change jobs, where there's two opportunities, the new person at the old company and where this person is now. I mean, there's so many alerts. And the goal is to go through those alerts and say, How can I start meaningful conversations based on these alerts, that helped me grow rapport, and ultimately, you know, create the business relationships that we need to bring in new business?

Jack Hubbard  20:55

Awesome. And this is live TV. So we have the practices, you've got some in our studio, I don't see the chat, and neither does Brynne but they're on your phone. Are there some questions that have come up that are of any interest?

Brynne Tillman  21:12

There's some technical questions that we're trying to deal with. But ultimately, we just got into this is a great show, and really good insights. Okay, great.

Jack Hubbard  21:24

Great. One more thing I mentioned is a bonus. And I mentioned that brands really know what's going on. AI is obviously a target topic that everybody's talking about. And I don't think Sales Navigator wants to be left out here. What's happening on Sales Navigator with AI going forward, Brynne.  

Brynne Tillman  21:49

So Sales Navigator has, well, they already have some AI built in. But there are two new features coming out in q1, that blow my mind. The first one is conversational chat. Sorry, conversational filters. So what this means is, you can just type in chatGPT. I'm looking for entrepreneurs that have had a business that's more than 10 years old, but less than 20, that has this many employees in manufacturing. Great. So now that we've got, you know, that list, all of a sudden, LinkedIn will have these filters that I talked about that are pretty robust, we'll take that chat and create a list for you. So you may say that I have engaged on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. And then it refines that list for you. So if you know what you're looking for, but you don't feel comfortable in the filters and trying to figure it out, you just tell it and it figures it out for you. So I think that's going to be huge, especially for new people using Sales Navigator. And folks that are like, you know, there's this complex, it's a little confusing, they're taking the confusion out of it, which I love. 

The second one, which I think is now a game changer for all bankers, period, end of story. It's amazing. We know the value of research, we know the value like that RelPro brings in where we've got all of this, these great insights, public financials, things that are coming in, that can help us make better decisions. Account IQ will actually go out in real time. This is the end, grab just what's out there. If you Googled not, it doesn't go nearly as deep as RelPro grows, by no means. But anything that's that if you Googled would come up, we'll now come into account IQ and give you a little summary about what's going on in the last 15,20 days. Whatever is top of Google, and all of a sudden we now have these insights that can help us start conversations and find out what's going on. Maybe they acquired a few branches. Maybe they've been acquired, maybe I mean, you could Oh that would be for us for you guys. For bankers, it might say, you know, businesses too, is there a merger, is there a purchase not a branch, right but a business. And you look at these things you go, okay, these are insights that can help me start a meaningful conversation in their eyes, because we're relevant and in real time, we know what their priorities are.

Jack Hubbard  24:43

We do this every week. We take 30 minutes of your time. It's recorded, so you can watch it again. But our goal here is to provide as much practical help as we possibly can. I'm ready Really excited to tell you about next week. You know, I, we talked about our wonderful Taylor who passed away a couple of weeks ago. And she used to have this wonderful routine that she would do, we would know exactly what time of day it is based on her routine. Now, you don't have to be on LinkedIn, three hours an hour and a half an hour a day to make this work for you. But you do have to have some kind of a routine. 

So next week, we're going to talk about A Day in the Life, what you should be thinking about as your day progresses around LinkedIn. And for me, it's not just the morning, there's certain things I do in the morning. And certain things I do around noon, certain things I do in the air in the afternoon, and we're going to talk about them on November second. I'm really excited about that. I'm also excited Brent to tell everybody that you're going to be getting out of the office and you get to travel. And so the week of on Thursday, November 9, Jack Rants without Brynne. And I'm excited to talk about some of the things that I've seen in 2023. And some of the things that might go on in 2024. Not from a LinkedIn perspective, but from a sales perspective. And I'm going to review some of the books that have come out. I'm going to talk about some tools and some best practices. And I'm hoping that we get a ton of people there. So you can ask lots of questions. And so we can have a real engaging 30 to 40 minutes. So this is fun. Brynne, I look forward to Thursdays all the time, because I get a chance to see you.

Brynne Tillman  26:45

I do too. And thank you so much. This is great. And I am looking forward to Aday in the life of a modern banker next week.

Jack Hubbard  26:55

See you next week, everybody.

Brynne Tillman  26:57

Bye guys.

Jack Hubbard  26:58

We are here live on LinkedIn every Thursday at noon Eastern time. We'd like to thank our amazing sponsors RelPro and Vertical IQ, two vital platforms that all modern bankers should be leveraging to start more trust based conversations without being salesy. If you found value in today's program, please subscribe, review, like, comment and share with your peers. And lastly, be sure to sign up for a free public library at themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary. Again, that's themodernbanker.com/publiclibrary. Here's to your continued great success.