Have you heard of Sales Navigator? A surprising number of LinkedIn users are unaware of this terrific tool, so here is a brief summary.

Sales Navigator is a useful extension to LinkedIn which can help you with marketing, lead generation and business development. There is a cost to use the service, but many people find Sales Navigator essential to help them manage their social media community.

One of the main benefits of Sales Navigator is that you import your LinkedIn contacts and then sort them into leads, clients, targets etc. You can find companies, their employees or individual people. Once saved as a lead, you can add your own notes and tags as you build a hit list.

To help you, LinkedIn has built in a Lead Search function which has more than 20 filters to pick from. You can give your search a name and save it for use at a later date, plus you can choose to receive daily or weekly emails with new leads. You can also see content posted by your connections in the past 30 days — perfect for prompting engagement.

Once you have saved your leads, you can then make contact by sending a direct message to your first-level connections or InMails to everyone else (please note that you have a limited number of InMails).

When casting your net wider for new leads, you can refine your search by keywords, industry, location, company size, role and more. Focus on a company, keep up to date with their activity and develop relationships with the key people. If you have your own LinkedIn company page, you can even view leads who follow your firm.

Another useful function is the Social Selling Index (SSI), which shows you how you’re performing on Sales Navigator. Discover where you’re doing well and what areas need improving, while also comparing your performance with those in your team, company or industry.

Other tools worth a mention include Team Link (great for sales managers), Sales Navigator for Gmail (links to your inbox), the Sales Navigator mobile app (network on the move) and Learning Center (resource library).

If you feel that both the free and Premium versions of LinkedIn are too limited, Sales Navigator could be the tool for you. You can give it a go with a free trial, but beware — it will open up a whole new world which will consume your time. Let me know if you need any help…