Each week on “Around Town,” our host, Sarah Olson, talks to members of the First Coast community who are making an impact in their part of town. Today, Sarah speaks with Brad Pearse of Simplified Sales
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Transcript:
Sarah Olson:
Welcome back to another episode of Around Town. I’m your host, Sarah Olson. And today we have my new friend, Brad Pearse, with Simplified Sales, LinkedIn, and sales navigating strategist. Yes! What an awesome time to be in your field. Thank you for being on the show.
Brad Pearse:
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Sarah Olson:
Yeah, tell—tell us everything. Tell us about you and the strategy. Yeah.
Brad Pearse:
So Simplified Sales was really founded on the idea of helping small business owners, founder-led companies drive business development strategies on LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. And how it all kind of came to be is that I’ve been in business development for over 20 years. My latest role was Director of Business Development for a company called OtterBox.
Then I started my own development agency a couple of years ago. And what I found was that in my sales roles, I jumped on LinkedIn probably about a dozen years ago, and it really propelled my career in business development. I found a lot of success on it.
So when I left corporate and started my own agency, I found that a lot of small business owners and founder-led businesses were really trying to figure out ways to optimize LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. And that’s what I do today.
Sarah Olson:
And LinkedIn is real. I’ve been on LinkedIn forever as well. And LinkedIn is a different beast on social media because it has a lot more rules. It’s more business-focused. It’s not salesy—you know, they frown upon selling stuff online. It’s more of a connection. So how does Sales Navigator kind of bridge that gap?
Brad Pearse:
Yeah. So there are two different platforms. Obviously, you have LinkedIn.com, and you have Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is kind of an offshoot from LinkedIn. They pull all their database data from LinkedIn into Sales Navigator.
The way I look at LinkedIn is that it’s really a business-to-business networking platform. So when people think about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s a way to connect and engage with people—to do business, open up new relationships, or partnerships.
Sales Navigator was born as a prospecting platform that’s more organized. You can build target lists, filter by industry, company size, and then do buyer mapping to understand who you want to connect with inside a company.
There are different ways to do that—mapping personas, building target lists. One of the cool things about Sales Navigator is that it automates recommended leads for you to reach out to. So you don’t have to do the heavy lifting.
They’ll actually serve leads up to you based on the criteria you set.
Sarah Olson:
You can spend hours just typing in “human resources director,” and then you can’t get anywhere because they’re a third connection or a fourth cousin. And you just can’t make that connection. So Sales Navigator really hones that in and helps make a nice approach.
Brad Pearse:
Exactly. It really becomes what I call a digital prospecting workspace. You can be strategic about who you want to go after, who you want to connect with, ask for introductions—those types of things.
Sarah Olson:
Can you give me an example of a small business that needs help with sales? If they call you, what’s the first thing you ask them?
Brad Pearse:
The first thing I do is walk them through an assessment to understand where they’re at and what their goals are. The first thing we focus on is understanding who their core ideal customer is and gaining clarity around that.
The second step is building a specific target list based on those industries. We filter those out and build them inside Sales Navigator. That gives them a collective workflow inside the platform.
Then we work on the messaging. One of the cool things about Sales Navigator is a feature called Account IQ and Lead IQ, which is an AI function built inside Sales Navigator. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, so they use the Copilot engine for AI.
Account IQ gives insights into pain points and business needs. Based on those insights—what we call triggers or buying signals—we create outbound messaging strategies.
Sarah Olson:
Thank you so much for being on the show. And for more information on Brad at Simplified Sales, go to HGTVJax.com.
