Check Out These New Updates to LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn Sales Solutions

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As you probably know, about one in five decision makers changes jobs every year. That means your CRM data can get stale…fast. 

If you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for sales prospecting and closing deals, you probably also sync it to your Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365. Recently, LinkedIn announced a new data validation feature, which automatically flags if a contact is no longer at the company listed in your CRM. This is checked daily against LinkedIn data so you know you’re getting the most current and accurate information available. 

Contacts who have moved on to other companies are now marked using a “Not at Company” flag field in your CRM. Because this field is written to your CRM, you can use it to trigger activities like contact cleanups or removal from marketing campaigns. You can even leverage it with other applications that sync to the CRM. 

To make things easy, LinkedIn is including three key reports right out of the box: 

  1. Opportunities at Risk: Proactively identifying when a buyer has left an open opportunity
  2. Past Customers at New Companies: Identifying contacts at current customers (potential champions) who have joined new companies
  3. Out-of-Date Contacts: All potential contacts that need to be updated

This is a single and simple field, but its potential to help streamline your sales prospecting and maximize your selling time is highly valuable. 

Sales Managers Can Now Boost Team Success 

Many sales managers have Sales Navigator administration capabilities. With this in mind, LinkedIn has given usage reporting a new look, plus added metrics to improve your management experience. These include:  

  • InMail performance stats: See your sales reps’ InMail acceptance rates (measured when a LinkedIn member responds positively).
  • Expertise levels: See each team member’s Coach level with Sales Navigator, from beginner to expert, and know who needs to spend more time training. This will give you a better handle on your team’s skills and help you guide their success. 
  • New filters and exports: Filter your charts by custom date ranges, groups, and users. The improved CSV export gives you the ability to filter out inactive users.
  • Data update: We’ve updated the functionality for saved leads and saved accounts to include all save actions – giving you a more accurate view of activity on a specific day. 

Accommodating Global and Remote Sales Teams 

Many sales teams have reps who work remotely – and both your company and customers may be located in different time zones (perhaps even all around the world!). That’s why LinkedIn has integrated geography data (powered by Bing) to Sales Navigator and added coverage for 2.4 million more cities and more than 2,000 new states/provinces – to make your searches by regions, territories, and cities even more precise. 

Boost Your Prospecting with Funding Events Spotlight 

One of the best times to reach out to a prospect is right after they’ve raised a fresh round of capital. LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s new Funding Events Spotlight brings these updates to the top of your search results within the Spotlight tab, giving you a helpful cue to check in.  

And two new saved account alerts help you follow up at the right time. The first alerts you when a saved account adds headcount – specifically when there is more than five percent growth in 90 days. The second alerts you when there are new hires in a senior leadership position – signaling new decision makers. These alerts will be delivered for all saved accounts, so you don’t need to set anything up. 

Make Your Lists in Sales Navigator More Collaborative 

Lists have exceeded our expectations, with more than 1.6 million lists created to date. But we’re just getting started and have made lists a fully collaborative experience – allowing multiple people to add, remove, and comment on leads or accounts within the list. 

For enhanced collaboration, list owners will now be able to designate “view only” or “edit” permissions for collaborators. List collaborators with edit permissions will be able to add, remove, and comment on leads or accounts within a shared list, and alerts will be sent to collaborators when leads or accounts have been added to or removed from a custom list or when there are new comments on a custom list.

More Integrations for the Sales Navigator Application Platform Program

We’re also excited to announce integrations with Tableau and PowerBI as part of our growing Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) program. These new integrations allow you to view and analyze Sales Navigator usage data in your preferred business intelligence platform – with several new workbook templates that are ready to use right away. 

Linkedin also updated its Oracle Sales Cloud integration, which now has embedded profiles on lead and account pages (in addition to the currently-supported contacts feature).

Plus, all users on shared contracts will now receive access to new feature releases at the same time. This will provide a more seamless experience for users who may be collaborating on Sales Navigator. For sales managers, this will simplify sales training or sales enablement activities.

Learn more about the updates to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Headshot of Doug Camplejohn

Doug Camplejohn is VP of Product Management for LinkedIn Sales Solutions.