Several weeks ago, LinkedIn began promoting upgrades to the home page of its Sales Navigator service. The new features finally hit my user id today. Enhancements include expanded insights and update filtering, the Social Selling Index, and a recent activity section.
Expanded Insights
Expanded insights help users “get the intelligence you need to engage with your prospects at the right time, including new insights on who to reach out to – and how.” This is a welcome addition which partially helps address their discoverability problem concerning older posts. Sales Navigator now displays two member posts along with the ability to scroll through older posts. However, this broader discoverability is not yet available throughout the product.
Update Filtering
Updated Filtering allows users to “filter your updates by type or by the top accounts you’ve been prospecting recently.” While most of these filters already existed, the quick filtering by top accounts is a welcome enhancement. Unfortunately, it does not provide a quick means to drill down to your other accounts. For those, you would need to go to the account profile directly.
Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index (SSI) helps you “see how your score is trending, and how you rank against your peers in Social Selling.” The SSI provides a gamification element to Navigator which encourages greater social selling through the service.
Members are rated by their ability to
- Establish a Professional Brand
- Find the Right People
- Engage with Insights
- Build Relationships
The SSI section also allows users to share updates, but not long-form posts. For those, users must toggle over to the standard LinkedIn platform.
Users can drill down to their SSI statistics which provides a six week history of the SSI along with comparison scores vs. your team, industry, and network.
The SSI also includes a pre-canned boast link to promote the SSI to your LinkedIn network. I also discussed the SSI last week.
Recent Activity
This section consists of Recently Viewed Executives, Keywords, and Companies. Saved Searches are also displayed.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the eleven vendors I profiled in my just published 2015 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors. In the coming weeks, I will provide mini-profiles of each of these vendors in my blog. I have already published a few: