LinkedIn rolled out its Q1 2020 Sales Navigator release, the first quarterly release under their new product chief Lyndsey Edwards. Expanded features include contact creation, a redesigned PointDrive service (now called Smart Links), search enhancements, job posting growth alerts, and enhancements to the home page and mobile app.
Contact Creation is the biggest enhancement in the release. Like the Data Validation flag last quarter, Contact Creation is a limited data sync solution that is bounded by their member data privacy agreements. Contact Creation allows reps to create CRM contact records from within Sales Navigator. While other Sales Intelligence vendors provide full contact records including email, direct dial, job function, job level, and social links, Sales Navigator only supports the following fields (of which only four are pre-populated):
- Account
- Opportunity
- Opportunity Role
- First Name (Pre-populated from Sales Navigator)
- Last Name (Pre-populated from Sales Navigator)
- Job Title (Pre-populated from Sales Navigator)
- Country (Pre-populated from Sales Navigator)
- Phone Number
- Lead Source
Edwards noted that the average CRM instance has roughly half of its records out of date. Reducing record creation and update workflows help address this problem. LinkedIn can be particularly helpful in identifying executive departures and title changes, hence last quarter’s data validation flag. However, Contact Creation only pre-populates four fields. Thus, sales reps either need to have the other details available when creating the contact record or upload a stump record, which is later populated by a different vendor (e.g. Lightning Data partners on the AppExchange). While other vendors allows lists of Account, Contact, or Lead records to be uploaded, only a single contact record may be created at a time from Sales Navigator.
“We’re really leaning into our relationships with CRM vendors over the past couple of quarters,” said Edwards. “It’s an age-old problem that isn’t getting better. We think we can help in a pretty meaningful way. When people change jobs, they update their LinkedIn profiles first.”
Record matching and duplicate checking are performed.
Contact Creation is available for Enterprise clients only. Admins must turn on CRM Sync for Salesforce. Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales contact creation is in beta.
Part II of my release coverage discusses Smart Links, their next-generation PointDrive service.