LinkedIn Sales Navigator unveiled its Q4 release this month with new account and relationship intelligence lists, improvements to buyer intent, refined searching, expanded revenue and technology data, and a more streamlined ability to upload a sales rep’s book of business.
The new My Current Accounts homepage prompt lets sales reps load their book of business as a CSV list matched against LinkedIn company profiles. In addition, LinkedIn offers a quick field mapper to ensure the CSV is properly ingested and matched to the correct LinkedIn company profiles.
Account Lists provide several benefits to sales reps. Sales Navigator users can
- Target in-market accounts based on LinkedIn Buyer Intent
- Review real-time alerts around sales triggers such as funding events, leadership changes, and headcount growth/decline
- Streamline search and prospecting efforts by spotlighting specific saved searches based a user’s book of business
“Yes, it’s great on its own,” blogged LinkedIn Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray. “But it reaches a whole new level of capability when you can manage your entire book of business in Sales Navigator – insights surfaced via features like Buyer Intent are more actionable, searching becomes more powerful, and it’s that much easier to stay on top of what’s happening at your most important accounts.”
LinkedIn already aggregated Buyer Intent scores spanning 180 different intent signals, and it added four isolated visible Buyer Intent activities as part of an early beta in Q3. LinkedIn plans to release additional Buyer Intent activities in future releases. These specific activities are displayed with the associated account. Furthermore, when the intent activity is public-facing, the individual completing the activity is also presented to the sales rep.
The four isolated Buyer Intent activities are
- Who’s followed a company
- Who’s visited your profile
- Who’s a new connection to yourself
- Who’s filled out a lead gen form
LinkedIn contends that its intent insights differ from other intent data sets across multiple dimensions, beginning with its identity-based intelligence. Because LinkedIn users are opted-in, the intent data is tied to the individual conducting research on LinkedIn, not the broader account. Thus, users know “whether it’s the actual person, groups of people, or if they’re a decision maker.”
Sales Navigator said that it will offer a full-funnel view across the buyers’ journey “from the top of the funnel with ad engagement, to the middle with product page engagement, and to the bottom of the funnel with InMail Engagement.”
Finally, LinkedIn positions activity transparency as a differentiator that goes beyond a signal score to activity detail, which will expand in scope.
Current Account Lists and Buyer Intent are available in Advanced and Advanced Plus (CRM) editions of Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn did not expand the Buyer Intent categories in Q4 but added two new features: Filtering for Buyer Activities and new Buyer Intent account hover cards. On Account Pages, sales reps can filter for activities by time range and level of decision-making ability.
Reps can also hover over accounts on Alerts, Lists, and Lead Pages to better evaluate an opportunity and refine account messaging. The hover popup displays the level of buyer interest, recent news, and decision-makers changes “so sellers can easily double check any account’s level of intent as the work through Sales Navigator, without disrupting the current workflow.”
The New Executives at Saved Accounts List is an auto-generated list based on the saved accounts list. The list identifies VP and CxO executives hired by tracked accounts. While the executive view restricts the report to top-level executives, it doesn’t yet support filtering by function, a valuable report extension.
I’ve long extolled the value of identifying new executives at companies. Fortunately, sales intelligence solutions are doing a better job of leveraging executive change insights in their products:
- D&B Hoovers supports exec change alerts and triggers by job function.
- ZoomInfo offers executive tracking of champions to new companies along with backfill contact recommendations at their old employer.
- LinkedIn identifies new execs at saved accounts.
“We’ve found a lot of success internally being able to see when a new executive comes in,” LinkedIn Sales Solutions Head of Product Marketing Neil Khare explained to GZ Consulting during a briefing. “They’re generally more willing to think about new vendors or have a mandate to change things up a little bit. It’s a great time to capitalize on it, and we find that we’ve had some success internally on it, so we wanted to bring this up externally as well.”
LinkedIn also released a Recently Accepted Connections and InMails List highlighting individuals who responded to connection requests or InMails over the past thirty days.
The lists are available online from the list tab or via a weekly email digest.
“These are people that you are going to want to follow up with,” stated Khare.
Users can access two updated filters when building lists: Technology Used and Revenue. Both filters have been improved with new data licensing agreements from undisclosed data partners.
Accounts may be filtered by preset revenue ranges (vs. discrete values determined by the end-user). All revenue data is in US Dollars.
To improve regional screening, users can paste a set of postal codes.
LinkedIn Sales Insights, LinkedIn’s DaaS enrichment service for sales ops, also benefited from expanded revenue data sourced from LinkedIn members, third-party vendors, and AI models. 95% of Fortune 500 and 75% of publicly traded companies display discrete revenue data. More broadly, 60% of companies have at least a modeled revenue range.
To improve the Sales Insights workflow, LSI added exclusion filters for companies and personas, helping Sales Operations “focus on industries and geographies that are relevant to your business.”
