LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 2023 Sales Navigator release to admins two weeks ago. As with other releases, LinkedIn is executing a rolling release to its customers. New Functionality includes an Account Hub, enhancements to Product Category and Buyer Intent, and search upgrades.
LinkedIn Director of Product Marketing Neil Khare argues that traditional Sales Intelligence platforms fail to empower sales teams due to poor data quality. However, LinkedIn’s “trifecta of insights” (buyer intent, relationship intelligence, and account insights) empower reps to “quickly act on the best opportunities with Account Hub.”
LinkedIn claims that its Sales Intelligence drives 2.3X larger deals and 72% more revenue.
Sales Navigator supports 60 million company and 900 million personal profiles that members maintain as their professional business identities. Along with account information, Account Hub provides actionable details, including funding events, buyer intent, and opportunity data (if your CRM is connected to Sales Navigator).
The Account Hub offers a centralized location for account prioritization and management activities. It is the next iteration of the Buyer Intent Dashboard and combines intent and activity insights within account lists.
“With it, you can make data-driven account prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place,” blogged Senior Director of Product Monica Lewis. “As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like ‘growth alerts/ or ‘high and moderate buyer intent’ to see which accounts are showing signals that they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.”
The Account Hub enables account prioritization, outreach, and relationship-management activities:
- Understand the economic changes taking place: Know when a company has recently received a new round of funding or is experiencing changes in its headcount, with timely account alerts displayed within Account Hub.
- Find new warm paths into the account:Account Hub’s Recommendations are derived from intent and relationship intelligence. Indicators include InMail acceptances, decision-maker hires, and connection paths (first, second, and TeamLink connections).
- Prioritize outreach to accounts with buyer intent: Sales Navigator has been building out its buyer intent capabilities with the combination of both Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent in Account Hub. Buyer Intent signals include new employee connections, InMail acceptances, ad engagement, and company page engagement.
- Manage account lists: Reps can toggle between account lists and manage them. Users can also upload CSV files of accounts to build new lists or search for relevant accounts.
Sales Navigator continues to build out its Product Category Intent launched in Q1. Product Category intent identifies buyers potentially searching for products in their category. The Q2 release lets sales reps select and track relevant categories.
Sales Navigator Buyer Intent is based on research into a vendor. Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category as a whole. The two types of intent data can be compared to understanding the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.
On May 31, Sales Navigator is adding Product Category Intent data, which includes 770 product categories, to the Account Hub.
“Our AI model that drives Product Category Intent is constantly learning and today has largely isolated software-focused product categories, but this will change in coming releases,” noted Lewis.
At multi-product companies, high Buyer Intent and active Product Category Intent help focus initial messaging to prospects and cross-sell messaging into accounts. Likewise, firms with low Buyer Intent but active Product Category Intent are candidates for initial outreach.
“Sales leaders have been limited to running the same linear, one-size-fits-all approach to selling because they’ve only had access to stale, inaccurate, and limited identity data provided by other sales intelligence tools,” stated Khare. “With only 5% of their customers’ purchase time, being ill-equipped results in missed deals. Sales organizations struggle to identify and prioritize the right people and companies. With imprecise focus, they’re forced to spin their wheels, and golden opportunities are left hidden in the dark.”
New Buyer Activities have also been attached to the Buyer Activity section of Account Pages. These new Buyer Activities include website visits for companies with the LinkedIn Insights Tag installed and new connections to colleagues (Sales Navigator Sellers and TeamLink users on the Sales Navigator contract).
Buyer Intent is collected and analyzed across a set of 180+ LinkedIn Activities, including:
- Profile views and page activity, such as following a company page.
- New connections to colleagues
- LinkedIn.com advertising activity such as clicking, viewing, or filling out a lead generation form
- LinkedIn messaging activity (e.g., InMail acceptances/declines), including messaging with colleagues on the Linkedin contract
- Website activity for firms with the LinkedIn Insights tag added to their website
“Up-to-date, accurate information is the difference between hitting people at the right time and missing your moment. If your data is out of date, you’ll miss your chance. If your data is incomplete, you won’t be able to craft the right message,” blogged Senior Product Marketing Manager Sarah LaCroix. “The research is clear: In today’s market, closing a deal starts with finding the right data.”
Sales Navigator added a Buyer Intent Lead Filter, helping reps identify “potential buyers at accounts where someone has expressed high or moderate interest in the past thirty days.”
Other Search enhancements include:
- A simplified saved search UX
- A connection filter that selects accounts with first-degree connections
- A “people you interacted with” filter that can include or exclude leads with recent interactions.
- Current job title and past job title filters
The Account Hub is available across all Sales Navigator editions, but Buyer and Product Category Intent are limited to the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus CRM-connected editions.
LinkedIn Sales Insights resets which records are enriched at the beginning of each contract year. The new Prior Year Reports let Sales Ops quickly find and select past accounts for ongoing enrichment. At any time, the operations teams can create a report of purchased accounts and apply filters to determine which accounts they wish to continue enriching.