Tag: LinkedIn

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q2 2023 Release

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 new Sales Navigator Account Hub.

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.
LinkedIn Product Interest Intent

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.”

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Buyer Activities

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.”

Buyer Intent flags are now displayed in search results.

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.

LeadDelta: Seed Round & Product Profile

The LeadDelta Network Manager provides a light CRM view for managing LinkedIn contacts.

LeadDelta, which offers a Sales Engagement platform focused on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, closed on an $800,000 pre-seed round.  LeadDelta has been self-funded since its 2021 founding.

LeadDelta focuses on managing the social capital entrepreneurs and sales reps capture in Sales Navigator. 

LeadDelta began as a “simple app” for tagging LinkedIn connections but now offers a broader app used by over 11,000 individuals and teams.  Features include a dashboard, sidebar (Chrome Extension), and Smart Inbox that help users manage their network.

The Smart Inbox lets users pin, star, and tag LinkedIn messages.  It also supports LinkedIn message filtering, a connection sidebar for viewing notes and tags while chatting, messaging templates, and a unified inbox for LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.  Users can message up to 25 contacts at a time.

The network manager syncs and updates contacts in a “lightweight CRM view.”  Users can search and sort contacts, create custom tables and views, follow/unfollow in bulk, and filter contacts.  The network manager also displays signals such as when connections were made and the last text.

The LeadDelta Dashboard analyzes the user’s LinkedIn network.

The Dashboard helps users view and manage key connection attributes, tags, and notes.

LinkedIn has not been careful about partnering with vendors that pull data from its platform; however, LeadDelta has managed to avoid conflict with LinkedIn by focusing on enhancing the LinkedIn experience and not mining it for contact intelligence.

“It has been a journey of really trying to be the good guys on Linkedin and really making sure that Linkedin likes what we do because we complement the community.  We enhance the community.

What we say is ‘You own your data.  This is your data.’ This is also how we are a legitimate Linkedin business.  You have the permissions, and you say what you want, but then you can choose to whom to give.  If you want to give your contacts to your company or not, and which contacts, and what context?  This is your digital Rolodex, and for the first time, you can monetize it.  You can come to your new employer and say, look at my app.”

CEO Vedran Rasic

LeadDelta has been growing “steadily 20% month-over-month,” helping them “complete the fundraising from really reputable angels around the globe,” continued Rasic.

The firm will soon be launching LeadDelta Workspaces to “revolutionize how teams sell, hire, fundraise, and market their products and services. For the first time, teams can utilize their combined social capital,” said LeadDelta.

Workspaces support pooled connections across teams, notes, and tagging.

LeadDelta will simplify sales and support selling from both traditional and non-traditional sales roles.  Rasic sees LeadDelta as akin to Figma, which simplified design and took market share from Adobe. 

“Figma came and said, Everybody is a designer, and we can all collaborate.  We can all add notes [and] comments.  We can all engage.  This is the same thing.  This is what we want to do for sales for relationships,” analogized Rasic.  “Imagine a recruiter being able to help a salesperson close a deal or a salesperson, in reverse, being able to help recruit or score that next hire.”

Historically, individuals could only manage 150 relationships at a time, but that number is expanding due to social networks and AI, helping with fundraising, selling, marketing, and hiring.  LeadDelta’s goal is to create “one integrated, cross-referenced professional network” that improves the odds of success as users collaborate cross-functionally.

The network will expand further as additional individuals participate and data is integrated from other platforms such as HubSpot and Gmail.

LeadDelta targets SMBs with annual invoices between $5K and $50K.  Many of their prospects have deployed HubSpot; thus, HubSpot CRM connectivity is a popular request that will soon be implemented in the platform.

Along with HubSpot, LeadDelta is looking to add CSV uploads to capture second-degree connections.

Rasic noted that at many tech organizations, the executive team is well-connected but too busy to leverage its connections for the organization.  LeadDelta helps address this issue.

“As a person who fostered numerous for-profit and non-profit enterprises through stewarding community efforts, it wasn’t until LeadDelta that I got the first smart and dedicated application for targeted network outreach,” stated lead investor Tijo Bajic.  “This is not only an idea I believe in.  It powers how I interact daily as a professional.  I’m proud to be the first investor and the angel syndicate lead.”

LeadDelta is priced at $29 per user per month or $19.33 when billed annually.  In addition, the firm is offering grandfathered pricing to its early clients.

The LeadDelta Sidebar (Chrome connection).

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q1 Release


LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out its Q1 product, focusing on relationships, personas, and enhanced buyer intent functionality.

The new Relationship Explorer surfaces “hidden allies” and best paths into accounts, helping sales reps avoid cold outreach and “spam cannon techniques.”

“Instead of a blanket approach where you target everyone at an account, you can laser in on the people who are most likely to take a meeting with you based on their persona and what connection they have to you,” explained LinkedIn Senior Director of Product Mitali Pattnaik.  “You can also use it to multi-thread deeper into accounts by finding the next-best person to reach out to.  This creates a more efficient experience for buyers and sellers alike.”

Sales Navigator has long supported introductions and TeamLink (colleague) suggestions, but it has never fully leveraged the value of its economic graph for warm communications.  The Economic Graph supports 900-million-member profiles across 61 million companies, along with current and prior employment, educational background, posts, etc.

Sales Navigator has a second advantage: its profiles are maintained by its members, ensuring that profiles are kept up to date and contain rich data around education, interests, skills, employment history, etc.

“Teams have relied so heavily on cold outreach largely because they’re leveraging sales intelligence tools that are limited in showing how to get a foot in the door of an account.  These tools are chock-full of stale data: everything from incorrect contact info to the wrong person in the wrong role.  With reliance on tools full of stale data, reps end up spamming all potential prospects with a spray-and-pray strategy, leading to an abysmal 1-2% response rate,” argued Pattnaik.  “Looking forward, sellers are going to need to be smarter and reach out with a more personalized approach.”

Relationship Explorer recommends prospects at an account, leveraging the interactions and trends across its professional network “to provide sellers with optimal paths to connect with their target personas at their target accounts.”  As a result, Relationship Explorer saves time prospecting, cross-selling, and upselling at accounts, helping reps find the best contacts at target accounts.

The feature offers up to eight “of the most relevant individuals” based on their target persona and relevant, actionable insights (called spotlights by LinkedIn) based on interactions between members and organizations.  Spotlights highlight both biographic and dynamic information, including recent job changes, LinkedIn postings, and past customers.  As such, they provide timely reasons to reach out and content to include in their outreach.

Relationship Explorer suggests the best contact at an account based on the user-defined persona.

Relationship Explorer is available in all Sales Navigator editions.  However, while it displays a dozen spotlights, not all are available in each edition.  For example, Past Customer spotlights are only available in the Advanced Plus edition.

Personas help users identify their target audience by function, seniority level, geography, and current job title.  They are available on the Homepage, Search, Relationship Explorer, and Account pages.

Users can define up to five personas which act as templates for homing in on ideal prospects.

Persona definitions on the homepage.

Pattnaik suggested several use cases for personas:

  • Creating highly targeted Personas matching target customer profiles.
  • Leveraging Personas in Search, Homepage, or Account Pages to identify the most relevant opportunities.
  • Identifying warm paths and decision-makers at targeted accounts with Relationship Explorer.
  • Using insights from Account Pages, including Persona growth, to prioritize accounts composed of leads matching Personas.

Persona functionality is available to all users.

Over the past few releases, Sales Navigator has built buyer intent into its service.  Its latest intent-based feature is Product Category Buyer Intent, which identifies buyers searching for products in their category.

Product Intent Categories

Previous Sales Navigator intent was based upon research into a vendor.  Product Category Intent identifies prospects researching a product category but may not know a vendor or its offerings.  The two types of intent data can be compared to understand the level of interest in the company versus the interest in the company’s product category, informing sales and marketing strategy.

“Categories are created with AI by combining related keywords into one central category, which is then tied to products using publicly facing product descriptions.  For example, “fintech” and “financial tech” are individual keywords, which the AI model can combine into a single category,” explained Pattnaik.  “Intent is then connected using buyer’s members’ profile as well as recent buying activities on LinkedIn.com to help sellers find the buyers who are likely looking for a solution like theirs.”

LinkedIn is rolling out several new Buyer Activities that will be displayed on Account Pages and the Buyer Intent Account Dashboard.  Additional intent categories are rolling out over the next quarter:

  • LinkedIn Ad Engagement: Clicks and view activity data.  Both of these data points are private, so sellers will only be able to see the general profile of the buyer.
  • InMail Acceptance for a colleague: Displays the public identity of individuals who have accepted InMails from other sellers on the same contract.
  • Company LinkedIn page visits: Clicks on the company page.  Page visits are a private activity, so the buyer is anonymous.
  • LinkedIn profile visits to colleagues and leadership: A new activity that shows sellers when a potential buyer visits the profile of a colleague on the same contract or company leadership.  This is also a private activity.

Buyer Intent is available in the Advanced and Advanced Plus editions of Sales Navigator.

Users can now search against any account list or use an account list as a suppression list.  Other new search filters include:

  • Past Customer (Advanced Plus only)
  • Past Colleague
  • Executive TeamLink – leverages the networks of a company’s executives (Advanced and Advanced Plus only).
  • Viewed Your Profile
  • Product Category Buyer Intent

LinkedIn also enhanced its Sales Insights (LSI) service with the improved matching of companies to CRM accounts and Adjustable Growth Time ranges.

LinkedIn admitted that its previous LSI matching logic may have been inaccurate as it only matched against a few standard CRM fields.  LSI now supports CRM custom ingestion that improves match rates with customer-defined match fields.  There is also an option to force matches based on LinkedIn Ids or URLs.

LinkedIn Sales Insights Field Mapping

Adjustable Growth Time Ranges can be set to 3, 6, 12, and 24-month increments.

LinkedIn: Using AI Responsibly

LinkedIn posted its AI principles today. These are all high-level which is a good starting point, but implementing rules and policies requires more details.

AI is not new to LinkedIn. LinkedIn has long used AI to enhance our members’ professional experiences. While AI has enormous potential to expand access to opportunity and transform the world of work in positive ways, the use of AI comes with risks and potential for harm. Inspired by, and aligned with our parent company Microsoft’s leadership in this area, we wanted to share the Responsible AI Principles we use at LinkedIn to guide our work: 

  • Advance Economic Opportunity: People are at the center of what we do. AI is a tool to further our vision, empowering our members and augmenting their success and productivity. 
  • Uphold Trust: Our commitments to privacy, security and safety guide our use of AI. We take meaningful steps to reduce the potential risks of AI.
  • Promote Fairness and Inclusion: We work to ensure that our use of AI benefits all members fairly, without causing or amplifying unfair bias.  
  • Provide Transparency: Understanding of AI starts with transparency. We seek to explain in clear and simple ways how our use of AI impacts people. 
  • Embrace Accountability: We deploy robust AI governance, including assessing and addressing potential harms and fitness for purpose, and ensuring human oversight and accountability.
“Using AI Responsibly,” LinkedIn In the Loop Newsletter (March 2023)

As with every new technology, it can be used for either the betterment of society or malign purposes. Setting out principles helps frame product management and engineering in building their models, promoting trust, and setting guidelines to reduce negative effects (e.g., recapitulating bias, spreading misinformation and disinformation).

Transparency helps reduce negative effects as well. If it isn’t known why a recommendation was made, how can it be trusted? Furthermore, how does one know that the AI isn’t recapitulating somebody’s IP; gathering information from incorrect, malign, or outdated sources; or making incorrect assumptions? Thus, black box AI should be avoided.

Microsoft is the early leader in implementing Generative AI, a category of AI “algorithms that generates new output based on data they have been trained on” (Gartner). The best known of these is ChatGPT which generates text and carries on chat conversations. Microsoft recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. It is quickly moving to integrate it into Bing and other products.

On Monday, I will post about ChatGPT being integrated into Microsoft’s Viva Sales product.

GZ Consulting Resources

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q4 Release

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

  1. Who’s followed a company
  2. Who’s visited your profile
  3. Who’s a new connection to yourself
  4. Who’s filled out a lead gen form
Reps can view LinkedIn buyer intent against their account list and then target accounts with high intent levels.

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.

Buyer Activities capture account and contact-level intent.

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.”

Hover cards provide account intelligence without disrupting research flow.

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.”

LinkedIn Sales Insights now offers exclusion criteria to improve reporting filters.

LinkedIn “Deep Sales” Positioning

LinkedIn Deep Sales ad (Wall Street Journal)

Coinciding with its Q3 2022 release, LinkedIn is positioning Sales Navigator as a facilitator of Deep Selling.  Deep Sales positions LinkedIn as a new way to sell that addresses many of the current problems faced by sales teams (e.g., The Great Reshuffle, increased deal complexity following COVID, the digitization of communications, and an increase in SPAM).  This new positioning was announced in the Wall Street Journal.

“Too many sales professionals are stuck in what we’ve come to call “shallow selling” – an endless, frustrating loop of contacting more and more potential buyers in ways that no longer work,” posted LinkedIn Sales Solutions’ Marketing VP Gail Moody-Byrd.  “I’ve felt the pain of sales in my professional life.  I’ve consoled colleagues who were at risk of getting fired because they weren’t hitting their numbers or seen them committing “unnatural acts” to get a deal closed.  I’ve been on endless, painful pipeline review calls, looking at leads that will never materialize into a closed/won deal.  And I feel it daily in my personal life, as I try to dodge intrusive emails, texts, and phone calls that keep coming at me to purchase MarTech software.”

Moody-Byrd argued that shallow selling doesn’t work, but reps can employ deep learning software to support “deep sales.”

“Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get to a meaningful answer.  Deep sales relies on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context.  It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in the buying process that makes sense.  It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics.”

LinkedIn claims that Sales Navigator customers enjoy a 38% increase in pipeline generated, a six percent increase in win rates, and a 47% increase in deal size.  The firm is positioning the combination of Sales Navigator and Sales Insights as its Deep Sales solution set.

“It’s good to see LinkedIn working on new ways to utilize machine learning to sort its various data inputs and provide a better experience,” stated SocialMediaToday Head of Content Andrew Hutchinson.  “Thus far, LinkedIn hasn’t really been able to tap into its unmatched database of professional insights, but maybe, through advanced machine learning on its huge dataset, it’s moving towards the next stage of becoming a critical companion for all HR and business professionals, by facilitating guidance on various fronts that can lead to smarter decisions.”

Sales Navigator actionable insights include relationship intelligence, buyer intent, and Account Insights.

Gong Adds LinkedIn Sales Navigator SNAP Integration

SNAP integrations support LinkedIn content display and functionality within partner platforms.

Gong is the latest RevTech company to join LinkedIn’s SNAP program of Sales Navigator integrations.  Joint customers can view LinkedIn Sales Navigator Embedded Profiles directly in Gong.  Functionality includes executive profile display, related leads, icebreakers, and introductions.  Contacts may be viewed or Saved as Leads in Sales Navigator.

“Being a great seller requires two datasets – the quantitative data of when to reach out to whom and the qualitative data of, once you connect with those people, ensuring you have a full view of deal health and that you are employing sales best practices in all your interactions,” argued LinkedIn’s Head of Product and Solutions Marketing Nicole Desjardins.  “Sales Navigator does a great job of providing the former, and Gong’s Reality Platform, the latter.”

The SNAP integration provides context around key accounts and the demand unit, helping them build broader relationships and leverage TeamLink (colleague) connections.  Furthermore, Sales Navigator within Gong helps reps build credibility, establish rapport, and multithread.

“Integrating Gong’s Reality Platform with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is all about empowering revenue teams with actionable sales intelligence they need to build stronger relationships with prospects more efficiently.  Bringing together these two powerful datasets will give sales reps insights and recommended next steps that result in more closed deals, faster,” commented Gong’s Senior Director of Market Strategy Craig Hanson.  “Successful go-to-market teams understand that contact inspection and validation are paramount to successful deal management.”

The SNAP integration is only available to Gong customers with Sales Navigator Advanced or Advanced Plus licenses.  SNAP integrations are also available across major CRMs and SEPs, including Salesforce, MS Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Salesloft, Outreach, and Groove.

Sales Navigator added M&A Alerts for saved companies.  The alert is displayed on the Homepage and is shared for both acquired and acquiring companies. Another new feature is a Weekly Leads and Accounts List Digest that suggests the most relevant Leads (contacts) and Accounts for outreach.  It highlights accounts showing interest in the rep’s company, recommended leads, past customers at a new company, and opportunities at risk due to headcount changes.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Q2 2022 Release

The new Sales Navigator search UI dynamically updates the results list as soon as a filter is added or removed.

LinkedIn began rolling out its Q2 Sales Navigator release to users earlier this month.  As with previous releases, admins receive the release first, with general users following a few weeks later.  New features include expanded data validation, a new SNAP integration with conversation intelligence leader Gong, and the continued rollout of Sales Navigator’s new Search and Lead Page experiences.

Companies have responded to the pandemic and Great Reshuffle by increasing channel noise, hoping to break through the din, but this strategy is flawed.  Top-performing reps who heavily exceed their quota are “spending less time selling in the traditional sense — smiling-and-dialing and sending out mass outreach,” explained LinkedIn VP of Global Sales Solutions Alyssa Merwin Henderson.  They aren’t increasing the volume but carefully targeting their prospecting and messaging, conducting buyer research, and focusing on skill development.

“In today’s virtual world, where there’s more noise than ever, the recipe for winning is clear – fewer things done better,” concluded Henderson.

LinkedIn Head of Product and Solutions Marketing Nicole Desjardins highlighted three problems facing sales reps that LinkedIn is working to address:

  1. More virtual selling than ever, leading to more virtual noise than ever, with buyers being overwhelmed by irrelevant and generic outreach.
  2. Job switching continues to be higher than normal, making a mess of CRM data and putting deals at risk.
  3. A plethora of new sales tools have hit the market, many of which don’t integrate with each other, making it more confusing to choose the right tech stack.

Desjardins argued that the solution to these problems comes from real-time data fed into the CRM and “meaningful sales intelligence that helps you connect with and nurture the right buyers at the right time.”

The Great Reshuffle continues to create a “mess” of CRM data, resulting in inaccurate forecasts and irrelevant messaging.  According to LinkedIn’s upcoming “State of Sales” report, 41% of sales reps said their biggest problem was inaccurate, out-of-date CRM data.  To help address this issue, Sales Navigator now flags out-of-date contact and lead records and allows reps to update the CRM from Navigator to address this problem.

Sales Navigator Data Validation displays Update CRM badges and syncs updates to Leads and Contacts.

Data Validation displays an Update CRM badge on Sales Navigator member pages who have recently changed jobs, titles, or locations.  After clicking on the badge, reps are shown the new title, account, location, contact owner, and most recent opportunity.  Updates are made to matched Lead and Contact records, with the user controlling which fields are to be updated.  Reps are also shown which open opportunities are linked to the executive, allowing them to quickly remove departed execs from live opportunities.

“Clearly, this will save you time.  Instead of having to toggle back and forth between your CRM and Sales Navigator, you can do it all in our platform,” blogged Product Marketing Manager Austin Gray.  “More importantly, because updating your CRM is now easier to do, you’ll have more accurate data within it.  LinkedIn’s real-time first-party data means that you can have confidence that your CRM will have access to the most accurate and up-to-date information available.”

Data Validation is available for Sales Navigator Advanced Plus and supports record updates in Salesforce and MS Dynamics 365.  The functionality was released to customers with fewer than 15 seats this week and will be rolled out to large customers on June 22.

The New Search and Lead Page Experiences were rolled out to accounts with fewer than fifty seats last quarter.  The largest accounts will receive the updates this quarter.

The search feature has been streamlined to improve the time to “successful results.”  In addition, the search includes a “larger collapsible, intuitive grouped view of filters” that improves search filter discovery.  New and updated filters include TeamLink Connections of, Saved Leads, Saved Accounts, Previously Viewed, Current Company, Past Company, and Company Headquarter.

The search interface updates dynamically, providing results as each filter is added or removed.

The updated Sales Navigator Leads (Contact) Page

The new Lead Page (contacts) is designed for rapid lead qualification with “the most important info front and center,” including the most recent touchpoint, current role, and description.  Other features include a sticky action bar, conversation starters, and introduction paths.

The Conversation Starter section displays recent posts for comments and commonalities.

The Get Introduced section has been redesigned and expanded.

The TeamLink section is now organized by seniority level so that reps can find “their best path in.”  In addition, the section supports a pre-populated InMail to save reps time writing messages.

Sales Navigator is also adding a new Lead Panel for researching contacts in a prospecting list without having to open multiple windows.

“Prospecting in Sales Navigator often means using our powerful search to find your target buyer,” wrote Desjardins.”  Once you’ve found that list of potential buyers, we’re betting you then open a tab for each individual, which can mean a lot of open tabs and a lot of switching back and forth.  The new Lead Panel streamlines this process and keeps you on the same page the entire time.”

The new Lead Panel streamlines qualification and messaging from lead (contact) prospect lists.

The Lead Panel displays job title, job description, and conversation starters to assist with quick qualification and messaging.

The Lead Panel will be rolling out to accounts with fewer than fifty seats this quarter and enterprise accounts next quarter.

LinkedIn also added a Gong SNAP integration for viewing LinkedIn intelligence within Gong’s conversational intelligence platform.

LinkedIn: DEI Programs Boost Sales

LinkedIn commissioned Forrester Consulting to analyze whether firms with strong Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs have higher sales performance.  The result was a “resounding yes.”

“As the US population diversifies, so must your sales teams,” concluded Vanessa Fabrizio, Market Impact Consultant at Forrester.  “You need a diverse sales team to be customer-obsessed in 2021 and beyond.  Respondents understand the importance of diversity, as 60% stated that diversity within their sales team has contributed to their teams’ success.”

While DEI received much attention in 2020, sales leaders view it as an ongoing initiative, with 82% stating racial or ethnic diversity will be equally or more important in two years.  Additionally, 72% believe that DEI will be equally or more important across the business organization in two years.

Last September, Forrester Consulting surveyed 500 B2B sales leaders about their firms’ performance metrics and DEI practices (e.g., diversity in personnel, commitment to DEI training, and career advancement programs for underrepresented groups).  Those with strong DEI programs outperformed lagging programs across a series of metrics:

  • Sales Forecasts: Firms with strong programs expected 2021 revenue growth of 9% vs. 6% at lagging firms.
  • Conversion Rates: Organizations with strong DEI practices had a 54% lead-to-opportunity conversion rate vs. 26% at laggards.
  • Customer Satisfaction: Firms with strong programs saw a 24% increase in customer satisfaction scores vs. 17% at firms with weak programs.

“As buyers continue to demand a more personalized experience, successful companies will understand the increasing benefit of diversifying their teams to reflect the changing demographics of their target consumer,” said author and sales expert Jeff Davis.

Source: Forrester Consulting (LinkedIn commissioned research), “Diversity Drives Sales Success: The Link Between Successful Sales Teams and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

“In 2022, sales leaders will monitor and track the diversity of their organization like any other metric or KPI,” separately predicted Outreach Global Innovation Evangelist Mary Shea.  “With more weight and visibility on this business priority, sales leaders will embrace new and more creative channels to source talent, and they will create internal programs to nurture and foster their existing talent.”

Coincidentally, I am publishing this article on Martin Luther King Day at a time when voting rights are being restricted in many states. MLK stood for DEI, voting rights, freedom, economic opportunity, and economic justice. He was instrumental in pushing LBJ and Congress to pass the original Voting Rights Act which is now opposed by the Republican Party. It is time for Congress to renew the Voting Rights Act and at least pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

Senator Raphael Warnock, who preached from MLK’s pulpit at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, stated

“I have to tell you that the most important thing that we can do this Congress is to get voting rights done. Voting rights are a preservative of all other rights. They lay the ground for all of the other debates. And so to my Democratic colleagues, I say: while it is deeply unfortunate, it is more than apparent that it has been left to us to handle alone the task of safeguarding our democracy.

Sadly, many of our Republican friends have already cast their vote with voter suppression. And so the judgment of history is upon us. Future generations will ask, when the democracy was in a 911 state of emergency, what did you do to put the fire out? Did we rise to the moment or did we hide behind procedural rules?

“I believe that we Democrats can figure out how to get this done, even if that requires a change in the rules, which we established just last week that we can do when the issue is important enough.”

Senator Rappael Warnock (December 14, 2021)

Democracy is not a given. Freedom expands or contracts based upon our willingness to accept others and afford them the same rights (and responsibilities) as others. It must be renewed each generation through teaching, activism, and voting.