As part of their Q1 2019 release, LinkedIn rolled out a set of new SNAP (Sales Navigator Application Platform) partners including Altify, Drift, G2 Crowd, and Mixmax.
The Drift partnership allows sales reps to “continue website conversations” after a prospect drops off of a Drift chat: “sometimes people leave your conversation abruptly – it happens. But as an SDR, that’s a potential meeting walking out the door. So what do you do? Well now you can send a connection request or follow up message with InMail right from within Drift.”
The Drift integration also displays contact and company intelligence including shared connections while a sales rep is chatting with a prospect visiting her website (see image on right).
“Gone are the days of toggling back and forth between LinkedIn and your ongoing sales conversation,” said Drift Product Marketer Daniel Murphy. “Say goodbye to awkward lags in conversations. Prospects will never again have to wait for a response while SDRs search LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Salesforce to determine if they’re a good fit. Now they can research a prospect’s company, see mutual connections, and grab other insights and conversation starters – all in real-time.”
G2 Crowd gathers intent data from 24 million technology searchers. Intent data is collected from G2 profile and category views along with competitor comparisons. Sales reps are notified when followed accounts are researching on G2 based on contact connections, sales preferences, search histories, and profile interactions.
“People don’t buy today as a result of cold calls and emails. The power is in the hands of the buyers doing more research than ever before. As sales teams, we need to focus on accepting the modern buyer journey and connecting to the right buyers at the right time. We’ve always been aligned with LinkedIn on this vision, and this integration helps us make it a reality.”
G2 Chief Revenue Officer Matt Gorniak
The Mixmax SNAP integration supports InMail and Connection requests and profile views from Gmail.
Altify’s org-chart software now displays insights and helps users identify key buyers across an organization.
LinkedIn also noted that it will be available within the Salesforce Winter 2019 release. Salesforce admins can install the application from the Lightning Setup Console instead of the AppExchange.
One problem that has long dogged sales intelligence vendors is ongoing training and product exploration. To encourage exploration, Sales Navigator added a coaching feature to extend product knowledge. Sales Navigator Coach is a new dashboard that “suggests actions for customers to take and links to short learning videos.” Actions are associated with core workflows. The videos run thirty to forty seconds.
Finally, GDPR opt-outs are being added to PointDrive presentations. PointDrive recipients will be able to revoke viewer tracking permission, effectively anonymizing their viewing data from sales reps.
Part 1 (Shared Custom Lists) posted yesterday.