LinkedIn Sales Solutions has begun rolling out its Q4 release to Sales Navigator subscribers. New features include a data validation flag for contacts, improved geographic filters, a funding events spotlight, two new alerts, additional SNAP partners, and extended administrative tools.
A new data validation flag warns users that a contact
is no longer at a company listed in the CRM. If the company differs
between LinkedIn and the CRM a “Not at Company Flag” is written to the CRM.
The flag is both displayed to the rep and available as a trigger for contact
clean-ups and removal from marketing campaigns.
LinkedIn added three new reports which leverage the
field:
Opportunities at Risk: Proactively identifying when a buyer has left an open opportunity
Past Customers at New Companies: Identifying contacts at current customers (potential champions) who have joined new companies
Out-of-Date Contacts: All potential contacts that need to be updated
LinkedIn is hemmed in by commitments to its members’
data privacy. Thus, it cannot append or sync full contact information
like other vendors. The data validation flag simply alerts sales and
marketing that a contact is no longer at a firm. It does not upload
information on the member’s new company to the CRM.
The Data Validation flag is available to Enterprise
Edition licensors with CRM sync enabled in Salesforce and MS Dynamics 365.
LinkedIn redesigned its usage reporting with
time-series charts for messaging effectiveness. Expanded analytics
include InMail messages sent, InMail acceptance rates, messages sent, and total
unique connections. The report also includes the top five reps for each
category.
Other new administrative tools include
Coaching/training levels
Chart filtering by custom date ranges, groups, and users.
Data Updates – Saved Leads and Accounts
LinkedIn has integrated Bing location data, making
prospecting more precise. The service covers 2.4 million more cities and
over 2,000 new states/provinces.
Users may also filter by a new funding events spotlight. The new filter “brings these updates to the top of your search results within the Spotlight tab, giving you a helpful cue that it’s the right time to check-in,” blogged Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn Sales Solutions.
In a blog titled, “Maintaining the Trust of our Members,” LinkedIn recommitted itself to a members-first approach. The Microsoft subsidiary frames its decision-making with the question, “Is this the right thing to do for our members?”
Along with a members-first policy, LinkedIn employs four principles to frame decisions:
Members maintain clarity, consistency, and control over their data. This goal is manifested in a broad set of privacy settings, observing the stated wishes of each member, and protecting their data. Microsoft employs a global GDPR standard and does not transfer member data to other companies. For example, LinkedIn Sales Navigator limits data access to member-data view-only access, which displays profiles within CRMs and other partner applications but does not transfer data to those platforms.
LinkedIn will remain a safe, trusted, and professional platform. The firm removes content which violates their Professional Community Policies and removes fake profiles, jobs, and companies.
LinkedIn is committed to removing unfair bias from its platform so that individuals with equal talent have equal access to opportunity. “To achieve this goal, we are committed to building a product with no unfair bias that provides opportunity to all of our members. There is a lot of work still to do, but we are focused on working across our company, with our members and customers, and across the industry to close the network gap.”
As a global platform, they are committed to respecting the laws that apply to them and “contributing to the dialogue” about legal frameworks.
LinkedIn Advertising is subject to an initial review. LinkedIn vets ads to ensure they are non-discriminatory:
“Even if legal in the applicable jurisdiction, LinkedIn does not allow ads that advocate, promote, or contain discriminatory hiring practices or denial of education, housing, or economic opportunity based on age, gender, religion, ethnicity, race, or sexual preference. Ads that promote the denial or restriction of fair and equal access to education, housing, or credit or career opportunities are prohibited.”
Blake Lawit, LinkedIn General Counsel
The statement of principles comes at a time when other social media firms are struggling to develop rules and policies around political advertising. LinkedIn does not carry political advertising and also restricts adult content, illegal, health, gaming, weapons, multi-level marketing, alcohol, tobacco, and financial (payday loans, cryptocurrency) products.
LinkedIn continues to grow its customer base with 660 million members across 200 countries and 30 million companies. The top countries are the United States (165M members), India (62M), China (48M), Brazil (40M), and the UK (27M).
LinkedIn maintains offices in nine US cities and 24 international locations. The platform supports 24 languages.
Elevate provides a curated feed of content to company employees for social media distribution. The curated content is now fed into Sales Navigator for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook sharing
LinkedIn announced its Q3 Sales Navigator enhancements which are currently being rolled out to clients. Key features include LinkedIn Elevate integration, improved save a lead functionality, InMail active status, list cloning, and improved customer support.
Elevate is a LinkedIn Marketing Solutions offering which supports employee content promotion. A curator provides thought leadership pieces, press releases, and open web content to corporate employees. About one-third of Elevate content recipients also have Sales Navigator seats. Most clients are midsize or enterprise customers.
Elevate
is sold based on the number of seats with volume discounts. Enterprise
licensing is also available based on the company size.
The
Elevate integration delivers curated content to the Navigator home page.
Content may be shared to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Sales reps
may add personal comments with the share.
Elevate
provides metrics to help firms track increased site traffic, leads, and new
hires.
LinkedIn
Sales Solutions VP of Product Management Doug Camplejohn noted that the Elevate
integration resulted in a dramatic increase in both the percentage of sales
reps sharing content and overall content being shared.
According
to LinkedIn, content that is shared by employees has double the engagement rate
of non-shared content. Furthermore, social enterprises are “58% more
likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to retain them.”
Social
sales reps are also more successful. LinkedIn stated that social sales
reps that regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota.
“Marketers will still be able to control what content they’d like to see employees post. But now Sales Navigator users will have an even easier time boosting their brand and the brand of their company.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management, LinkedIn Sales Solutions
LinkedIn introduced custom list sharing in Q1 and extended the functionality this quarter. Previously, lists were shared but ownership resided with the list creator. Shared lists may now be copied, providing the copier with full list management capabilities. Other new list management features include shared list removal and bulk saving of all leads or accounts from a shared list.
LinkedIn
also improved the lead connection flow. Now, when a connection is
proffered through Sales Navigator, users can check a box to add the contact to
their leads list, even if the connection is ignored or declined. This
allows the rep to track the contact.
Sales
Navigator redesigned its Help Center with “more intuitive navigation,” easier
search, article tagging, and tables of content. Click to chat allows
users to chat with support reps. The Sales Navigator community has been
extended to seven European languages. The Learning Center has been
rebranded the Customer Hub.
LinkedIn
has been knocked in the past for its lack of subscription service support.
Improved training and support tools along with chat indicate that the
firm now realizes that enterprise subscription services require a higher level
of customer support than free or consumer services.
Sales Navigator included a set of small enhancements including expanded list sorting options, an increase in list size to 2,500 leads or accounts, and an active status indicator from InMail. A user is only shown active if they permit it in their privacy settings.
I’ve been sitting on a Harvard Business Review article written by Doug Camplejohn since March due to a surfeit of news. I figured that if I couldn’t slip it into my blog in August, I would never get to it. August is when the press releases slow and there is an opportunity to speak about broader topics such as how to write a press release (or not write one).
Camplejohn’s
advice takes a long-run strategic approach to building and nurturing a social
network based upon ongoing engagement, asking for advice during transitions,
and assisting others. As such, his advice dovetails well with real-world
approaches to building relationship networks.
Camplejohn
begins by recommending that business professionals build their network with
peers instead of focusing on seniority. A peer-based network grows over
one’s career, creating a network which matures with the professional.
Furthermore, senior-executive response rates are lower than mid-level
managers. Less than one percent of VPs and CxOs respond to cold reach
out.
“People earlier in their careers respond most often to an initial message, while VPs and C-level professionals respond the least to people they don’t already know.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn
Initial messages should be short. Camplejohn recommends three sentences that can be easily read on a mobile device. InMail messages of under 100 words work best with response rates “decreasing significantly” beyond 500 words.
Camplejohn
also advises a hook such as an alma mater, joint interest, or a mutual friend.
“According to our research, referencing a mutual connection boosts the
acceptance rate of these messages by 51%, second only to attending the same
school at the same time (53%),” wrote Camplejohn.
Camplejohn
notes the value of asking for advice and leveraging transitions. In
fundraising, there is an adage, “If you go seeking advice, you get money; if
you seek money, you get advice.” Likewise, transition periods are an
excellent opportunity to build your network and seek advice.
“If you’re in a transitional period — starting at a new company, switching industries, or moving to a new city — recognize the opportunity to reach out to people, ask for their advice, and absorb their wisdom.”
Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn
Another
recommendation is to pay it forward. Don’t be looking for immediate
benefits or strictly reciprocal opportunities. Social networkers
recognize that they are contributing to the commons, whether helping one person
or adding to the group. Sales reps and others should also continue to
nurture their network, maintaining conversations with colleagues, clients,
partners, and mentors.
“The best way to build a relationship is to help
someone with joy and with no expectation of anything in return. It feels
good, it trains your own sense of generosity, and it informs you of what the
other person values. It also sets the stage for you to ask them something
in the future. You don’t have to offer to help in every circumstance, but
make yourself available as a resource to people, particularly to people who are
just starting out in their careers.”
Camplejohn concludes that online networking should be viewed as an extension of real-world interactions: “Connect with people personally by finding common ground, then build trust and long-term relationships, rather than one-time transactions.”
The new org chart SNAP connector for MS Dynamics provides rich biographic information for executives.
I’ve been covering Q2 enhancements to LinkedIn Sales Navigator this week. On Monday, I discussed their Sales Coach enhancements and on Wednesday their Alerting enhancements. There were also a set of communications enhancements to Sales Navigator (an area of strength vs. other Sales Intelligence offerings). Communication enhancements include conversation histories, improved filtering, more visible icebreakers, and InMail credit status.
Improved Sales Navigator Keyword Searching
Keyword
searching speed has been improved and a guided search experience helps the user
expand or narrow the search term (see image on left).
Sales Navigator custom lists were introduced last year and nearly one million have been created. More than half of saved leads have been added to custom lists.
Two
new list features were added in Q2:
Bulk
save and bulk remove accounts and contacts from lists.
Match
Lead to Account – As not all leads (people) are attached to accounts, the match
feature allows users to assign leads to any company for alerting purposes.
A live org chart integration is being introduced For Microsoft Dynamics which supports saved accounts. The functionality is being delivered through LinkedIn SNAP.
The
chart displays LinkedIn member profile photos and additional profile details which
provide additional insights into the account.
During
Q2, Lucidchart also became a SNAP partner. Lucidchart users can now view
lead recommendations, save leads to Sales Navigator, view contact profiles and
updates, request introductions, and send InMails from within Lucidchart.
“Sales teams work faster and smarter when they work visually. Bringing the power of the world’s largest professional online network into Lucidchart in a more seamless way underscores our ongoing commitment to enhance the sales experience.”
Lucidchart CEO Karl Sun
Note: This is the final chapter on the Q2 2019 LinkedIn Sales Navigator release. Part 1 | Part II
Last month, LinkedIn Sales Navigator rolled out a set of alert enhancements as part of its Q2 release. Alerts are intended to deliver “timely, relevant, and actionable insights” which allow reps to shift from researching to selling and building relationships. As with other recommendation engines, Navigator alerts call out the “Next Best Action” with an “instant snapshot of the things that matter most about your prospects along with recommended action step for each.”
“At
LinkedIn, our goal is to arm you with timely, relevant, and actionable insights
so you spend less time sifting through information and more time focused on
what matters: building relationships and closing deals,” stated the firm in its
release notes. “Alerts on the homepage gives you all the functionality of
Newsfeed in a compressed, easy-to-use dashboard. Don’t worry about missing
anything — all of your favorite items from the old Newsfeed live on as alerts.
We’ve also added some new types of alerts as well!”
New
alerts are highlighted in blue at the top of the feed. Each alert
contains an action step (e.g. Message, See Article, See List). Alerts may
be filtered by type and individual alerts may be deleted or turned off.
Three
new alert categories were released
An account has had a funding event
A colleague shared a custom list
Pending actions in Sales Navigator Coach
LinkedIn
recommends that Navigator Alerts be reviewed once or twice a day.
“Every sales professional faces the challenge of how to best spend their time, maximize their productivity and close more deals,” said Camplejohn. “That’s why Sales Navigator is now centered around alerts — making it easier for salespeople to identify important changes and prioritize the best next steps to take.”
The new LinkedIn Sales Navigator Coach encourages reps to explore Sales Navigator. It is located on the redesigned home page.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has been rolling out its Q2 release to customers over the past few weeks. The new functionality includes a redesigned home page, improved keyword searching, custom list enhancements, and additional Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) connectors.
The homepage emphasizes alerts and the new Sales Navigator Coach. The Coach is a training tool with a gamification feature – a progress meter which shows your level of product mastery, from Beginner to Expert. Reps are shown three recommended actions. They can either try a recommended action or watch a short training video.
All of the Coach features, with the exception of PointDrive, may be executed from a mobile device.
“This is just the beginning for Sales Navigator Coach, and we can’t wait to bring more personalized education to all our Sales Navigator customers. We’re also excited to bring Sales Navigator Coach to usage reporting later this year.”
Sales Solutions VP of Product Management Doug Camplejohn.
Several features on the homepage have been moved. The SSI (Social Selling Index) tool is available via a drop down and the newsfeed has been replaced with an alert feed.
Note: This is part one of my profile of the Q2 2019 release. Tomorrow I will be covering enhanced alert functionality.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP) defines who are your best customers and prospects. It is defined by firmographics, intent data, technographics, business signals, etc. ICPs are focused on Accounts.
Your question implies that the firm has a single decision maker. But that is generally only the case at small firms. Generally, B2B mid-sized and larger procurement decisions are made by a buying team which can consist of multiple individuals at different levels and functions / departments. For these, you should define a set of personas that cover economic decision makers, users, influencers, reviewers (e.g. technology gatekeepers).
Many of the ICP vendors support contact searching for ABM accounts. Once the ABM list is defined, they allow users to prospect for contacts by persona (job function/level/title) at ABM accounts.
These vendors include emails and direct dials for contacts along with company profiles, sales triggers, financials, technographics, family trees, filings, etc.
While LinkedIn Sales Navigator does not offer an ICP tool, it includes a Buyer’s Circle which allow sales reps to quickly identify potential contacts at accounts and drag and drop them into their role. They can then review all open opportunities, including buying committees, via a single-pane Deal report which combines LinkedIn intelligence with Salesforce or MS Dynamics.
Sales Navigator Buyer’s Circle supports dragging executives to their function within the buying committee.
While Sales Engagement vendors continue to expand their supported channels, email and phone remain the preferred B2B channels. Preliminary results from a VanillaSoft survey of 2,000 executives indicated that email is the preferred communication channel. SMS and Social Media were not listed as preferred channels with social media peaking at 24% during the need stage and falling to 15% during the evaluation stage
“We
often read and hear about the rise and role of social selling at various points
in the sales engagement process,” said VanillaSoft CEO David Hood, “However, as
these initial findings show, more traditional channels – from email to phone to
simple word-of-mouth – are actually preferred by B2B buyers.”
VanillaSoft Survey of 2,000 Executives.
Phone
contact grows in importance from 39% in the Need stage to 54% in the Evaluation
phase.
Social
Media remains low, but it is a broad category and likely perceived as more of a
consumer channel. Even young professionals (25 to 34) had little interest
in social as a sales contact channel with only 18% looking favorably upon
social as a desirable sales communications channel. 41% of young
professionals favored the telephone.
LinkedIn
Sales Navigator has had significant success as a third channel with messaging,
InMail, and PointDrive. Had LinkedIn been broken out as a distinct
category, it likely would have scored higher. SNAP connectors are now
available from Outreach, SalesLoft, InsideSales, and Yesware. VanillaSoft
is in the middle of its certification process. SalesLoft has indicated
that Sales Navigator is their top ecosystem partner.
Also
omitted were video meetings (e.g. WebEx, JoinMe, BlueJeans, Zoom) which are
commonly used within organizations and work quite well for establishing trust
with prospects, demoing a product, and walking through documents.
“Understanding these types of reality-based findings will allow smart sales professionals to align their activities to their customers’ wants and desires,” said Hood.
SalesLoft looks for partners that help “activate the authentic seller in everyone,” boost their productivity, and help customers scale their business. Vendors should be adjacent to Sales Engagement, filling the gaps of functionality in the platform.
Partners pledge to serve joint customers first, invest in the success of integrations through co-marketing, and “support our developer community, thus enabling innovation,” said VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester.
Kester noted that the partner ecosystem provides a strategic market advantage as it “creates a moat in the ecosystem supplanting us as the dominant #1 player.” It also “significantly enhances customer LTV (lifetime value) due to the sticky nature of usage” and “drives customer acquisition through the roof, and CAC (customer acquisition cost) down due to leads driven from partners.”
The SalesLoft ecosystem has grown to 54 partners with a million “integration actions executed” over the past six months. Nearly 2,700 teams have one or two integrations with 800 having implemented three and 500 having four or more integrations.
The top partner integrations are LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Sendoso, Showpad, and Vidyard. VP of Product Strategy Sean Kester called Sales Navigator “by far the most popular integration we have.” The SNAP integration supports four cadence steps: Account and Lead (contact) research, introductions, connection request, and InMail (Salesforce is an investor in SalesLoft).
Sendoso provides a direct mail service. Integrated cadence steps allow sales reps to send direct mail, company swag, handwritten notes, eGifts, and Amazon items.
Showpad is integrated with the sales reps’ workflow. Within SalesLoft, users can easily add content to their email campaigns, and gauge their prospects’ level of interest. Showpad also provides context-specific content recommendations.
Vidyard GoVideo helps sales reps “easily create polished and personal videos for your prospects using Vidyard GoVideo webcam and screen recorder,” said Kester. Sales reps can “boost response rates and humanize sales outreach by adding video to your sales emails in SalesLoft.
SalesLoft
includes a freemium version and has supported 175,000 platform videos.
SalesLoft
announced several partnerships that are in their development pipeline including
LeanData, Drift, Ramble Chat, and Seismic.
LeanData provides Lead-to-Account assignments with automated cadences by persona and customized conditions. Sales Operations defines the lead assignment and routing rules which are displayed as a flow diagram with Send to SalesLoft Cadence steps. Duplicate checking will prevent a second cadence from being kicked off.
Drift and Ramble Chat are joining Intercom as chat partners. “Ramble empowers sales engagement customers with a unique ability to extend chat directly through their platform,” said Kester. “Ramble creates an additional channel of communication for their customer interactions.”
Ramble
Chat performs a reverse IP lookup that identifies the account and logs it to
Salesforce or SalesLoft, providing a form of first-party intent intelligence.
Both inbound (anonymous) and outbound (Cadence driven) chat are supported
with outbound chat connected to the originating sales rep.
“We are excited for our partnership with SalesLoft. Ramble’s unique architecture enables us to deploy chat within third-party applications, like SalesLoft, which changes how sales leaders utilize chat for pipeline contribution. We not only make chat ‘outbound’ and ‘inbound,’ but we give companies the ability to extend chat anywhere online as a means of instant connection and sales acceleration. Moving beyond ‘omnichannel’ and towards ‘omnipresence.’ The full breadth our chat technology can be deployed organically, directly from SalesLoft, which provides a more seamless client experience and new channels for Sales Engagement.”
Ramble CEO Justin McDonald
Seismic offers an enterprise-grade content management system which recommends the next-best action for content. The platform employs analytics to recommend which content is most likely to resonate with a prospect based on buying stage, vertical, etc.
DataGrail provides a GDPR and CCPA compliance tool which “enforces on-demand access and deletion of a requester’s personal data across all first and third-party/external business systems.” DataGrail also centralizes customer email preferences. Other features include the “detection of non-consented or high-risk contacts, including geographic fingerprinting and migration for consented to non-consented purposes” and alerts if a deleted contact is being recreated in a sales or marketing platform.
Current apps are displayed on SalesLoft’s App Directory which helps admins see how integrations work, understand their use cases, and co-market the integration. A developer’ portal is in development.
