LinkedIn: Musings on $LNKD

On LinkedIn’s Q1 earnings call yesterday, the firm boasted that their Sales Solutions products grew revenue 55% year-over-year with sales products now constituting 40% of Premium Subscription divisional revenues. Thus, LinkedIn Sales Navigator revenues were around $60 million last quarter. This is an impressive number given the short period of time the product has been available. It also suggests that Sales Navigator is by far the largest Sales Intelligence product on the market.

The funny thing is, when I talk to other vendors in the Sales Intelligence space, LinkedIn remains low on their competitive threat list. They simply aren’t seeing them much as competitors. Perhaps their customers are licensing both Sales Navigator and their solutions, but I’m not sure about that. Doing so would be an expensive proposition.

This is a square I have yet to circle.

LinkedIn, which laid an egg last quarter after announcing much more conservative guidance than the analysts expected, raised its full year guidance by two percentage points and had beats on earnings and revenue. The market obviously overreacted to its lower than expected FY 2016 revenue guidance on the Q4 call, but LinkedIn generally guides low. The problem with hyper-growth stocks is the moment the growth trajectory slows, the expected revenues and future cash flows decline by a compounded factor. Thus, several years of stock price growth can be wiped out overnight. There is a reason analysts often say these stocks are “priced to perfection.”

LinkedIn announced a set of small-ball enhancements to its Sales Navigator service in Q1. The firm mentioned some improvements to their CRM connectors on the earnings call, but didn’t provide any details. There were some non-discussed features that were covered on a SlideShare presentation a few days ago.

The best new Sales Navigator feature is a set of Spotlight filters for prospecting. These LinkedIn-specific filters appear at the top of the results page. Navigator users can now screen for executives and managers who have

Shared experiences (e.g. groups, education, companies, etc.) with the sales rep
Changed jobs (company or title) in the past ninety days
Posted on LinkedIn in the past thirty days

Sales Navigator's new Spotlight filters leverage member intelligence to identify contacts more likely to respond to your InMail. — Sales Navigator’s new Spotlight filters leverage member intelligence to identify contacts more likely to respond to your InMail.

These Spotlight filters help identify individuals who are more likely to respond to InMails due to similar affinities, job changes, or active LinkedIn participation. Spotlight filters, like TeamLink, are a good example of the firm leveraging its unique content sets to provide value added Solution Selling features instead of taking a me-too approach.

LinkedIn added five other new filters to their side panel of selects including “Leads that Follow Your Company on LinkedIn.” This filter lends itself to strong messaging concerning displayed interest in your company (e.g. “I see that you follow us on LinkedIn. How did you hear about us?”).

The other new filters are “Exclude my Saved Leads,” “Years in Current Position,” “Years at Current Company,” and “Company Type” (e.g. Private, Public, Partnership, Educational, Nonprofit, Government Agency, Self-Owned, and Self-Employed).

Other enhancements include multi-ZIP screening, notifying the user when a lead views his or her profile, and shifting Navigator accounts to different contracts. All of these are welcome feature additions, but small-ball upgrades unlikely to grow the business.

Navigator added an update message that flags leads who have recently viewed user profiles. — Navigator added an update message that flags leads who have recently viewed your profile.

And contract shifting is potentially problematic. If a sales rep joins a company, the firm can invoice the employer instead of the rep (good). However, if a rep leaves the firm, he or she can assume the contract for their account (potentially very bad). Thus, a sales rep can maintain a digital rolodex of leads and customers within Sales Navigator and take it to his or her next employer. The sales rep would be delighted by this opportunity, but the former employer is potentially making it easier for a rep to walk across the street to a competitor with their book of business.

DueDil Connect: Six Degrees Tool

British sales intelligence service DueDil is looking to challenge LinkedIn in the connected executives prospecting game. With the exception of InsideView, which offers its own Relationship Capital Management (RCM) tool, sales intelligence vendors have shied away from building “who knows who” tools. Instead, they have followed a coopetition strategy which encourages free LinkedIn alongside their service. This strategy provides hyperlinks to company and executive profiles on LinkedIn, but does not compete directly with LinkedIn’s RCM features.

DueDil Connect helps users identify and connect to decision makers, map and understand their network connections, and alert users on company news related to their contact network. Users can also filter by colleague connections within Advanced Search.

“DueDil Connect allows teams to use the power of their social networks to work together – enabling them to find the ideal contact at any company and the best way to reach them” – DueDil CEO Damian Kimmelman

Privacy is an important issue with respect to RCM as rainmakers wish to control their relationships and are wary of sales reps leveraging their network without discussing it with them first. Users may also wish to restrict which contacts they share. This is particularly true at firms managing confidential relationships. CEO Damian Kimmelman noted that enterprise access can be partitioned by teams at the request of a client. Furthermore, “If your profile is on DueDil Connect, it’s because we could find a publicly available social profile and only in that scenario. In compliance with EU privacy laws, we’ll remove any information you don’t want displayed as soon as possible after you’ve requested it to our support team. You’re also free to unlink your account at any time.”

Contact networks are imported from Google Gmail or Microsoft Exchange. The system shares emails but not direct dials. Users may remove an association by navigating to the executive’s profile page, but DueDil does not appear to offer direct group management of relationships.

DueDil Connect leverages co-worker connections for identifying introductions.

DueDil, which is built on UK and Irish filings data, benefits from the deep set of Directors and Shareholders (DASH) filings in the European market. These DASH filings allow prospectors to view current and previous directorships along with disqualifications. One limitation to these datasets is they often list the positions as Director or Corporate Secretary, not the job function or role within the organization.

“A lot of people use LinkedIn to do their prospecting [and] lead generation. LinkedIn is built off user generated content, and as such it’s really not comprehensive,” said Kimmelman. “On LinkedIn you have to know the businesses that you are prospecting – most businesses that you prospect you actually don’t know the name of, you only know their characteristics. To take that further, when you look at something like LinkedIn, you are utilising only one form of ability to get in contact with those businesses, which is InMail. Most marketers or salespeople want to either use social avenues, or they want to be able to cold call, they want to be able to direct mail, or they want to be able to utilise the biggest business network, which is email.”

InMail is a significant LinkedIn vulnerability. LinkedIn is looking at how it can be a sales tool without allowing its members to be inundated with sales messages. This is attempting to square the circle. Either you provide sales connectivity or you don’t. Their compromise was restricting access to emails and direct dial information while preventing users from downloading prospecting lists or uploading them to CRMs. They don’t even allow CRM synching for individual records. Instead, LinkedIn provides limited access to their InMail text only messaging service. InMail is not tied into corporate emails, lacks templates and corporate branding, and bars attachments. In short, it oftentimes feels like spam.

Along with DASH intelligence, DueDil provides much deeper company intelligence than LinkedIn which is generally limited to repurposed marketing content from corporate websites and Facebook. DueDil company content includes UK corporate financials, credit scores, family trees, and original filings.

DueDil Connect is available to enterprise clients with plans to make the service available to premium and free users in the future.

Not All C-Level Executives Can Be Found in LinkedIn

C-Level Gap Rates on LinkedIn — Partial Display of DiscoverOrg Research on C-Level Population Rates on LinkedIn

A 2015 DiscoverOrg survey of C-level executives found that 25% of top-level execs cannot be located on LinkedIn. The most accessible industries were health products (e.g. pharmaceuticals, medical devices), professional services (e.g. legal, professional services), and financial services (e.g. banking, insurance, financial services) while the least accessible executives worked for state or federal governments and resource extraction industries (e.g. oil and gas, mining). Thirty-seven percent of top-level federal officials cannot be found on LinkedIn while only eighteen percent of legal execs cannot be located on the professional social media site. The technology sector execs tended slightly below the mean with rates between 23% and 25%.

Even if an exec is on LinkedIn, it does not mean that he or she actively uses the site, provides contact information, or responds to InMail requests (plain text messages that can easily be confused with SPAM). Thus, targeting execs via LinkedIn may be insufficient to reach them. Sales reps targeting C-level execs will likely need to employ other sales intelligence platforms for direct contact information. Furthermore, LinkedIn also does not allow users to send company and contact information to CRMs. Thus, users have to copy / paste or rekey information, an overhead task that most other sales intelligence services handle automatically.

Another shortcoming is the lack of detailed company information for account planning. Organizational profiles tend to consist of repurposed website and Facebook content with little original company content.

LinkedIn is excellent for tracking colleagues, maintaining professional relationships, personal brand building, and researching executives. As such, it should be part of every B2B sales reps’ arsenal (at least the free version); however, due to content and functional gaps, LinkedIn should be viewed as a high-value complement to other sales intelligence services and not a direct replacement of them.

LinkedIn: Biased Research Doesn’t Help You Sell

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

– Mark Twain (and others)

Sometimes you see a statistic reported by a firm and you just want to scream BS. When I read LinkedIn’s claims about revenue and pipeline lift, I did just that (OK, I didn’t scream it, but I muttered it under my breath).

Here is the claim published in their Sales Solutions Blog back in April, “While social selling by itself is positively associated with sales performance (both pipeline size and revenue growth), the study found that Sales Navigator users achieve 7x more pipeline growth and 11x more revenue growth than if they used LinkedIn.com only.”

LI SN PipeLine and Revenue Growth — LinkedIn claims a huge lift from Sales Navigator, but it is based upon an implied pipeline lift of only 1% from their freemium offering.

Unpacking the numbers, LinkedIn usage provides only a 0.99% pipeline growth but Sales Navigator provides a 6.8% growth rate. Respective revenue growth numbers are 1.7% vs. 20.4%.

I see two problems with these numbers. First, the LinkedIn standalone service provides more lift than indicated in the study. Why would sales reps be spending so many hours using the service if it provided so little benefit? Certainly other products would increase their productivity by more than one or two percent. If so, reps would be investing time using those tools for research, not LinkedIn.

Second, there is likely to be a significant selection bias. Companies that have had success with solution selling processes around LinkedIn are more likely to adopt Sales Navigator. These firms were likely to license Sales Navigator and their sales reps were more likely to incorporate Sales Navigator into their Solution Selling processes. Furthermore, rapidly growing companies are more likely to invest in new processes and techniques than older, slower growing firms.

So if you are going to blog on a study, particularly one you commissioned, make sure it has face validity.

By the way, Mark Twain did not originate the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” phrase (nor did he claim to), but it perfectly encapsulated this research.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Social Selling Index and Improved Filters

Several weeks ago, LinkedIn began promoting upgrades to the home page of its Sales Navigator service. The new features finally hit my user id today. Enhancements include expanded insights and update filtering, the Social Selling Index, and a recent activity section.

Expanded Insights

Expanded insights help users “get the intelligence you need to engage with your prospects at the right time, including new insights on who to reach out to – and how.” This is a welcome addition which partially helps address their discoverability problem concerning older posts. Sales Navigator now displays two member posts along with the ability to scroll through older posts. However, this broader discoverability is not yet available throughout the product.

Expanded Insights displays the two most recent posts associated with a profile and provides a scroll arrow for additional posts.

Update Filtering

Updated Filtering allows users to “filter your updates by type or by the top accounts you’ve been prospecting recently.” While most of these filters already existed, the quick filtering by top accounts is a welcome enhancement. Unfortunately, it does not provide a quick means to drill down to your other accounts. For those, you would need to go to the account profile directly.

Social Selling Index

The Social Selling Index (SSI) helps you “see how your score is trending, and how you rank against your peers in Social Selling.” The SSI provides a gamification element to Navigator which encourages greater social selling through the service.

Members are rated by their ability to

Establish a Professional Brand
Find the Right People
Engage with Insights
Build Relationships

The SSI section also allows users to share updates, but not long-form posts. For those, users must toggle over to the standard LinkedIn platform.

Users can drill down to their SSI statistics which provides a six week history of the SSI along with comparison scores vs. your team, industry, and network.

The SSI also includes a pre-canned boast link to promote the SSI to your LinkedIn network. I also discussed the SSI last week.

Recent Activity

This section consists of Recently Viewed Executives, Keywords, and Companies. Saved Searches are also displayed.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the eleven vendors I profiled in my just published 2015 Field Guide to Sales Intelligence Vendors. In the coming weeks, I will provide mini-profiles of each of these vendors in my blog. I have already published a few:

InsideView: Social Selling with a Refreshed UI

InsideView Profile of InsideView (old UI)

I have been holding off on writing my mini-profile of InsideView for a few weeks now. They posted some teaser screenshots on their blog a few weeks ago, but the UI has yet to launch so you’ll get a mix of old and new UI shots in this overview.

InsideView was the first sales intelligence vendor to use the term “social selling” and created the Social Selling University site for training and promoting the use of social media in sales and marketing.

InsideView has been around since 2005 so offers a mature set of sales intelligence features in their InsideView for Sales product offering. What distinguishes InsideView for Sales is their sales trigger functionality, relationship finder tool, and social media viewing tools. They also support a broader set of partners than their competitors. Not only do they offer connectors for the top CRMs, but they also support NetSuite and SugarCRM. Last September, they launched a full service OpenAPI service and began to OEM their content in other sales and marketing services. Finally, they have built marketing enrichment and update connectors for Marketo and Eloqua which help marketers match company and contact data from InsideView into their Marketing Automation platforms.

For a few years, their move into APIs and marketing services required them to put less emphasis on InsideView for Sales Intelligence development. The good news is they are once again investing in their sales product. Recent enhancements include an expansion of companies and contacts and a new UI for InsideView for Salesforce.

A refreshed InsideView for Sales UI is pending, but they have provided teaser screenshots and a video.

The Company Overview tab shifts from content and feature lists to an emphasis upon key workflows: Research & Qualify, Connect to Key Contacts, and Find the Right Message.

InsideView for Sales Company Profile (New UI)

The new layout moves from a traditional tab driven design for company profiles to a mobile layout with icons placed on a left-hand toolbar. The new design also provides a stacked report approach which allows for quick scrolling on touch enabled devices.

The stacked flow format raises in prominence some reports which were buried in the Other Tab of the old design: news, jobs, financials, and industry profile.

The People profile provides a biographic overview, executive news and tweets, and connections between the user and the executive. Users can also link to the person’s social media profile, email him or her, synch the profile with CRM, and follow the person. Following adds a company or person to InsideView’s email alerts.

InsideView for Sales People Profile (New UI)

A longstanding strength of InsideView is its social media tools. A Buzz Tab provides a feed of company Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. Users may even keyword search the feed. Other social media tools include People Alerts which alert on Twitter posts; a who knows who relationship finder that imports relationships from LinkedIn and email; and social sharing of news and sales triggers.

The Build a List feature supports a broad set of variables including sales triggers, email presence, and social media link presence. Both company and contact lists are supported. Users may download records to Excel or upload them to their CRM.

While the service offers a set of eighteen high precision sales triggers (called Agents by InsideView), they are only available for thirty days. The agents are displayed within company profiles, daily email alerts, and a filterable Activity Stream report.

InsideView aggregates its news and contacts from multiple vendors including Equifax, S&P Capital IQ, and Reuters. Coverage spans 12 million global companies and 16 million people. While these counts are below those of their competitors, they have doubled coverage this year and intend to add additional international profiles in 2016.

InsideView for Sales is reasonably priced at $99 per user per month or $999 per user per year. Volume discounts are available for larger purchasers. This price includes CRM connectors and mobile apps. There are additional charges for their marketing data hygiene services.

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Expanded Insights

Update Filtering

Social Selling Index

Recent Activity

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