Here’s What’s New in the Most Recent Quarterly Update to LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Solutions released several new features in its quarterly update to its Sales Navigator platform with the aim of helping sellers to fine-tune their outreach efforts. Associate product marketing manager Angel Gonzalez wrote in a blog post last week, “As virtual selling continues to grow in importance, sellers are eager to understand and to connect with their buyers more effectively in this new world. At the same time, buyers are inundated by general sales messages and are seeking a more personalized buyer experience that starts with timely, relevant outreach. In fact, data shows there was a 30% decline in buyer responses to sellers compared to the pre-Covid benchmark.” He added, “The bottom line? Sellers who seek to build relationships with buyers must tailor their virtual selling approach to engage with the right buyer, at the right moment, with the right message.” LinkedIn’s new Account Buyer Interest feature, for Enterprise users, taps a newly developed artificial intelligence model to determine an account’s aggregate interest in the user’s products or services, helping sellers stay up to date, prioritize their book of business, qualify their target accounts and gauge and track the interest of new accounts. The AI model factors in elements including ads engagement, aggregated employee interactions, company page engagement and InMail acceptances, and it generates a feed of top buyer interest alerts associated with each account, as well as guidance on when to act. All Sales Navigator users have access to enhancements to Account Map, including the ability to filter searches by specific functions, viewing outreach activity (including connection requests and InMail messages sent to saved and recommended leads) and the ability to save leads to lists and add notes to them directly. Team and Enterprise users can access the new CRM (customer relationship management) Powered Lead Recommendations option to analyze previously closed and won opportunities and combine the with data from the professional network to automatically recommend leads for Account Map. CRM-Powered Lead Recommendations uses these CRM fields: associated contacts/accounts, contact roles, opportunity creation/close dates, opportunity owner/team, opportunity size and opportunity status. Team and Enterprise users can also share lists of saved leads and accounts with colleagues. Gonzalez explained, “For example, let’s say that company A has Sales Navigator contracts 1, 2 and 3. Contract 1 users can now share with any user within contract 1, 2 or 3. Large companies, in particular, often have more than one Sales Navigator contract, especially global companies that may have contracts for each region. This new capability enables users to share lists to collaborate with their colleagues.” The new Sales Navigator Referral Program, available to all users, enables current customers to refer their network to try out the platform free of charge for two months. This can be extended to 10 first-degree connections, and only those who have not used another free trial from LinkedIn over the past 12 months can participate. The new User Activation Link, for Team and Enterprise administrators, enables them to bulk-invite new users to their contracts without sending emails or generating individual links. Finally, access to the Sales Navigator Community was extended to Professional users, enabling them to view best practices shared by fellow users, success stories and virtual selling discussions.