LinkedIn overhauls Sales Navigator with deals management, Adobe Sign and Office 365 integrations, new search tools and mobile deal pages and direct connection to product team.
A LinkedIn Sales Navigator refresh adds a deals management feature, smoother search experience and mobile deal pages to the social media giant's social sales platform.
The revamp injects an array of new ways to search, manipulate and process LinkedIn's vast troves of personal and consumer data and data from CRM systems and puts LinkedIn in a better position to monetize the information -- coming off a hot quarter for LinkedIn, which reported June quarter earnings of $1.46 billion, up 37% from Q2 2017.
These upgraded features represent the next step in AI-assisted sales and marketing campaigns in which B2B companies mash up their own customer data with information on LinkedIn.
Microsoft banking on LinkedIn revenue
Microsoft bought LinkedIn in June 2016 for $26.2 billion. While Microsoft doesn't always announce how AI is assisting automation of sales-centric search tools in Sales Navigator, a premium LinkedIn feature that also integrates LinkedIn data to CRM platforms such as Salesforce and Dynamics CRM, some experts have noted how AI subtly manifests itself in the search.
The LinkedIn Sales Navigator refresh was unveiled in a blog post by Doug Camplejohn, vice president of products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions.
The new "Deals" web interface extracts and imports sales pipeline data from the user's CRM system and enables users to update pipelines considerably faster, Camplejohn said in the post about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator refresh.
"Reps can now update their entire pipeline in minutes, not hours," he wrote.
Adobe Sign connector added
Meanwhile, a new feature in Deals, "Buyer's Circle," pulls in and displays opportunity role information to streamline the B2B buying process. Users can see if any "key players" such as decision-maker, influencer or evaluator, are missing from deals, according to LinkedIn.
We all live in email.
Doug Camplejohnvice president of products, LinkedIn
The vendor called another new function in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator refresh -- Office 365 integration -- "Sales Navigator in your inbox."
"We all live in email," the blog post said. "Now you can take Sales Navigator actions and see key insights without ever leaving your Outlook for Web Inbox. "
LinkedIn also touted what it called a "new search experience" in the Sales Navigator update, saying it redesigned the search function to surface search results pages faster and easier.
Also as part of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator refresh, LinkedIn added mobile-optimized lead pages for sales people working on mobile devices. LinkedIn also named Adobe Sign the fourth partner to its Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP). Other SNAP partners include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SalesLoft.
