LinkedIn announces a major update for Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is an unique solution from LinkedIn that helps sellers to target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach. Sales Navigator has potential to become the top revenue generation service for LinkedIn. Today, LinkedIn announced a major update for Sales Navigator with several brand new features.

First of all, LinkedIn is planning to integrate Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Campaign Manager that will allow marketers to accurately target the accounts and leads their sales team is pursuing.

Marketers will see two new ad groups appear in LinkedIn Campaign Manager — Sales Navigator Leads and Sales Navigator Accounts. The marketer will still control creative, budget and when the campaigns will go live. But now, they will have the ability to market directly to the leads and/or companies their sales reps are pursuing on LinkedIn, and even use lookalike modeling to find new audiences who behave like their current prospects and customers.

Sales Navigator was initially integrated only on Salesforce and Dynamics CRM systems. Last year, LinkedIn opened it up to other CRM providers. Today, they announced that Oracle Sales Cloud integration will launch in the coming months. Similarly, Sales Navigator integration was announced for Gmail last year. Today, LinkedIn announced that they are bringing the same kind of integration to Microsoft Outlook in 2018. To support all kind of apps other than email and CRM, LinkedIn today announced the Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) partner program that provides Sales Navigator integrations across your sales stack. LinkedIn’s SNAP launch partners include:

• Business Intelligence: InsightSquared, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau
• eSignature: Adobe Sign, GetAccept
• Marketing Automation: Act-On, Demandbase, Engagio, HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua
• Sales Acceleration: InsideSales.com, Outreach, SalesLoft, Sendbloom, Tact.ai, Yesware
• Web Conferencing: BlueJeans
• Others: Microsoft PowerApps

To improve CRM data quality and provide actionable insights, LinkedIn today announced LinkedIn Data Validation capabilities for Enterprise Edition customers in 2018. For example, using the ‘No longer at company’ flag will identify leads and contacts who have left the company they’re mapped to in CRM.

LinkedIn is planning to integrate the Dealbook feature of Heighten into Sales Navigator which will allow sales professionals to be more efficient in managing their pipeline. With Dealbook, both reps and managers can easily view deals, identify the buying circle, and edit deal information directly in Sales Navigator, with key fields instantly synced back to their CRM. Dealbook and LinkedIn Data Validation features will be available in the first half of 2018.

LinkedIn has redesigned the search and navigation bar that will help sales reps to find people and companies they want to do business with. There are new features such as Saved Searches, Company Search, Discover tab and more.

Finally, they have redesigned the homepage of Sales Navigator mobile app with new Mobile Briefings feature. This feature integrates with mobile calendar and helps reps understand the next best action they should be taking throughout the day, and alert them of activities, such as saved leads who have recently viewed their profile. The updated navigation experience and Mobile Briefings features are now rolling out to users.