Nick VanWagner

Nick VanWagner

Global Head of Insights, Sales Solutions, LinkedIn

Nick VanWagner

Nick VanWagner leads our Insights team for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In this capacity, Nick and his team focus on leveraging LinkedIn’s data-driven and research assets to fuel the transition to social selling across the world. This ranges from building internal products to help our sales team leverage LinkedIn’s data to serve clients in the most effective ways, to providing deep analytic support to drive joint initiatives with clients, and finally to uncovering unique industry leading insights to help sales professionals around the world discover new ways to build meaningful relationships with their clients and ultimately improve performance for their company.

Nick has also spent time leading an Insights team in our Marketing Solutions business line as well as in Product Marketing on the consumer side of our business, focusing on building products that drive member growth and engagement in valuable ways across LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, Nick had a career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company leading teams largely focused on ecommerce and digital strategy.

Nick is passionate about helping LinkedIn’s clients solve their business problems through our unique data. You’ll find Nick walking the halls asking people “What is the ‘so what’” on a mission to ensure people don’t get lost in “big data” without thinking about the problems they are trying to solve. Whether we are trying to help our sales reps find the right people, reach out with more meaningful insights, or build meaningful relationships, we need to be guided by a real outcome before we dig in.

Sessions

  • Thursday, September 18, 2014 2:45pm - 3:25pm

    Forget What You Think You Know: The Art and Science of Sales Leadership in a Social World

    Gold Ballroom

    Billy Beane forever changed the way baseball teams are built. He balanced his innate understanding of the game with an unorthodox, rigorous reliance on data. Even when his findings flew in the face of conventional wisdom, he stuck by them, and by re-evaluating the strategies that produced wins on the field, the A's were able to transform and compete with much larger market teams.

    Today's sales leaders need to take a similar leap if they hope to compete and win in tomorrow's world. Learn how a deep understanding of relationships and the data derived from these relationships can fundamentally transform how sales teams organize and compete to win. This new world of complex data provides an opportunity for competitive advantage, but also heightens the need for an artful approach to establishing and growing relationships.