Introducing the New Face of Sales Navigator

One of the biggest challenges that every salesperson faces is where to spend their time to maximize impact. They can prospect for new leads, nurture existing ones, or move deals along.  Even then, it’s hard to stay on top of everything that needs to get done.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has helped countless sales professionals understand the next best steps to take and help deepen customer relationships, which has resulted in larger deal sizes and higher win rates. We’re delivering the tools that sales pros need, such as our popular integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, to drive more personalized and meaningful engagement with buyers. Advancements like this are why the number of pros using Sales Navigator is at a two-year high.

Today, we’re taking a big step forward, and announcing a newly redesigned homepage for Sales Navigator centered around Alerts, making it easier for teams to identify company changes, find relevant prospects and prioritize the best next steps to take. We’ve also made a number of improvements to messaging, lists, search and CRM integration to help sales professionals spend less time researching leads and prospects, and more time selling and maintaining relationships.

So let’s dive in.

Home Page Alerts — Never miss an important change

According to our latest State of Sales report, salespeople spend only 38% of their time selling. We transformed the homepage** from a Newsfeed to an Alert-based experience to more easily surface relevant and actionable insights, so you can spend less time researching and more time selling and maintaining relationships. 

While it looks different, all the most used features of the Newsfeed remain, as you can see in this new video. You’ll continue to see the alert types that you’ve come to expect from Sales Navigator, including   

• A lead started a position at a new company
• A lead had a position/job change (within the same company)
• A lead viewed your profile
• Someone at a saved account has viewed your profile
• A lead accepted your connection request
• A lead was mentioned in the news*
• An account was mentioned in the news
• A lead shared an update/article/photo/published an article
• A lead has engaged with posts from your company

We’ve also added new Alerts:

• An account has had a funding event
• A colleague shared a custom list
• Pending actions in Sales Navigator Coach

Sales Navigator Coach — Everyone can be a power user

Last quarter, we introduced Sales Navigator Coach, informative 30-45 second how-to videos designed to help you make the most of Sales Navigator.  Coach explains new features and workflows, and then lets you try them out, or easily jump to a Customer Hub article to learn more.

Now we’ve brought Coach to the homepage. We also added an “expertise” meter that shows your level of Sales Navigator mastery and the features we recommend you try out next.

This is just the beginning for Sales Navigator Coach, and we can’t wait to bring more personalized education to all our Sales Navigator customers. We’re also excited to bring Sales Navigator Coach to usage reporting later this year.

Communication Improvements — Messaging and Connecting just got easier

Reaching out to your clients and prospects is one of the most important steps in the sales process and we’re introducing new workflow enhancements to make those reach-outs more efficient than ever.  

Now, whenever you message someone anywhere in Sales Navigator, you’ll see the conversation history you had with that person. In the Inbox, you’ll see improved filtering, more visibly surfaced message Icebreaker suggestions and clear InMail credit status.

And when sending a connection request from Sales Navigator, you’ll get a confirmation in Sales Navigator instead of LinkedIn.com, so you can keep the conversation going from one place.

Keyword Search — Speed counts

Search is the most widely used feature of Sales Navigator and one we’re constantly working on to improve. Most of our users start with a keyword search, and this quarter we’re making that experience even better.

With this release, we’re improving the speed of keyword search and adding a new Guided Search experience, which interprets what you’re trying to type and provides auto-complete suggestions to help you quickly expand or narrow your search query.

Lists Enhancements — Tastes great, fewer clicks

We launched custom lists last year, and the adoption has been overwhelmingly positive. Custom Lists are a great way to organize your workflow and collaborate with your team. To date, nearly 1 million lead and account lists have been created, and more than half the leads saved to Sales Navigator these days are being saved to a Custom List.

With all this usage, we received a lot of great feedback and are adding two features you asked for: bulk-add/remove, and match a lead to an account.

• Bulk-add and bulk-remove: You can now bulk-save into your custom lists from the search results page, and bulk save your leads/accounts to a custom list from your My Saved Leads and My Saved Accounts pages. You can also bulk un-save saved leads and accounts, to remove them from all of your lists.
• Match lead to account: Not all leads have accounts matched to them. This enhancement allows you to manually match a saved lead to any company on LinkedIn, so you can get alerts not only on the lead but also the company.

CRM Enhancements — Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales take a big leap forward

Sales Navigator and CRM are a powerful pairing that work great together, and our integration with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for Sales has helped sales pros increase win rates and close deals faster.

Today, we’re introducing a live org chart integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365. This new experience lets you build an org chart of any account you have saved in Dynamics 365 for Sales. Through the Sales Navigator SNAP integration, the chart automatically displays LinkedIn member profile photos and gives you access to additional profile information to help you get a quick picture of the key people in that account.

Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) — Bringing Lucidchart to the family

The Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) ecosystem continues to grow because it brings the best of Sales Navigator into the most popular applications you rely on to close deals.

This quarter, we’re proud to introduce Lucidchart Sales Solution, which has integrated LinkedIn Sales Navigator into their visual org chart and account planning solution for Salesforce so sales reps can get recommendations for leads, and InMail prospects — all within the context of their Lucidchart account maps.

For more information on all the new features in this QPR, take a look at this video or visit our product updates page.

*mentions on EU leads not available

**The new homepage experience will be rolling out over the next few months, while you can expect the other features to roll out over the next few weeks.