Sales Navigator Puts Data to Work

For years, you’ve relied on Sales Navigator as a core part of your B2B sales stack. Today we’re going to make it your CRM’s best friend.

That’s because we’re combining the power of LinkedIn with the power of your CRM in a privacy-first way, through a new feature called Data Validation.

We also have some exciting new capabilities for administrators and users this quarter, but first things first.

Improving your CRM with LinkedIn intelligence

Thousands of our Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales customers sync their CRMs every day to Sales Navigator so they can log Sales Navigator activities to CRM, auto-save accounts and contacts associated with active opportunities, and run searches filtered by whether a match is or is not already in the CRM.

But there is still more we can do. Since one in five decision-makers change jobs every year, your CRM data can get stale faster than you realize.  

Enter Sales Navigator Data Validation. 

Data Validation automatically flags if a contact is no longer at the company listed in your CRM. This is checked daily against LinkedIn data so you know you’re getting the most current and accurate information available. 

Contacts who have moved on to other companies are now marked using a “Not at Company Flag” field in your CRM. Since this field is written to your CRM, you can use it to trigger activities like contact cleanups, removal from marketing campaigns, or even leverage it with other applications that sync to the CRM. 

To make things easy, we’re including three key reports right out of the box: 

1. Opportunities at Risk: Proactively identifying when a buyer has left an open opportunity
2. Past Customers at New Companies: Identifying contacts at current customers (potential champions) who have joined new companies
3. Out-of-Date Contacts: All potential contacts that need to be updated

It’s one simple field — but with a lot of powerful uses for Sales Operations teams and users alike.

Rich new capabilities for Sales Navigator Administrators

For Sales Navigator administrators, Usage Reporting is getting a new look and new metrics to improve your experience and your team’s effectiveness with Sales Navigator. This includes: 

• InMail performance stats: For the first time, you can see your reps’ InMail acceptance rates, which is measured when a LinkedIn member responds positively.
• Expertise levels: You can now see each team member’s Coach level with Sales Navigator — from beginner to expert — and know who needs to spend more time training. This will give you a better handle on your team’s skills and help you guide their success. 
• New filters and exports: Now you can filter your charts by custom date ranges, groups, and users. The improved CSV export gives you the ability to filter out inactive users.
• Data update: We’ve updated the functionality for Saved Leads and Saved Accounts to include all save actions, giving you a more accurate view of activity on a specific day. 

Making Search and Alerts even more valuable

With the growing number of remote workers, cross-office teams, and global workforces, your contacts are growing more geographically diverse by the day. We’ve integrated Bing geography data to Sales Navigator and have added coverage for 2.4 million more cities and more than 2,000 new states/provinces to make your searches by regions, territories, and cities even more precise. 

One of the best times to reach out to a prospect is right after they’ve raised a fresh round of capital. Our new Funding Events Spotlight brings these updates to the top of your search results within the Spotlight tab, giving you a helpful cue that it’s the right time to check in.  

And two new Saved Account Alerts help you follow up at the right time. The first alerts you when a Saved Account adds headcount — specifically when there is more than 5% growth in 90 days. The second alerts you when there are new hires in a senior leadership position — signaling new decision-makers. These alerts will be delivered for all Saved Accounts, so no set-up is required.

One team, working together seamlessly

Lists have exceeded our expectations with more than 1.6M lists created to date. But we’re just getting started and have made lists a fully collaborative experience, allowing multiple people to add, remove, and comment on leads or accounts within the list. 

For enhanced collaboration, List owners will now be able to designate “View Only” or “Edit” permissions for collaborators. List collaborators with edit permissions will be able to add, remove, and comment on Leads or Accounts within a Shared List, and alerts will be sent to collaborators when Leads or Accounts have been added to or removed from a Custom List or when there are new comments on a Custom List.

The next phase of the Sales Navigator Application Platform program

We’re also excited to announce integrations with Tableau and PowerBI as part of our growing Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) program. These new integrations allow you to view and analyze Sales Navigator usage data in your preferred business intelligence platform with several new workbook templates that are ready to use right away. 

We’re also announcing an update to our Oracle Sales Cloud integration, which now has embedded profiles on Lead and Account pages (in addition to Contacts, which were previously supported).

Plus, starting this quarter, all users on shared contracts will receive access to new feature releases at the same time. This will provide a more seamless experience for users who may be collaborating on Sales Navigator, and it simplifies efforts for administrators planning training or enablement activities.

To learn more about the updates in today’s announcement, visit our QPR page here.