Rolling out LinkedIn Sales Navigator has enabled the Corporate Banking division of Crédit Agricole Italia to digitally transform its approach to customer acquisition. It’s dramatically improved visibility into market opportunities, transformed the sales planning process – and accelerated the speed with which deals close.

An account manager for Crédit Agricole Italia’s Corporate Banking division receives a marketing brochure from a company on a growth drive – and recognises an opportunity. Within a few hours, he has identified the business’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and reached out with an invitation for a video meeting. Within a few days, the bank has a new customer – and LinkedIn Sales Navigator has provided yet more evidence of the power of social selling and LinkedIn data in accelerating the opportunity pipeline.

“It’s just one example that shows what happens when you empower an employee’s intuition and dedication with a tool like Sales Navigator,” says Marco Perocchi, Corporate Banking Director at Crédit Agricole Italia. “As soon as our account manager recognised a business opportunity, he was able to perform an advanced search, identify key people at the company like the CFO, and then reach out by InMail. Being able to shorten the sales cycle in this way represents a real success story for us.”

It’s one of many. The two years since Marco began the process of rolling out Sales Navigator at Crédit Agricole Italia has seen a digital transformation of the sales process. It’s enabled the Corporate Banking team to uncover new market opportunities and take greater control of the pipeline through higher quality sales data. And it’s done all of this during a time of unprecedented disruption for the sales profession.

Taking social selling to the next level with Sales Navigator

In many respects, the decision to roll out LinkedIn Sales Navigator across Crédit Agricole Italia’s team of account managers was an easy one. Many of those account managers were already active on LinkedIn in a personal capacity. Marco recognised the immense value to be gained by connecting their activity, elevating their visibility and pooling the insights that LinkedIn could reveal.

“We were able to change the mindset of our colleagues towards using LinkedIn as a commercial platform,” he says. “It’s part of a wider partnership between Crédit Agricole and LinkedIn that’s strengthened our presence and enabled us to connect with qualified target groups. LinkedIn is a crucial channel when it comes to covering the ‘last mile’ with the customer. It helps us to capture all of the business opportunities that are out there in the market.”

Data has played a key role in turning social selling from an individual initiative into an organisation-wide strategy. “We’re able to track profile searches and views by our target accounts and existing customers – and we’re able to measure success based on new account openings,” says Marco. “We’d have struggled to get such a detailed set of metrics through other tools.”

A new view of the market – and a new level of responsiveness

Continuous learning has been a feature of the adoption of Sales Navigator at Crédit Agricole Italia. “We made a point of engaging our colleagues with the potential of the tool at the start – and we keep them engaged with updates about new functionalities,” says Marco. “Advanced search and the proactive suggestions that LinkedIn makes have been our most useful features of the tool. They’ve given our account managers greater visibility of the market and helped us to focus on the most important leads and accounts.”

“Knowing who to reach out to is a great advantage. Having a platform for reaching out in an informed way is more valuable still. “Companies really appreciate it when we approach them on LinkedIn,” says Marco. “It’s a less well-trodden path, which means that we stand out and get a more positive response. We’re able to reach out in a way that’s personalised – and that gets things moving faster.”