LinkedIn Sales Insights arms Nitro’s sales operations, sales and finance teams with confidence to execute on their go-to-market strategy

The Revenue Operations team at Nitro knew that its contribution to the company’s growth strategy depended on data – and it knew that the quality of data in the CRM was letting the business down. After years of being fed by multiple data sources, the system was filled with duplicate and out-of-date entries that undermined sales planning and territory assignments. This in turn impacted both sales productivity and the sales teams’ data confidence. It reduced the role of Revenue Operations to fighting fires, without the credibility to help shape strategy.

With the business embarking on an enterprise-focused growth strategy, addressing these persistent data quality issues was vital. Investing in LinkedIn Sales Insights improved data accuracy almost immediately – but it also did far more. Equipped with a real-time database of accounts in their target market, Revenue Operations was able to transform Nitro’s perspective on its Total Addressable Market, reshape both business development and acquisition strategy, transform the effectiveness of its top accounts programme, and inform a new approach to business-wide planning.

Internal relationships transformed by data confidence

The persistent data quality issues in Nitro’s CRM didn’t just create practical issues through duplicate data. It also undermined the relationship between Revenue Operations and Sales, and severely limited the ability of the business to pursue a data-led strategy.

“It was impacting sales activity, sales’ trust in the data, on the efficacy of territory management policies and on the Revenue Operations team’s ability to enable the business,” says Nitro’s Senior Manager, Global Sales and Operations, Nick Flynn. “However, it also impacts our ability to credibly engage sales leadership as business partners or advisors, because you’re always chasing your tail and firefighting. That’s one of the principal ways that the data quality issue reared its head over the last decade.”

The real-time nature and quality data from LinkedIn Sales Insights immediately solved these problems, enabling Nick and the rest of the Revenue Operations team to align sales talent with accounts in a way that set them up for success. 

“It’s allowed us to solve those long-standing challenges, and because our conversations with sales leaders are no longer dominated by data quality, we’re able to be more future-facing and talk about what a region will look like 12 or 18 months from now,” adds Nick. “It’s allowed us to move upstream and have those kinds of strategic conversations. That wasn’t something I had anticipated Sales Insights enabling us to do – but it’s turned out to be one of the important benefits.”

It’s not just the relationship with Sales that LinkedIn Sales Insights has transformed. As Nitro’s Senior Director Sales Operations, Shantanu Shekhar explains, it’s pushing Revenue Operations’ data-driven approach towards the heart of the business. “We’re only just scratching the surface at this point,” he says. “It’s helping our relationship with finance, helping us with financial planning and giving us data that will help us plan headcount further in advance.”

A new view on addressable market drives sales and business strategy

LinkedIn Sales Insights gives Nitro a unique and strategic view into their Total Addressable Market.

“One of the things that most companies struggle with is trying to estimate the Total Addressable Market for their products,” says Shantanu. “With LinkedIn Sales Insights, we don’t just see how many employees a business has, we can calculate how many of those employees are likely to be knowledge workers. We can then overlay that with other forms of account segmentation from the LinkedIn data to inform our estimates. This changes the dynamic completely when it comes to thinking about penetration within customers and the broader whitespace opportunity.”

This change of perspective doesn’t just deliver long-term strategic benefits. It’s directly supporting our sales teams’ immediate objectives. “In our go-to-market planning, we’re going to be leaning into enterprise business in a really large way – and LinkedIn Sales Insights enables the enrichment and deployment of enterprise territories in key markets,” says Nick. “It’s also facilitated setting up a top accounts programme for our customers, aligning our resources against our highest-potential customer accounts to ensure we’re servicing them in the right way. LinkedIn Sales Insights scopes out which accounts fit the high-potential category, what our penetration is and what the real opportunity is for Nitro.”