Ion Interactive vs. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is hands down the best tool for identifying targeted contacts or leads. You can drill down on a company and look at its entire workforce, or search by the exact title that is your key target. The information is up to date, as people tend to keep their LinkedIn profiles current. In terms of other marketing functions LI Sales Navigator is extremely limited. BUT if you are looking to identify contacts for prospecting purposes, then this tool is what you need.

Incentivized

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• Search Functionality: LinkedIn Sales Navigator has one of the most powerful search functions. The filters are not unnecessary and some are very well thought of. You can drill down to finding a needle in a haystack of 20000 employee company when it comes to using LinkedIn Sales Navigator if done in the right manner.
• Smart Links: Gone are the days of attached Decks. One can simply create their deck online using this feature on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or even upload an existing ppt. A smart link is shareable as well as trackable for opens and clicks.
• Fewer Clicks: With a single click, I can filter out decision-makers in any company. With a single click, I can import contacts from LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Salesforce. Lesser clicks are actually less stressful if you think.

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

• Inbox needs work - too much confusion around your LinkedIn inbox and Sales Nav inbox
• Sorting - need a better, faster way to sort by for prospect lists and account lists
• Only voluntarily shared information. No cross checking or using API’s like a ZoomInfo

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

This question is a no-brainer. The tool is the industry standard for anyone tied to sales and marketing. The name "LinkedIn Sales Navigator" is synonymous with streamlining relevant customer and account data in an easy to use format that is actionable and intelligent. The focus on continuous improvement and richer means of communicating with customers and prospects is evident each time new features are rolled out. The social component of the tool even includes a gamification component to ensure that peers remain relevant among each other, which is refreshing and enjoyable for those who engage the tool on a daily basis.

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

Overall, it's very user-friendly. It's hard for a tool to make sorting through loads of data easy, but Sales Nav does this very well. Its advanced search features enable us to be selective in finding the right people to talk to and connect with.

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

I would recommend LinkedIn Sales Navigator entirely. It has been the most user-friendly tool to use starting off in a sales role. I genuinely enjoy the navigation of the tool and how easy it is to save lists and see job changes within those lists. Generating leads and finding the most up to date information on prospects is all housed within this tool.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

I am unsure of the rollout, as I was not involved. I was an early adopter, and I have had a lot of success with the tool personally at multiple organizations, but I have no idea whether the implementation process encountered any errors. I can personally say that it works, and that I have not encountered significant issues with the tool since adoption, although a few issues like messages showing up as being unread even though they have been opened have been an on-again/off-again issues throughout the past few years. Overall, the company is doing a great job, and our implementation seems to have been effective.

Incentivized

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is much more valuable than Dice or Cognism, as we do most of our prospecting on LinkedIn. Therefore, it means we can build lists of our prospects based on activity, connections, and buying intention. With Cognism and Dice, you cannot do this as they do not work alongside the LinkedIn platform and, therefore, lack the functionality that is essential to what we are using the platform for.

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized

• Helped warm up a few leads that I was having trouble getting in touch with via phone and email
• Allowed me to better identify the key stakeholders at companies I was targeting
• Kept me up to date on what was happening with my prospects and their companies.

Incentivized