LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Gmail vs. Twilio SendGrid

The Sales Navigator has allowed us to increase our awareness of our potential lead pool and has allowed us to grow our customer base. The system is easy to use and allows us to have great control over the number of leads we can see and the number of leads that we can connect to. Using the system has also helped us in being able to manage the number of leads that we can send.

Incentivized

If you're prepared to build out your whole staff UX, audience creation, email production, and analytics on your own using API, this tool may have that flexibility. If you require a sturdy drag and drop production tool, this tool has it but at the expense of a lot of other critical functionality. Out of the box analytics/reporting, is extremely limited. Complex queries, even something like pulling those who haven't engaged in email within a certain time period, is clunky. If you require any support at all, this is not the tool for you. I'm a deliverability consultant and have used many of the top email marketing tools and SendGrid has been extremely difficult for my team. I do not recommend it. Shiny and bright during sales, pretty disappointing thereafter.

• Has many filter capabilities for me to find exactly who I am looking for.
• Integrates with other prospecting tools to create a well rounded with the information it can collect.
• Integrates with SFDC- automatically uploads them as leads.
• Integrates with Salesloft for me to easily start the cadence.

Incentivized

• Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
• They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
• Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
• I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.

Incentivized

• Sometimes it tells me I need to log into my LinkedIn profile when I've already logged in. It's weird. It seems to be when the email address is not found. Instead of just saying the email is not found, it tells me I need to log in. Just something I've noticed.
• Sometimes I get this weird thing where I go to compose an email and instead of having it open all the way to the right, it opens all the way to my left. I'm pretty sure Rapportive is what's causing it. It doesn't happen very often but sometimes I see that.

Incentivized

• Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
• Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
• We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
• Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
• Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
• Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.

Incentivized

Rapportive is simple and great at what it does. Plus I anticipate they'll probably add more features in the future.

The user interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The workflow is an easy thing to incorporate into your day-to-day as a sales person. It’s very rare that I come across a glitch or website slowness. The collaborative Aspect is also a plus when I am working with others on my sales team

Incentivized

It is usable but needs improvement in overall user experience and ease of use. A new joinee/anyone new to the tool would need more tarining currently before he can use the platform seamlessly. The set-up to value realization time for Twilio SendGrid customers is generally high because of this concern.

Incentivized

I have never used Their support

Incentivized

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

LinkedIn Sales Navigators provides different services than most other products and has the unique ability to take advantage of LinkedIn's proprietary user data. That also comes with a drawback that the system is dependent on users to update their data in a timely and accurate manner in order to get the correct intel back to users. I'd recommend other products like Seamless.ai or MediaRadar for more accurate and updated contact information, but also to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Gmail for better market and company intel, timely pitching opportunities and seamless integration between Gmail and LinkedIn.

Incentivized

Sendgrid has a lot of features that other providers have and a few more - like the dynamic template builder, which AWS SES doesn't have. We choose the provider based on the scenario of use and the provider we're using. If we're going to be making regular changes to a template, then we'd go with Sendgrid, as the changes will be easier to make and don't necessarily require developer intervention.

Incentivized

• Really lets me leverage my entire business network
• Empowers me to see the prospect's whole picture (who they know, where they went, what they do) and take advantage of that opening
• We have no other system like it, so it's irreplaceable for us

Incentivized

• As it was cheaper than the transactional service we previously used, it saved costs.
• The API was relatively easy to work with so it helped us ship the service and test it quickly.
• We still use the transactional email service, even though we recognize its limits as it meets our immediate needs.

Incentivized