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.
Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
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.
Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
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.
Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
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.
While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
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.
I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
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.
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.
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
