LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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

I think the product, by definition, is meant for marketing — and we use it exactly for that, for running campaigns. That’s the best-suited use case for the product. I don’t think it’s really meant to be used for anything else — that’s just not how it’s designed.

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.

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

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

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

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

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

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

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

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 are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

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

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

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

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

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

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized