LinkedIn - Connecting real people with relevant actionable insights, contact info, employment history, areas of expertise and exploration
August 09, 2018
LinkedIn - Connecting real people with relevant actionable insights, contact info, employment history, areas of expertise and exploration
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Our sales team is using Sales Navigator for account and lead intelligence, for prospecting, and for continued prospect and customer interaction as part of our overall deal strategy. Sales Navigator is heavily utilized by the corporate teams to ensure accurate data when facilitating customer contact, and to increase our overall intelligence of basic company organizational and personnel chart type research to ensure accurate engagement and efficient communication methodologies.
Pros
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is arguably the most up to date source of employment information due to the fact that individuals are updating their own employment information for professional networking purposes.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is becoming increasingly more efficient at searching for individuals and companies with a variety of filter options to narrow searches and to specify important attributes when attempting to gather particular data points.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great means of communication for reaching high ranking individuals who otherwise are often too busy to check an inbox that has been completely overtaken by sales and marketing orgs of virtually every company looking to sell into a particular industry. LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides a means to contact, connect, and even refer contacts in a manner that is professional, secure, and trusted as an industry standard means of communication.
Cons
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is still not as efficient as it could be when enabling searches with filtered criteria. The optional filter criteria has already become far better than it previously was even a year and a half ago, but there is still room for improvement.
- Limitations to how many InMail messages can be sent is both a blessing and a curse. The limitation deters users from abusing the platform, which is a benefit, but the majority of users would benefit from increased communication functionality without attaching a higher price tag to this type of feature.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator would benefit drastically from greater Sales Force and CRM interoperability. This functionality is on their roadmap and will be an absolute game changer, but it is not fully baked, and will likely require several iterations and improvements before it is able to deliver the type of seamless analytics and account/lead intelligence required for enterprise level adoption.
- Perhaps one of the biggest shortcomings of Sales Navigator is that it is a parallel platform to LinkedIn rather than simply a unified platform that does not require one to navigate away from the primary LinkedIn platform.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator easily ensures that our sales teams are not side tracked with unnecessary administrative tasks such as verifying contact and employment information redundantly.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives our marketing and sales teams an easy to use collaborative tool for streamlining lead and contact communication efforts.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an industry standard tool that many other add-on/extension type services are working to incorporate into their own value propositions in order better to accommodate sales and marketing team's ever-expanding efforts at contacting the right customers at the right time with the right message through the right medium. In other words, LinkedIn is enabling sales and marketing organizations to respond to their customer's needs at the speed of their customer's attention spans.
- DiscoverOrg, RainKing (acquired by DiscoverOrg), D&B, D&B Hoovers (formerly Avention), XING Events, Facebook for Business, Workplace by Facebook (Formerly Facebook at Work), Data.com and Twitter Counter
LinkedIn is far superior to all of its competition, if for no other reason, simply because it is the unparalleled industry leader when it comes to finding out relevant information pertaining to employees, companies, and to a slightly lesser degree industries. LinkedIn Sales Navigator, in particular, is a fantastic means of enabling strategic account intelligence that is able to be used in an actionable manner without becoming "creepy" to those whom you are trying to reach. LinkedIn is a secure and professional platform for sharing relevant business data, including (but not limited to) the following: articles, contact information, employment history, expertise and project focus/needs, as well as enabling every level of professional to connect with other individuals to learn from them and connect in a manner that can enable knowledge sharing, the potential for job hiring and promotion, and many other means of communication.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Feature Ratings
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator
500 - Most of our employees that utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator are in our sales and marketing organizations. The overwhelming majority of these people are tasked with either directly or indirectly creating revenue for the company. Sales is charged with cultivating prospect/customer relationships and ultimately selling our products/solutions to their respective prospects and customers. Marketing is in charge of news, relevant insights, customer intelligence and event organization and execution in order to enable our sales teams to effectively communicate to their prospects/customers in a timely manner.
1 - We have one individual dedicated to the relationship with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, although many of our sales leaders take the initiative of working hand-in-hand directly with our LinkedIn representative in order to enhance the tool and company adoption. The tool is beneficial enough where our use case warrants continued expansion of not only adoption, but also efforts to increase features and functionality from LinkedIn, in order to make the solution even more effective.
- Sales - intelligence gathering pertaining to prospects/customers and companies/accounts for outbound sales efforts
- Marketing - intelligence gathering pertaining to prospects/customers and companies/accounts for outbound marketing efforts
- Sales & Marketing - prospect/customer communication with active/relevant insights pertaining to information gathered directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Filtering by revenue band in order to direct geo-based companies to the proper sales and marketing teams
- Relevant add-on extensions in harmony with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to gather contact information and ensure proper contact data
- PointDrive presentation sharing analytics for actionable insights pertaining to customer interest and presentation viewership data
- Awareness of upcoming CRM interfacing project, which will likely change the dynamic of how important LinkedIn Sales Navigator is for how we do business
- Greater CRM connectivity and interoperability functionality
- More hand tailored content being personalized through PointDrive to ensure more relevant insights being delivered to customers at the right time in an innovative and business intelligent format
- Access to more customer data that will enable richer communication and better insights about what matters to each individual and company
Evaluating LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Competitors
Not Sure
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
Usability is by far the most important feature that has driven adoption of the tool among our users. LinkedIn Sales Navigator was initially adopted by our corporate sales teams, then marketing, and then field sales as well. The tool is easy to use, easy to implement with popular CRM tools as well as other sales and marketing platforms and tools, and provides the actionable intelligence that differentiates from outdated sales methodologies that are cumbersome and not in tune with timely and relevant customer data.
I would not change anything about the process.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Implementation
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has spent a great deal of time enabling our users and addressing basic questions as needed. Our representative has been available for multiple training sessions and power users have utilized newer features well in order to enhance the overall usage of the tool by the company as a whole. The combination of a proactive sales staff and a knowledgeable Sales Nav rep has proven to be a healthy recipe for success.
Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Search is easy to use
- Sharing is extremely simple
- Connecting and communicating is a snap
- Extracting data could be made easier, especially to CRM systems, although they do have recently streamlined this function in a manner that is acceptable albeit slightly less than perfect.
Yes - It's a good tool whether you use it on a desktop or via mobile device. Some of the functionality is not quite as easy to use on the mobile version, but overall, the tool is very user friendly. For most people, the desktop version is probably the preferred method, but having a mobile version is a necessity for those on the go.
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