LinkedIn Sales Solutions Announces New Sales Navigator Features

LinkedIn Sales Solutions today announced a number of new features for its Sales Navigator sales tool, including alerts, custom lists, and a “reports to” field on the lead page.

Alerts are now incorporated into the main menu bar in both the desktop and mobile versions of Sales Navigator. “If you look at LinkedIn.com, over 50 percent of the sessions that get started there started with a notification of some form, but to date, we haven’t had anything like that in Sales Navigator,” says Doug Camplejohn, head of product at LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

The alerts capability, which include messages such as “someone at a saved account viewed your profile,” “a saved account has just raised funding,” and “a saved lead has engaged with LinkedIn posts from your company,” can surface “some of the most important things for a sales rep to know about,” Camplejohn says—like whether a prospect company has a new infusion of cash or whether a saved lead has engaged with your company’s marketing content.

Sales Navigator users also can now make unlimited, customized lists on both desktop and mobile. Additionally, a new custom lists view allows users to quickly make notes on saved leads or accounts, as well as filter lists using “spotlights,” which can show users whether an account has changed jobs or whether a company has had a change in leadership, “interesting trigger activities that are happening,” Camplejohn says.

“In the past, sales navigator has only had three buckets of lists—your own LinkedIn network, all of your leads, and all of your accounts. That’s not enough granularity for most people,” Camplejohn says. “Any time you see the ‘save’ action in Sales Navigator, you’ll be able to save that to either the generic pool of leads or accounts or to a custom list that you have created. When you drill down on those custom lists, you’ll see a new list view that makes it much easier for you to sort by when those folks were added to the list, and also quickly see notes.”

Adding the “reports to” field on the lead page is Sales Navigator’s first step into org charts, according to Camplejohn. When a user learns who someone’s manager is, they can add that information to their page by searching for a name or browsing recommendations. Then, when that person or another team member looks up that lead, they’ll see whom the lead reports to, who added that information, and a reporting history.

“When you click on the ‘reports to’ field, we’ll make a set of recommendations of whom we think that person might report to, based on whom lots of people have been looking at on LinkedIn when they also look at that person,” Camplejohn explains. “If I’m meeting with a company and I’ve just found out this person is this person’s boss, I can go put it in and then everybody on that sales navigator contract, when they go take a look at that lead page, sees that reporting relationship.”

Other features announced today for Sales Navigator include an account center, which aims to simplify admin tasks such as assigning users and managing groups; advanced mobiles searches, which puts all of the Sales Navigator desktop search features—advanced filters, search history, and save your searches—on the mobile app; PointDrive write-back, which allows users to write back to Microsoft Dynamics such PointDrive activities as sharing sales materials and tracking who is engaging with them; and the addition of web conferencing as a Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) partner category, with Zoom as the first partner.