LinkedIn Sales Solutions Launches Deals
LinkedIn Sales Solutions today launched Deals, a new feature for its Sales Navigator sales tool that aims to makes it easier for reps and managers to add, update, and manage pipeline data.
Deals takes pipeline data from a company’s CRM system and displays it in a web interface, where users can edit information—such as deal size, stage, close date, and next steps—for the entire pipeline on a single page, with all changes automatically written back to the CRM system. Additionally, it includes a feature called Buyer’s Circle that enables users to select anyone on LinkedIn and drag that person to a role—an action that is also automatically updated in the CRM system. If that contact is not already in the CRM system, Deals allows the user to create a new contact in just a few clicks.
“If you think about the weekly one-one-one between a rep and his or her manager, oftentimes those end up as a game of twenty questions. Managers are really trying to find out what are areas of weakness in the pipeline and how they can help. A lot of times, because the information that’s been put into CRM is incomplete, that can be a challenging conversation,” says Doug Camplejohn, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn Sales Solutions. “The problem Deals is ultimately trying to solve is how do you increase the quality of that data that is ultimately stored in the CRM, and by making it much easier for the rep to quickly see missing points of information as well as to add in what one could argue is the most important information—who are all the people that are involved in that buying decision at the target company.”
Along with Deals, LinkedIn Sales Solutions rolled out three updates. The first of these is Office 365 integration: Users can access Sales Navigator actions and insights within their Outlook inboxes. More specifically, they can mouse over any email address and take actions such as viewing profile information, saving a lead, sending a LinkedIn connection request, or viewing TeamLink connections.
Second, LinkedIn has redesigned the search experience. Account search and lead search capabilities are now featured more prominently, and search filters have been streamlined; it's also now easier to save searches. The search funtion also includes company hover cards that enable users to get an overview of any company mentioned on a search results page by mousing over the company name; they can also save that information without leaving the page.
Third, as part of its effort to make the Sales Navigator mobile experience as robust as the desktop one, LinkedIn Sales Solutions followed up its redesigned mobile account pages with redesigned mobile lead pages that more closely mirror the desktop experience.