LinkedIn Revamps Sales Navigator To Streamline Producivity for Sales Teams

Regardless of industry, one of the main struggles of sales professionals remains consistent: time efficiency.

Knowing which leads to follow up with, staying on top of alerts from prospects, and ensuring that the time invested in those activities has an equal payoff —  it can be a tricky balance.

Because the nature of sales is not always predictable, having tools to help guide sales teams in the right direction is key to investing time wisely.

One of these tools is LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, a paid sales solution that allows sales teams and organizations to build and nurture existing customer relationships, find the right companies to target (and the right people within them), and ultimately gain higher deal sizes and win rates.

This week, LinkedIn announced several new updates to the tool intended to make it even easier for sales teams to find, follow-up, and connect with the clients and prospects that matter.

What’s New in LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Emphasis on Alerts

If you’re a current Sales Navigator user, the first thing you’ll notice is the updated homepage.

The purpose of this redesign was far from aesthetics – it was intentionally built to prioritize Alerts and place the updates that matter front and center for sales teams to see.

According to LinkedIn, salespeople only spend 38% of their time selling. And that’s not based on lack of effort – but simply the amount of time it takes to research prospects, find and connect with people, and build relationships.

For this reason, LinkedIn ditched the newsfeed-style format for their homepage and repurposed that space for the relevant and actionable updates that matter to busy sales teams.

In addition to centralizing Alerts, LinkedIn also added three new Alerts that show the user:

• An account has had a funding event
• A colleague shared a custom list
• Pending actions in Sales Navigator Coach

While Alerts are the focus of the new homepage, all other most-used features still remain, so you don’t have to worry about any other important updates disrupting your favorite tools.

Improvements to Keyword Search

LinkedIn states that Keyword Search is the most widely used feature for sales teams to find prospects and new contacts.

To make this process easier, LinkedIn has added a “Guided Search” feature that auto-suggests alternatives and variations of your search query based on popular searches.

The feature has a “Did You Mean?” section to better refine your search, as well as an “Also Try” option to find related terms or titles that could open up new opportunities.

Expanded Communication Options

Because active communication is so crucial to the sales process, Sales Navigator has expanded its messaging capabilities to make reaching out and following up more efficient.

Now, if a sales team member messages a contact from anywhere in the Sales Navigator, they can see the entire communication history with the contact. This is helpful if you have multiple sales reps, a new team member, or just want to keep all history in one convenient place.

Additionally, for contacts you have no communication history with, InMail will provide more visibility into “Icebreaker” prompts to help start off the conversation.

Enhanced Custom List Features

The Custom Lists feature was launched last year, and it enables sales teams to organize and save leads in the way that makes sense for their unique team.

Now, LinkedIn has added two frequently requested features to make creating and analyzing these custom lists less time consuming:

• Bulk Add/Bulk Remove: Now you can bulk add contacts/accounts to custom lists directly from the search results page of your My Saved Accounts or My Saved Leads lists instead of adding them one by one. Additionally, you can bulk-delete entries as well through the same process.
• Match Lead to Account: Because not all leads have accounts matched to them, it can cause confusion or missed opportunities. Now, you can manually match a saved lead to any company on LinkedIn – so you can keep information on both the lead and the company consistent and up to date.

New Integrations

Finally, Linkedin is introducing two new integrations to connect your systems that focus on creating organization charts for your key accounts.

First, LinkedIn is expanding its current Microsoft 365 integration by enabling Live Org Chart syncing.

Users can now build an org chart of any account saved in Dynamics 365 within the Sales Navigator.

When created, the chart will automatically display LinkedIn member profile photos and provide additional information from the contact’s LinkedIn profile. This can help sales teams gain a more complete view of the key people associated with a particular account.

Second, LinkedIn is introducing a brand-new tool to its Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) with Lucidchart Sales Solution.

Lucidchart is a visual org chart mapping tool for Salesforce that will work in conjunction with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator to enable teams to easily identify lead recommendation, suggested actions, and InMail prospects — all within the context of these established Lucidchart account maps.

For more information on the full capabilities of this integration, Lucidchart did an in-depth rundown of its Sales Navigator integration in this blog post.

Final Thoughts

Sales teams have a lot on their plate – and are under a ton of pressure to juggle it all well.

These Sales Navigator updates may seem small, but even saving a fraction of time can make the difference between a deal closing and a missed opportunity.

What’s also great about the features LinkedIn has added is that they enable users to get the most out of this tool while they’re going about their daily interactions.

Here, LinkedIn is making an effort to put the most helpful assets of Sales Navigator front and center – and easily accessible. Personally, I’ve never understood why marketing and sales software tends to “hide” some of its most valuable tools – to the point that it nearly requires a specialized role to help manage.  

By centralizing its key features, Sales Navigator helping all team members understand and utilize the true value of the tool – without needing an expert or tedious tutorials to gain the full benefits.