LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool receives a slew of new updates

LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a tool that is widely used by sales professionals to meet their revenue goals, has received updates adding new functionality to help sales teams expand existing customer relationships, acquire new business and maximize sales productivity.

Today, LinkedIn is embarking on a journey to win the hearts and minds of the entire sales org with the release of new key features, including:

Deals — pipeline reviews will never be the same

Let’s face it — the weekly one-on-one between sales managers and their reps can be frustrating for both parties. Because information in CRM or spreadsheets is often missing or out of date, these meetings can turn into a game of 20 questions with managers probing to find areas of deal risk and ways for them to help.

Enter Deals.

Deals is a new feature in Sales Navigator that gives managers and reps a more effective way to understand and manage pipeline. It makes adding deal and contact information to your CRM much easier, and helps surface opportunities that might be at risk.

Deals pulls pipeline data from your CRM and displays it in a simple-to-use web interface. Instead of jumping in and out of each opportunity screen in CRM, you can edit information for your entire pipeline on a single page, including deal size, stage, close date, next steps and more, with all changes automatically written back to CRM. Reps can now update their entire pipeline in minutes, not hours.

But things get even more exciting with a feature within Deals called Buyer’s Circle.

According to the CEB, there are approximately 6.8 people involved in the B2B buying process.  Buyer’s Circle pulls and displays the opportunity role information from your CRM, like decision maker, influencer, evaluator, etc. so you know if any key players are missing from the deal.

But the real power comes when you want to add missing role contacts. Buyer’s Circle makes it easy to select anyone on LinkedIn and drag them to a role, which, again, automatically updates your CRM. And if that contact is not already in your CRM, Deals lets you create a new CRM contact associated with that opportunity in just a few clicks.

We think Deals can improve the way reps and their managers conduct pipeline reviews, and we’re just getting started.

Also Read: All you need to know about the new LinkedIn Experience Design

Office 365 Integration — Sales Navigator in your Inbox

We all live in email. Now you can take Sales Navigator actions and see key insights without ever leaving your Outlook for Web Inbox.

Once you authenticate your Office 365 and Sales Navigator accounts, you can mouse over any email address and access features like viewing profile information, saving a lead, sending a LinkedIn connection request, or viewing TeamLink connections. You can also see “icebreakers” —  the things you have in common — to help you personalize your message.

New Search Experience — because time is money

Search has been, and always will be, core to Sales Navigator. In this release, we’ve completely redesigned our search experience and search results pages to make your experience faster and easier. We’ve made Account Search and Lead Search more prominent, streamlined search filters, and made it easier to save searches, so you can get alerts any time a person or company on LinkedIn matches your search criteria. We’ve also added company hover cards, which gives you a quick overview of any company mentioned on a search results page by mousing over the company name, and even lets you save those company details without leaving the page.

Mobile Lead Pages — creating a full Sales Navigator experience on the go

The original Sales Navigator mobile app was designed to complement the desktop (web) app and didn’t include all the features of the Sales Navigator desktop experience. But as more of our customers have turned to the Sales Navigator mobile app as their daily go-to, we’ve decided to make it a full-featured Sales Navigator experience.

In our last Quarterly Product Release, we updated our mobile account pages, and with this release we’re improving the mobile lead page experience. We will continue to narrow the gap between our mobile and desktop experiences in upcoming releases, and take advantage of the unique characteristics of mobile as well.

Sales Navigator Application Platform — the movement is growing

With this release, we are delighted to add a significant new partner to the SNAP program —Adobe Sign.

Additionally, three existing partners — Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and SalesLoft — are rolling out much tighter SNAP integrations. The Salesforce and Dynamics integrations embed Sales Navigator information more deeply throughout lead, contact, account and opportunity pages, and allow CRM users to send InMails directly from CRM pages. The SalesLoft integration allows for LinkedIn actions such as research, connect and InMail/message to take center stage in SalesLoft cadences, alongside email and dial actions.

Sales Navigator Ideas — a direct line to the Sales Navigator product team

Last, but not least, we’re opening up a direct channel of communication between Sales Navigator program admins and the Sales Navigator development team. Sales Navigator Ideas lets program admins submit, vote on, comment on and track status of ideas for how to improve Sales Navigator. Powered by Aha, Sales Navigator Ideas can be found in the Sales Navigator Community Portal.