Last year, my wife and I saved up our money and took the family to Hawaii. My kids love sea turtles, so we searched for and found a beach that sea turtles are known to frequent.

We hiked about a half mile to the beach (with 400lbs of beach gear in tow), and were rewarded by walking up and immediately seeing an enormous sea turtle. My kids were over the moon! My wife and I were ecstatic, and I took about 100 pictures. We stood watching this magnificent creature sun itself, and throw sand on its shell.

After about 20 minutes of “ooh’s” and “aah’s,” a fellow beach-goer walked up to me, and said, “Um, if you like sea turtles, there’s about 20 of them around the corner.” And there were. This new revelation of information, and we spent the day admiring these reptiles (from a safe distance, of course), and taking enough pictures to last a lifetime.

Seeing the one turtle was great, and we would have been happy with that, but seeing all the rest of them made it even better.

That’s how I feel about a recent enhancement to LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator platform. If you are not familiar, Sales Navigator is the highest level of LinkedIn premium service. In a nutshell, it helps you get a lot more business.

The new Sales Navigator enhancement is called “Premium Insights”, which pulls in company information from many sources to make research faster and easier. If you have haven’t seen Premium Insights yet, here are the 5 new features (Note: I have included screenshots taken from Airbnb’s page as examples).

1) Total Employee Count is the total number employed at a company that are LinkedIn members over the past two years. This feature also shows the percentage growth in that period of time and average tenure.

If a company has seen significant downsizing in the past two years, it may not be the best place to apply for a job, or reach out as vendor. In the example below, you can see Airbnb has seen 68% growth in the past 2 years.

2) Employee Distribution by Function is the distribution of company employees by function over time. This feature defaults to the top 4 functions in size at a company.

The feature allows you to see where the company is focused (e.g. Media, arts and design, engineering and operations), and the trend for each. It also can give you some insight into who makes the decisions at a company. For example, if the company has 1,000 people, 700 of them are sales and 5 are marketing, and you’re trying to sell them on a product that is going to impact sales and marketing it’s a good bet that the head of sales is the key decision-maker you need to convince for a company to work with you).

3) New Hires is the trending count of newly hired employees over time at a company. This shows if a company is growing, and the trend of growth as well. Stagnant employee count is a sign that a company may not be ready for a new technology or consulting help, or maybe it’s the PERFECT time if they have just hired a new rock star from a different industry.

In the example below, you can see that Airbnb had big boost in hiring at the beginning of 2015, and new hires have slowed, but are still at a pace of close to 100/month.

4) Notable Alumni are noteworthy people that used to work at a company in the past. (Note: this feature only shows VP-level and above. So, if you were the mail boy at Disney for a month a couple of years ago, and you want everyone to know about it. Well, I’m sorry, but you will not appear here).

With this feature, you can find out if a company churns out great leaders, and is it held in high regard by its alumni. For example, if a company’s alumni include Bill Gates, Beth Comstock and Elon Musk, you’d probably want to work for or with that company.

At Airbnb, you can see there aren’t many notable alumni, which is to be expected for a company that has only been around a few years.

5) Active Job Openings are a company’s total job posts available on LinkedIn, segmented by seniority and function, trending over time. Everyone uses LinkedIn for recruiting nowadays, so if they are posting new jobs, it’ll be on LinkedIn. Thus, if you are looking for a job, or want to see if a company is the midst of an expansion, this will give you that insight.

In the example below, it looks like Airbnb is expanding again. They have more new openings in the past month than they’ve had in any month in the past two years.

Could you find out this information about companies from other sources before this Sales Navigator enhancement? Yes. It is a lot easier to have it all in ONE place? Absolutely! Now, you can do high-level research on a company with Insights to be able to inform a knowledgeable, custom-tailored conversation with a key stakeholder.

Linkedin took a great experience with Sales Navigator and made it even better.

Related articles

• The value of social selling
• The best part of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index
• How to Drive a Social Selling Project – Step One: Gain C-suite Alignment

About the Author

Robert Knop is a passionate helper of people, and Founder of Assist You Today, a company focusing on helping companies get closer to their clients, build trust and drive sales by harnessing the power of strategy, data, digital and social.

To find out how to set your company up for long-term success in this new digital age, and generate more sales using strategy, data, digital and social, contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

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