Today, LinkedIn rolls out their new Sales Navigator Inbox. I got a sneak preview, and I must say, it’s like a sales and social media dashboard / command center / mini-CRM all wrapped into one page.

Here are the highlights – it:

1)     Allows you to search for someone to write to – both within and outside of your current connections.

2)     Gives you the name, picture and description of the person you have selected to send to, and also allows you to view their profile (opens in a new window). Note: if you are not connected to that individual, the “View profile” button says “Connect” instead, and allows you to send an invitation to connect.

3)     Also pulls in that person’s phone number, email address and website URL from their contact information (so you can follow-up in the off chance that your InMail is not answered)

4)     Shows you the connections in common with that person. For example, I have 59 shared connections with Craig, to whom I am writing this note. These connections are a great conversation starter to get a warm referral (a warm referral is definitely the best way to reach out).

5)     Shows you LinkedIn groups that you are both a part of – another potential ice-breaker for a prospect.

6)     Shows you what that person has posted/shared on LinkedIn recently – another great thing to reach out to someone about – especially if they wrote it. Engaging with someone’s content is the purest form of flattery!

7)     Creates a signature for you…automatically. I didn’t type any this information. I assume the Inbox is pulling this content from my contact information. I like it – less work for me.

Also, in the new InMail experience, when you send someone an InMail, the window pops up on the right side of the page, so you can still see all the vital information about the person, and all the of features I mentioned about the Inbox are available in that window as well.

Conclusion

You used to have to search all over in LinkedIn for this information. Now, the new Sales Navigator Inbox and InMail experience provides it all to you, and at the right time and in the place where you need it most, when you are reaching out to someone. Great stuff. Let me know what you think of the new Sales Navigator Inbox in the comments.

Related Articles:

Big new Sales Navigator changes announced at LinkedIn’s Sales Connect conference

Connect with your pizza boy on LinkedIn

NEW FEATURE in LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes company research faster and easier

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving sales. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to evolve your marketing and sales strategy for the new, digital age, train your teams how to use a sales-driving social selling approach at your organization, or talk University of Michigan football, feel free to reach out to us:

Every year, LinkedIn brings together sales leaders from around the globe at their annual Sales Connect conference. This year, it is clear that Sales Navigator is a big priority for LinkedIn. They are continuously investing and expanding the capabilities of Sales Navigator, and today they announced a slew of new features focused on 5 key areas to create what they are calling a “System of Engagement.”

1) Tags and Notes – you can now write tags and notes and organize information on leads or accounts and categorize any way you want – such as where you met, how to follow-up, or the contents of your last conversation. Tags and Notes launched a couple of weeks ago. Personally, I’ve been hoping for this one for quite a while, and I have been loving it so far. Here’s what it looks like in action:

2) CRM – LinkedIn announced an integration with Salesforce a while back, and now through their CRM Partner Program, they will be allowing other CRM companies to create apps that plug Sales Navigator into other CRM platforms. The first batch of partners are Oracle, SAP, SugarCRM, HubSpot and NetSuite.

You will be able to see LinkedIn information at the contact level. You can set up leads, and act upon that activity more easily – you don’t have to move back and forth between platforms anymore. This lowers the barrier to social selling. No longer will you have to cut and paste information from LinkedIn into your CRM. This is huge.

You can also write directly into your CRM – more things you will no longer have to copy and paste into your CRM system and vice versa.

3) InMail 2.0 – a group of new enhancements to InMail were announced including:

• The current iteration of InMail blocks the entire window when you are sending a message. Now, the window be on the side of the screen on the desktop, similar to Gmail’s interface.
• LinkedIn will also give you icebreakers – common connections and items to include in your messages to improve likelihood of a response – while you are creating your InMail.
• You can include attachments now. Let me repeat that: You. Can. Include. Attachments. Now. Hallelujah! It’s also through a great, interactive, data-rich service method called PointDrive,

4) Search – You will now be able to search by:

• Spotlights – a group of key sets of information that will give you ways to drill deeper into your search results such as how many of your results have changed jobs in the last 90 days, have been mentioned in the news the past 30 days and have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days
• Department size and revenue (to determine if a company should be in your target audience)
• Senior leadership changes at companies (new people tend to make changes to personnel and technology)
• Zip code of a company’s headquarters (until now any office would appear in search results, but most decision makers are in a company’s headquarters)
• Growth of both company and department (to see the trajectory of a company and department)
• Content (keywords for content they are posting to see what is important to them)

Some of these enhancement are live (Spotlights, department size and senior leadership), and the rest are coming soon.

5) Sales Navigator for Gmail – this integration of Sales Navigator and Gmail brings Sales Navigator directly into your Inbox. You’ll have all the information you would have in Sales Navigator (connections in common, interests, shared companies, more) that you can use to start a conversation now in Gmail.

This one is already live as well. You can this find plug-in in the app store on mobile (search Sales Navigator) or here:

When I spoke with Derek Pando, Senior Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, he related “the new Sales Navigator features are to enhance the overall customer experience of Sales Navigator, and to integrate it into daily workflows to get people the information they need as easily as possible.”

With these new launches, LinkedIn has showed that they realize the way forward for them is through Sales Navigator, and the best way to do that is to help set sales teams up for success by making it as easy as possible to do social selling.

So, Sales Navigator users, what do you think of the new features?

About the Author

Robert Knop is Founder and CEO of Assist You Today, a company dedicated to helping companies transform their social media programs from driving engagement to driving revenue. He’s a proud member of the Wave3 network of consultants, and always happy to talk strategy, digital and social selling.

If you’d like to learn how to set-up a sales-driving social selling program at your organization, contact Robert at 323-972-3566, or simply complete the short form below.

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.

  [contact-form]