LinkedIn has announced some upcoming sales productivity applications as well as features for Sales Navigator aimed at connecting sales and marketing to enable businesses to work more efficiently. Some of the updates will impact the CRM solutions with which Sales Navigator integrates, like Dynamics 365, while others are focused on sales and marketing activities from within the LinkedIn solution.
The new features include:
- Sales and Marketing Integration — LinkedIn is planning to integrate Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Campaign manager to allow marketers to more precisely target the accounts and leads their sales team is pursuing. Marketers will see two new ad groups in LinkedIn Campaign Manager: Sales Navigators Leads and Sales Navigator Accounts. While marketers will continue to control creative, budget, and when campaigns go live, they will now be able to market directly to the leads their sales reps are pursing on LinkeIn. And sales reps will now have the ability to see how prospects are interacting with marketing campaigns from within Sales Navigator.
- LinkedIn Data Validation – This set of capabilities, which will be offered to LinkedIn’s Enterprise Edition customers in 2018, will enhance CRM data quality and provide companies with the information they need to make better business decisions. The first LinkedIn Data Validation feature will be “No longer at company” flag to enable sales reps to identify leads and contacts who have left the companies they’re mapped to in CRM. Sales reps and sales managers can use this real-time intelligence to determine whether they have to bring new contacts into their deals or if they can leverage existing relationships to pursue new business.
- Dealbook – LinkedIn will integrate the Dealbook feature of Heighten into Sales Navigator to enable sales pros to manage their pipelines more efficiently. Dealbook lets reps and managers easily view deals, identify the buying circle, and edit deal information directly in Sales Navigator – key fields instantly synced back to CRM. Additionally, Dealbook will also flag important updates that could influence the outcome of a deal.
LinkedIn will be rolling out these features over the next few months. Global Navigation and Mobile Briefings are currently ramping to customers. The Sales Navigator and LinkedIn advertising integration is available to pilot customers now, and will be available to all customers in early 2018. Dealbook and LinkedIn Data Validation will launch in the first half of 2018.
Last fall, LinkedIn announced integrations to other CRM partners in addition to Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. HubSpot CRM, Infor CRM, and Zoho CRM have also built Sales Navigator integrations into their applications and Oracle Sales Cloud will launch in the coming months.
Last year, LinkedIn also launched an integration with Gmail and will bring that functionality to Microsoft Outlook in 2018.