(Source – Shutterstock)

Fewer spam messages as LinkedIn introduces new deep sales platform

While LinkedIn is often regarded as the best social media platform for professionals, its popularity among some users has taken a dip in recent times. The reason for this is simply because they continue to be targeted with loads of messages from sales representatives.

Most of these folks are often after business leads and while LinkedIn is a good platform to get it, the reality is, too many messages are now being considered spam by many users. In fact, C-level executives often find themselves targeted the most by such messages. LinkedIn was also the most imitated brand when it came to phishing scams in recent times.

According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report 2022, the adoption of sales technology is at an all-time high, but it is frustrating buyers as some B2B sellers use it indiscriminately to spam potential customers. Sellers need to sell the way today’s buyers want to buy and use technology better — not to knock on more doors, but to knock on the right ones, reach sellers the right way, and deliver the right message at the right time.

However, when 47% of APAC sellers say their biggest data challenge is incomplete data, having the right tools that can give deep, high-quality data and timely insights can fuel the type of relationship building needed for successful marketing and selling.

As such, LinkedIn has launched a new deep sales platform. The next generation of Sales Navigator, the deep sales platform expands its capabilities to open up a new category of B2B sales intelligence technology that learns from data to make predictions and recommendations at a scale impossible for humans.

As the world’s first deep sales platform, it has the unparalleled ability to deliver timely and actionable insights. These insights empower sellers and organizations with the right intelligence to focus on the highest-probability accounts, approach buyers with welcomed and relevant outreach, drive better outcomes, and shift the performance curve.

With the most comprehensive, accurate, first-party professional data in the world and decades of experience working with top sellers to understand their habits, LinkedIn is able to build these best practices into the next-gen Sales Navigator, to help sales leaders level up the performance of their entire organization.

LinkedIn sales

(Source – LinkedIn)

In a LinkedIn post, Gail Moody-Byrd, Vice President for Marketing at LinkedIn Sales Solutions stated that the B2B buying landscape has changed since the pandemic. Today, the high movement in the workforce has made identifying the right decision makers difficult with 81% of sellers seeing a deal lost or stalled due to a buyer changing roles.

At the same time, increasing touchpoints have made the customer journey longer and more complex. Since the pandemic, the number of interactions required to make buying decisions leaped from 17 to 27.  The Increased digitalization has also resulted in more buyers doing their own research and preferring to do business virtually. 87% of buyers in 2021 wanted to self-serve part of or all of the buying journey. Gartner projects that by 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions will be digital.

“Shallow selling doesn’t work. What sales teams need now is a new category of sales technology called deep sales. Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get a meaningful answer. Deep sales rely on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context. It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in buying process that makes sense. It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics,” stated Moody-Byrd.

The next generation of LinkedIn Sales Navigator fuels more effective B2B connections by delivering actionable insights and recommendations in three priority areas:

  • Account insights: Targeting accounts that have the best chance of success
  • Relationship intelligence: Identifying decision-makers and finding the best path to reach them
  • Buyer intent: Capitalizing on the right moments to reach out, based on signals and alerts of key moments such as organizational growth, job changes, and change in strategy

These work together to help sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed and at the right time while at the same time, develop deep relationships with buyers.

To achieve this level of intelligence, the next-gen Sales Navigator gathers high quality first-party and comprehensive data provided by LinkedIn members that includes companies and buyers. LinkedIn technology analyses and packages proprietary data points to provide real-time, transparent, and actionable insights to power new features such as the Account Dashboard where sellers can review intent data and discover new leads. This will help sellers to prioritize the right accounts. Most importantly, this data is analyzed in a trusted environment, observing LinkedIn’s commitment to the privacy of its members.

“As always, we utilize the magic of LinkedIn to create economic opportunity for the global workforce, this time, for B2B sellers and buyers. Only we can apply our massive scale to help sales leaders solve this problem. We do this in a trusted environment, observing all the privacy rules our members expect from us,” she concluded.