LinkedIn is betting large organizations will be willing to pay up to $1,600 per seat per year for a new Enterprise edition of Sales Navigator, which it says will generate higher productivity and results for social selling efforts. Here are the key details from LinkedIn's announcement:
Until now, if you were looking for a warm introduction to a lead, you could go through your personal LinkedIn connections, or use TeamLink, which pools the networks of all the Sales Navigator seat holders in your company. But we know your reps are probably not connected on LinkedIn to the vast majority of employees at your company, and not every employee in your company needs a seat of Sales Navigator (as much as we’d like that).
TeamLink Extend solves that by letting anyone in your organization opt-in their LinkedIn network to the TeamLink pool. That means, if you’re trying to reach a prospect, you can quickly see if anyone in your company has a connection with that person, and reach out to your colleague to ask for warm introduction.
LinkedIn is also integrating Enterprise Edition with its PointDrive tool, which gives salespeople the ability to give prospects more content through a desktop or mobile app instead of an email larded with attachments, giving reps visibility into how the materials are being consumed.
Perhaps the most telling piece of news for the longer-term is LinkedIn Enterprise's enhanced CRM integration. Its CRM Sync function will log Sales Navigator activities into CRM systems with a single click. This capability will be available for Salesforce first, not Dynamics CRM, although support is coming for other platforms this year.
LinkedIn Enterprise also includes CRM Widgets, which enable users to view Sales Navigator profile details within CRM systems. There are widgets for Salesforce and Dynamics now, with ones for Oracle, NetSuite, SugarCRM, Hubspot, SAP Hybris and Zoho coming soon.
Analysis: No Walled Garden Here, But One Caution Abounds
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who was outbid for LinkedIn by Microsoft, complained last year to regulators, alleging that Redmond would close off third-party access to LinkedIn's vast and valuable store of business data in favor of Dynamics CRM. The new integration points for LinkedIn Enterprise Edition suggest that on the contrary, Microsoft sees plenty of money in integrating LinkedIn with competing CRMs. Constellation believes this is a good approach not only for Microsoft but for all customers, as the potential value of alignment of CRM with LinkedIn still has plenty of runway.
But the new TeamLink feature shows Microsoft clearly wants to see how much value it can squeeze out of LinkedIn's data pool by leveraging its social graph. There are some challenges here, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Cindy Zhou.
One concern is with how organizations will handle the opt-in to share contacts. The less employees do, the less effective TeamLink becomes, she notes. There's also potential for spamming. "Organizations using TeamLink will need to be aware of the responsibility to properly train users so they don't abuse this additional access to connections," she says. "Ultimately. the connections didn't 'opt-in' for their information to used by a broader enterprise sales team."
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