LinkedIn Sales Insights: How it can help sales teams

/ by

With over 760 million professionals on LinkedIn and 60 million companies, it’s the most valuable social media platform in the world to connect salespeople with potential customers.

No matter who you want to interact with, there’s a good chance they’re on LinkedIn. If you use LinkedIn the right way, you can win new customers every week, engage with prospects, and set up and run a complete sales funnel.

LinkedIn also contains a vast amount of data. And like any smart, Microsoft-owned, social media company, they’ve found a way to tap into this data for the benefit of customers. Earlier in 2021, LinkedIn rolled out a new tool for sales teams and sales operational and enablement professionals: LinkedIn Sales Insights.

What is LinkedIn Sales Insights?

LinkedIn Sales Insights is a data-driven solution for sales teams that plugs directly into the LinkedIn platform. It promises “more reliable data” at scale from LinkedIn, and gives “sales operations the clarity they need to do smarter sales planning.”

Price-wise, it’s along the same lines as LinkedIn Sales Navigator; and combined they could make a powerful set of tools that would help you power sales planning, cold outreach, and creating an inbound sales funnel.

Pricing starts at $64.99 for an individual, if you pay annually, or $79.99 monthly.

For teams, the price is $103.33 for an annual subscription or $134.99 monthly. Plus there are Enterprise options for those with larger sales teams.

Every pricing option starts with a 7-day free trial period.

How this is different from Sales Navigator, is that it focuses on the data. It’s more useful, in many ways, for sales managers and those in sales operational or enablement roles. This way, with better data at the team’s disposal, a sales plan can be implemented more effectively. Conversion rates should because salespeople will be focusing on the right prospects.

Not only that, but it should give you a much clearer idea of the total addressable market (TAM). And then using the data, you can focus down on individual companies within sectors and niches. Let’s take a closer look at the features and what you can do with them.

LinkedIn Sales Insights features

The dashboard has three main areas for sales teams, managers and operational professionals: Reports, Sources and Exports.

Between these features (shown as individual tabs within the dashboard), they help you create personas in real-time, understand markets and sectors, and see who on the sales team already has connections with potential customers, or who could open the door for them. You can also analyse data uploaded from .CSV files, or sync the solution with numerous popular CRMs.

1. Reports

Here is where reports from all of the real-time LinkedIn data will live. You can use this to get an overview of markets and sectors, and then filter down on individual companies, or groups of them. This includes a series of filters, such as location, the number of employees, and numerous more advanced filters.

2. Sources

Sources shows where data from CRMs, uploaded files, and any other connected accounts, or previous accounts, will live. You can access the data from any of these sources through this tab, and you can bring it all together in this section. All of this data is shared automatically in real-time with anyone who’s got a Sales Insights account.

3. Exports

Here is where every report team members download can be viewed and accessed. This shows who’s creating reports and exporting them, and this data is shared across the organisation.

How LinkedIn Sales Insights benefits sales teams

Not having enough data, the wrong data, or enough data visibility are some of the challenges that sales managers and operational teams face. LinkedIn Sales Insights is designed to solve those problems, tapping into the vast amount of sales data that sits within LinkedIn.

With access to this data, you can more effectively design and shape sales plans. Teams that operate without plans are less likely to hit targets. Every sales manager needs their team on-target, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to have a sales plan, and use LinkedIn data to guide the implementation.

Knowing who your target customers are is the first step. Sales managers and teams should know, at a minimum, the following:

  • Company size (e.g. number of employees or turnover)
  • Locations
  • Sectors, niches within sectors
  • Job role (personas): Buyers, influencers, decision-makers

LinkedIn Sales Insights can give you all of this data. So if you happen to be looking for CFOs of mid-size manufacturing companies with 500 employees in the North East of the UK, you can find who and where they are using LinkedIn Sales Insights.

Very few other solutions on the market can give you that granularity. All of the data can then be turned into a report, and viewed within the online app, downloaded, or plugged into a CRM. With the advantage is you can see who on the team is already connected to these target customers, And then either with other LinkedIn solutions (Sales Navigator) or third-party tools, start connecting and reaching out to them.

CrankWheel: Cut your sales cycle in half with instant screen-sharing. Go from two or more sales calls to one: Become a one call close sales team.