By: Linda Rosencrance
LinkedIn has rolled out Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition, the third and “best edition of LinkedIn,” for salespeople and the system of engagement for Redmond’s customers. Available today, Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition starts at $1,600 per seat per year before volume and multi-year discounts.
The Enterprise Edition joins the Professional Edition of Sales Navigator for individuals, and the Team Edition for groups of salespeople. In addition to the new release, LinkedIn has also added two new features for Team and Enterprise Edition customers: PointDrive and enhanced CRM integrations, according to Doug Camplejohn, head of products for LinkedIn Sales Solutions
To date, logging Sales Navigator activities into CRM systems has been a manual, time-consuming process for users, which is why Microsoft added a new CRM Sync feature to Sales Navigator that includes writeback functionality, to give users that time back, he stated.
“As you take notes, send InMails or even place calls from the Sales Navigator mobile app for iOS and Android, you can now write them as activities to your CRM with a simple mouse click,” Camplejohn stated. “For Sales and Operations leaders that want their reps’ Sales Navigator activity recorded in the CRM, they now have an easy, authorized way to do it.”
Curiously, at launch CRM Sync will only be available in Salesforce; other CRM platforms – like Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 – will be added this year, he stated.
CRM Sync also includes new CRM Widgets to enable users to view LinkedIn Sales Navigator profile details, such as photos, work histories, job titles, and TeamLink shared connections, within CRM systems, including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
In the near future, other partners, including Oracle, SAP Hybris, Netsuite, SugarCRM, Hubspot, and Zoho, will also be providing Widget integration, according to Camplejohn.
At recent eXtreme365 event in Lisbon, Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 customer engagement team stated that while the LinkedIn Sales Navigator (LISN) can already be rendered in D365 as an IFrame inside of the typical D365 web interface, in the future it will include bi-directional integration.
Lead data will be made to flow first from D365 to LISN for cases where a sales rep wanted to use LinkedIn’s InMail to reach out rather than regular email. Also in the future, LinkedIn activities will be pushed to D365, to provide “holistic engagement history” in the event an organization prefers to have full visibility and management of contacts from within D365.
As well as boosting the number of InMails to 50, Enterprise Edition adds manageability features, such as Single Sign-On, as well as a new feature: TeamLink Extend.
“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,” Camplejohn stated.
Now, TeamLink Extend enables anyone in an organization opt-in their LinkedIn networks to the TeamLink pool. So a sales rep trying to reach a prospect can quickly see if anyone in his company has a connection with that person, and then reach out to his colleague, asking for a warm introduction, he stated. The first 1,000 seats of TeamLink Extend are free with each Enterprise Edition contract.
Microsoft is also integrating PointDrive into Sales Navigator Team and Enterprise Editions at no additional charge. Enterprise Edition customers will have unlimited PointDrives and additional management reporting, while Team Edition customers will be limited to 10 PointDrives per seat per month, according to Camplejohn.