LinkedIn Tries To Solve One Of The Oldest CRM Challenges By Adding Deals Feature To Sales Navigator

LinkedIn says the addition of a Deals feature to its Sales Navigator tool will pull pipeline data directly from customer relationship management systems and make it easier to find additional contacts before a potential purchase decision goes awry.

The Deals feature was one of several additions to Sales Navigator LinkedIn announced in a blog post this week. Doug Camplejohn, the company’s vice-president of product management and sales strategies, wrote that the Deals feature addresses the fact that sales teams often fail to properly update their CRM systems. Having to toggle back and forth between such tools and Sales Navigator means some might give up rather than look for additional contacts on a B2B buying team when a purchase decision is in limbo.

“The weekly one-on-one between sales managers and their reps can be frustrating for both parties,” Camplejohn wrote. “These meetings can turn into a game of 20 questions with managers probing to find areas of deal risk and ways for them to help.”

Instead, the Deals feature in Sales Navigator will save sales teams time, he added, and will allow them to edit pipeline details within the web interface based on deal size, stage, close date and more.

The Deals feature includes an additional capability called Buyer’s Circle, which will identify the key roles across a buying team such as decision maker, influencer and so on.

“But the real power comes when you want to add missing role contacts,” Campblejohn wrote, adding that Sales Navigator users will be able to select LinkedIn contacts and drag them to a role, which will automatically update the CRM at the same time.

LinkedIn users were quick to praise the Deals feature in posts on the service itself. Ali Hussein Kassim, the CEO of a Kenyan-based fintech firm called FinteXX, for instance, said LinkedIn is taking major strides since its acquisition by Microsoft last year.

“The revamp injects an array of new ways to search, manipulate and process LinkedIn’s vast troves of personal and consumer data and data from CRM systems and puts LinkedIn in a better position to monetize the information,” he wrote. “The interconnection of diverse software applications through APIs has been with us for a few years now. However, this level of API usage to link our day to day work experiences to social is unprecedented.”

Besides the Deals feature, LinkedIn also announced integrations for Sales Navigator with Microsoft’s Office 365 and Adobe Sign, mobile lead pages and made its account search and lead search more prominent.