A Big Week for Social Selling

Welcome to episode 129, at the end of a busy week for LinkedIn having delivered their social selling conference Sales Connect in New York. I was keenly watching the Twitter feed and some updates from people I knew were there to hear reaction to some of the big announcements made.

In this episode I’m going to dive into the 5 main announced changes to Sales Navigator. Don’t worry of you don’t have a Sales Navigator account, this could still be very relevant to you.

But before all that I spotted these interesting things in the news this week;

Reid Hoffman is so against Trump, he created a card game! LinkedIn Siri integration goes live with the launch of iOS 10 3 new LinkedIn services in India

Sales Connect 2016

I wasn’t able to make it to New York but I did the next best thing and followed on Twitter.

Various speakers talked about the exciting world of social selling including several case studies, Chris Anderson from TED talks appeared to be the most popular but I bet Malcolm Gladwell was pretty good too!

Various statistics were quoted, many I have heard before but these did grab my attention;

“Sales & Marketing are blending into one”

“Personal value has to 2X the impact over business value. 71% of B2B buyers who see personal value will purchase”

“92% of B2B buyers engage with sales professionals who are known industry thought leaders”.

“EY have 30,000 Sales Navigator licences”!!

The five really big announcements

Sales Navigator is becoming an open platform (at last!). Initial CRM partners are Oracle, SAP Hybris, SugarCRM, Hubspot and Netsuite. New search filters for Lead builder. Size of department, Senior leadership, revenue, HQ zip code, department growth and content keywords. InMail 2.0. Improvements to SN inMail allowing a compose box to the side, attachments and ‘write to CRM’ Notes & Tags. This includes the ability to filter searches by tags. Gmail extension. Very similar to Rapportive.