LinkedIn adds Gmail, CRM integration to Sales Navigator

LinkedIn today announced three major updates to Sales Navigator, the company’s product designed to connect sales professionals with qualified buyers or prospective leads based on specific criteria. The social networks says it’s the first major update to the product since it launched almost two years ago.

LinkedIn is looking to expand the appeal of Sales Navigator by focusing on key improvements designed to make salespeople more productive and successful. Sales Navigator will now integrate automatically with your CRM application and identify the most important leads and accounts, according to LinkedIn. You will no longer have to manually select the CRM data most relevant to your active projects.

LinkedIn boosts Sales Navigator capabilities with Gmail

Sales Navigator will also be integrated with Gmail so you can view data on your most important contacts and leads directly within Gmail, according to LinkedIn. “This new extension will allow users to engage with their Sales Navigator insights inside of the Gmail experience as they are communicating with their contacts,” Tom Lee, senior product manager, LinkedIn, wrote in a blog post. The feature will also let you save a contact as a lead in Sales Navigator without leaving Gmail.

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The final change is coming to the Sales Navigator mobile app, which the company admits was due for an update. A new discovery tab is designed to make it easier for you to find new accounts and leads will appear when you update the mobile app to the latest version. Discovery will alert you to lead and account recommendations based on your preferences, according to LinkedIn. Up to 10 recommendations will be sent per day, and the list will be refreshed every 24 hours. More than 25 percent of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator customers are using the mobile app exclusively, according to the company.

“Our goal for Sales Navigator is to be an important part of the daily lives of sales professionals, and we believe these enhancements will get us that much closer,” Lee writes. “Ultimately, we want to help sales professionals build deeper relationships by working smarter, not harder, and this reinforces our commitment to make them more efficient and effective every day.”

LinkedIn sells access to Sales Navigator on both an individual and team-wide basis. The professional edition for individuals costs $80 per month and the team edition for companies starts at $1,200 per user per year before volume discounts.