The tool provides customer segmentation and opportunity analysis to sales teams.
Microsoft’s LinkedIn social media platform this week unveiled a new tool for its customers in sales management. Sales Insights is a new data analytics solution tat aims to give sales teams real-time insights into potential opportunities.
The tool creates these insights using data generated by the over 700 million members on the social network. Sales Insights will now complement Sales Navigator as part of LinkedIn’s sales solutions unit.
Sales Navigator, introduced in 2014, is a tool that helps sales people find the right contacts within a potential customer’s organization.
The new Sales Insights tool will take that feature one step further, according to LinkedIn. It will help sales managers evaluate market segments as well as their own sales team’s performance.
Sales Insights was first introduced in December of last year, but has been made generally available this week.
“One of the most powerful datasets in the world”
Sabeer Thajudeen, a Data Scientist at LinkedIn, detailed the Sales Insights offering in a blog post this week. “Sales Ops professionals need to optimize for results by evaluating and defining territories,” he writes. “And sales leaders and CXOs need to understand the opportunity landscape to help set strategy.”
Sales Insights helps these operations execs to better understand their customers and their markets, according to Thajudeen. “Understanding a company means knowing who works there and what they’re trying to accomplish,” he writes.
Sales Insights is powered by the LinkedIn Economic Graph. Thajudeen describes the graph as “one of the most powerful datasets in the world.” It maps the relationships between people, companies, skills, jobs, and schools.
Finding the best opportunities
This new tool helps Sales Ops focus their teams on the right accounts, according to LinkedIn. That means finding the ones with the most opportunity. The Sales Insights tool determines the relative value of each opportunity. It does this through a foundation of real-time market, account, and relationship strength data and insights, Thajudeen explains.
“We’re making this data available to sales organizations across the globe,” he states, “and there’s much more to come.”
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