LinkedIn launches Sales Insights to provide real-time data on business opportunities

LinkedIn has launched a new data analytics platform designed to give sales teams real-time insights into potential opportunities based on data generated by more than 700 million members on the social network.

Called LinkedIn Sales Insights, the product is part of LinkedIn’s sales solutions unit, which includes Sales Navigator, a tool that helps sales teams find prospects by harnessing the vast swathes of business and engagement data on LinkedIn. Just last week, LinkedIn added a new account mapping feature to Sales Navigator, enabling users to visualize all the key stakeholders in a customer account and identify the right people to build relationships with. LinkedIn Sales Insights builds on that to help sales teams better understand prospects by mapping the relationships between companies, employees, skills, jobs, and more.

The Microsoft-owned company first debuted LinkedIn Sales Insights back in December, but today it’s pushing the product into general availability.

Above: LinkedIn Sales Insights

At its core, LinkedIn Sales Insights helps sellers segment their customers and glean an up-to-date overview of the size of specific departments or job titles, how fast they’re growing, and how big an opportunity this might represent. Moreover, it can help sales teams compare opportunities across markets, locations, and segments while also displaying how well their sellers are connected to existing or prospective customers.

From all this data, businesses can generate sales reports with specific delineations, such as “engineering managers at software companies with more than 1,000 employees.”

Above: LinkedIn Sales Insights: Creating a new report

According to LinkedIn, the sales insights platform leans on a range of AI and data mining techniques. For example, it uses character-level language models to determine the legitimacy of a company page, such as whether the company it purports to represent is a real company. It can also detect and connect LinkedIn pages that are part of the same company, such as “JP Morgan Chase” and “Morgan Chase Bank.”

Elsewhere, the underlying data mining smarts can scan for companies’ addresses on their websites and import those into the LinkedIn Sales Insights database, as well as matching a sales team’s existing records in their CRM with those on LinkedIn to add supplementary data.