LinkedIn Launches CRM Partner Program

LinkedIn today announced its CRM Partner Program, a new initiative that enables its Sales Navigator solution to integrate with a number of leading CRM systems. Previously, the solution would simply display lead and account data inside a CRM system. Earlier this year, the company rolled out automatic syncing between Sales Navigator and Salesforce records and launched its first email integration, Sales Navigator for Gmail.

Sales Navigator relies on an algorithm to provide users with tailored lead recommendations. Additionally, the solution enables users to get real-time updates on customers and prospects, see who has viewed their profile in the previous 90 days, and measure and track their social selling efforts through a dashboard. Users can also receive insights on the go with the Sales Navigator mobile app.

To provide deeper CRM integration with Sales Navigator, LinkedIn looked at its customer base to determine which CRM systems were most widely used. The company selected SAP Hybris, Oracle, NetSuite, SugarCRM, and HubSpot, enabling them to incorporate Sales Navigator functionality directly into their applications. The goal of the integration is to help LinkedIn customers increase the ROI of their Sales Navigator investment, as well as derive more value from their CRM systems.

"Since the day we launched Sales Navigator two years ago, we knew how critical it would be to make it compatible with all CRM systems. Today, we are taking a step forward in realizing our goal of making Sales Navigator more useful to a larger pool of sales professionals," Doug Camplejohn, head of products at LinkedIn Sales Solutions, told CRM Magazine in an email. "Our goal is to make sales professionals more productive and successful every time they use Sales Navigator. By integrating into their chosen CRM system, we are able to reduce the amount of time it takes them to toggle back and forth between the two."

LinkedIn views Sales Navigator as an open platform and considers the new CRM integration as a first step in tapping the potential of sales application developers. "What's significant here is that the new CRM Partner Program will harness the creativity of the third-party developer community to give them the tools they need to better integrate with Sales Navigator," Camplejohn says. In the future, the company plans to expand its list of compatible CRM systems.

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