What really is LinkedIn's 'deep sales' platform?

At the end of 2023, LinkedIn launched what it claims was be the world’s first deep sales platform.

This platform has been designed to revolutionize the way businesses approach sales, offering a new category of B2B sales intelligence technology.

The deep sales platform is a product of LinkedIn Sales Solutions, a division dedicated to enhancing the sales process through technology. The platform is designed to learn from data, making predictions and recommendations at a scale that may not be possible for sellers to achieve on their own.

This is the next generation of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, a tool already renowned for its ability to deliver timely and actionable insights.

The launch of the deep sales platform comes on the heels of LinkedIn’s recent global research, which revealed that only 20% of buyers are in-market for services in a given year. This underscores the importance of understanding buyer intent, a critical factor for all sellers.

The LinkedIn State of Sales Asia-Pacific 2022 research revealed 81% of Indian buyers believe that working remotely has made buying easier. However, 84% of Indian sellers have experienced a deal lost or delayed in the past year due to a decision-maker changing roles.

These findings highlight the increasingly important role of sales technology in helping sellers understand buyer sentiment and intent.

The deep sales platform aims to help sellers build more effective B2B connections by delivering actionable insights and recommendations in three priority areas.

First, it provides account insights, helping sellers target accounts that have the best chance of success. Second, it offers relationship intelligence, identifying decision-makers and finding the best path to reach them.

Lastly, it capitalizes on buyer intent, enabling sellers to reach out at the right moments based on signals and alerts of key moments such as organizational growth, job changes, and changes in strategy.

The Impact on B2B Sales

The introduction of LinkedIn’s deep sales platform is set to have a profound impact on B2B sales. Over the past two years, the  pandemic has forced a shift to remote work, making selling less personal and buying more complex.

This upheaval in the way customers make buying decisions has led many sellers to engage in ‘shallow selling’—an endless loop of contacting large numbers of potential buyers in ways that no longer work.

To break this cycle, sellers need deeper insight into buyer psychology, which the deep sales platform provides. By forgoing the ‘spray-and-pray’ approach, sellers can access more first-person, reliable data to develop deeper buyer relationships.

This is done in observance of all the privacy rules that LinkedIn members expect from the platform, ensuring that the process is not only effective but also respectful of user privacy.

The deep sales platform also includes features such as an Account Dashboard, where sellers can monitor their list of saved accounts and their level of interest based on various signals.

Teams can monitor interest levels over time, determining the best time for outreach and the message most likely to resonate. Alerts about accounts showing intent are also included in the Homepage Highlights section, and a Buyer Intent filter in Search.

This makes buyer intent information part of the daily Sales Navigator workflow, making it easier to prioritize the right accounts at the right time.