Reimagining B2B Selling with Deep Sales and LinkedIn Sales Navigator

I’ve been in B2B sales and marketing for 21 years. The sales process has never been easy, but I’ve never seen it so broken for as many reasons as it is today. Too many sales professionals are stuck in what we’ve come to call “shallow selling” – an endless, frustrating loop of contacting more and more potential buyers in ways that no longer work. 

As we discovered, sales needs a new way to sell – a deeper way to sell.

I’ve felt the pain of sales in my professional life. I’ve consoled colleagues who were at risk of getting fired because they weren’t hitting their numbers, or seen them attempting amazing feats to get a deal closed. I’ve been on endless, painful pipeline review calls, scrolling through leads that will never materialize into a closed/won deal. And I feel it daily in my personal life, as I try to dodge intrusive emails, texts, and phone calls that keep coming at me to purchase martech software. 

My personal experiences are backed up by studies and evidence from experts. Sales has been hit by a perfect storm of societal change and misguided technology. Once we at LinkedIn saw the problem, we couldn’t unsee it. Drivers include:

The Great Reshuffle created chaos. Since the pandemic, everyone is changing jobs, making it painful to try to find the right decision makers to approach. One study found that 81% of sellers say that they have seen a deal lost or stalled because a buyer changed roles. And LinkedIn’s Economic Graph shows that turnover among corporate director-level-and-above — the mass of B2B buyers — increased 21% globally in the period between December 2021 and March 2022.

Covid-19 made buying complex. During the pandemic, the number of buying interactions leaped from 17 to 27. To put this into perspective, there was only a one-point increase between 2017 and 2019. More touchpoints means more complexity and longer sales cycles throughout the customer journey. And now buying groups have become predominant. More than 80% of purchases now involve complex buying scenarios like consensus (in which three or more people are involved across two or more departments) and committees (in which strategic purchases include multiple people and departments across the organization and require executive oversight). 

Everything moved online. Buyers today are doing their own research, and they want to do business through a screen. In 2021, 87% of buyers reported wanting to self-serve part or all of the buying journey. Gartner projects that by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels. 

Spam poisoned the waters. As all these forces made selling harder, sellers turned to tech stacks that helped them spray messages out to ever more prospects in ways that were less and less meaningful to those prospects. In other words, they turned to shallow selling, whether they thought of it that way or not. As Harvard Business Review reported: “In many sales models reps send out emails indiscriminately—in effect training prospects to ignore their communications as spam.” And Forrester found that only 53% of sales reps say the sales technology stack aids productivity and positively impacts results. The report says that sales reps “are easily frustrated when the technology they use prevents, rather than enables, success — leading to burnout and turnover.“ 

Add it up, and B2B selling is in big trouble. B2B conversion rates are weakening. In an August 2022 survey of 200 sales leaders, 68% of participants reported missing their monthly target for the previous month.

We Can’t Sell Like We Used To: Introducing Deep Sales and Next-Gen Sales Navigator.

Shallow selling doesn’t work. What sales teams need now is a new category of sales technology called “deep sales.” Think of deep learning, where software learns from enormous amounts of reliable data to get to a meaningful answer. Deep sales relies on that kind of data to deeply understand buyers and their context. It helps sellers approach buyers in the way that is welcomed, at a time in the buying process that makes sense. It helps develop deep relationships with buyers, based on understanding them – the opposite of shallow spray-and-pray tactics.

Selling is important to the economy and to companies and impacts so many livelihoods. A deep sales solution must exist in the world. We became convinced of that at LinkedIn, and we uniquely have the kind of reliable, first-person data that can enable deep selling. We know the habits of top sellers because of our decade of experience serving them, and have built these best practices into our Sales Navigator product, helping sales leaders uplevel the performance of their entire organization. If B2B sales organizations were able to improve the performance of their teams through the adoption of improved selling methods by as little as 0.01% (“one one-hundredth of a percentage point!”) of global GDP, that’d unlock $9.6 billion of value every year!

LinkedIn Sales Solutions is going live today with the first deep sales platform. What does this mean for the LinkedIn Sales Navigator product you’ve come to know and rely upon over the years? It will retain all the goodness you know, while expanding its capabilities to provide more modernized and all-encompassing technology — a layer of intelligence second only in importance to your CRM, or system of record.

As always, we utilize the magic of LinkedIn to create economic opportunity for the global workforce, this time, for B2B sellers and buyers. Only we can apply our massive scale to help sales leaders solve this problem. We do this in a trusted environment, observing all the privacy rules our members expect from us. 

Here’s a peek at one of the exciting new ways we are bringing the deep sales message to market today - a cover wrap of the 9.20.22 issue of the Wall Street Journal in the U.S. Watch for this and more ways to learn how we’re reimagining our product.

I joined LinkedIn because of the power of this platform and opportunity to impact how selling is done. 

Join us on our journey into a new era of selling.

To learn more, visit our new deep sales landing page.