LinkedIn Sales Navigator Custom Lists
Background
For salespeople, there is a world of potential buyers out there, but their goal is to find and sell to the people who have a need for their product. Oftentimes salespeople will start their search of potential buyers on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network with more than 645+ million members.
For salespeople, there is a world of potential buyers out there, but their goal is to find and sell to the people who have a need for their product. Oftentimes salespeople will start their search of potential buyers on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network with more than 645+ million members.
Beyond linkedin.com, salespeople may use a paid product called LinkedIn Sales Navigator, tailored specifically to prospecting needs and sales processes. Salespeople will use this tool to narrow down their search to target the right people, but also to understand these potential buyers and engage with them.
Up until recently, the Sales Navigator product allowed users to search for potential leads in order to target the right people, as well as to understand these potential buyers and engage with them via messaging or inMail. However, the product did not provide capabilities to efficiently track or organize potential leads in a way that was necessary, meaningful, or helpful to users.
My role
As the lead designer on this project, I led research and design and worked with Product and Engineering to launch the first version of this feature as well as the following 3 iterations. In addition, I spearheaded the design effort into thinking through our users’ overall workflow utilizing this feature.
Problem
1) Need for tracking and collaboration
Through user interviews and analyzing existing feature performance metrics, we learned that users had a need for organizing and categorizing their leads into something meaningful. We learned about how they were keeping track of all their leads and collaborating with colleagues in shared spreadsheets.
2) Need for organization and customization
We observed how people were using tags to label certain leads they found into roles like “decision maker”, “champion”, or outreach status like “contacted”.
3) Confusion around two different pages with the same layout
We also heard feedback about how the existing lead lists in Sales Navigator looked exactly like the search results page, and that oftentimes confused people in understanding which page they were on.
Opportunity
Gathering these insights from users, my team and I saw an opportunity to build a better experience within the Sales Navigator product that would allow users to track, organize, and collaborate with teammates on qualifying leads and accounts.
Knowing that users 1) had a need for tracking and collaboration, 2) needed to organize their leads and accounts, and 3) were confused by the existing “Lists” page layout, we narrowed our scope to the following problem:
Design Challenge
Hypothesis
The team hypothesized that a set of customizable lists allowing for status tracking and team collaboration, displayed in a way that users can easily scan and sort their prospective leads and accounts, would address their workflow needs and improve clarity of the tool.
Ideation
Solution
The following screens resulted in the final solution the team decided to build, ship, analyze, and iterate on.
The new feature allowed the ability to save a lead to a custom list directly from Search Results or any page in their workflow.
Once a list was created, a user could continue her journey on the Search page, or navigate to a central lists hub to find and drill into the list she wanted to view more in detail.
Each custom list would display a detailed view of the user’s collection of leads and accounts, allowing for easy scannability, sorting, and tracking--geared towards a salesperson’s needs.
The new feature also allowed users to share a list they created with teammates to access and collaborate on with a custom editable notes field.
The feature was built for not only desktop, but also mobile, in order to enable access to one’s custom lists from anywhere.
Testing & Feedback
Continuing enhancements with more integrations with third party apps like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems. The team continues working on integrating valuable features like contact creation and identification in future versions, as well as automated activity and collaboration functionality.
Results
Within the span of eight months, the Custom Lists feature had undergone at least five iterations of design, implementation, and launches, and has proven to be one of the most successful features for the Sales Navigator product since inception.
Overall this feature resulted in a 3% lift in WAUs, with the number of lists created has been increasing at an average growth rate of 50% every month. The ability to share lists and collaborate with coworkers within Sales Navigator has enabled business to increase sales of the Enterprise SKU (tier) of the Sales Navigator product, while simultaneously increasing virality of the feature within large organizations and producing more usability and value for customers with teams.
After six months of launching the first version of the Custom Lists feature, the team reached a milestone of 1 million lists created by users, demonstrating the traction and utility users have found in this new capability.
"We are all excited and delighted about shared lists."
- Relationship Manager, EMEA
Next Steps
Continuing enhancements with more integrations with third party apps like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems. The team continues working on integrating valuable features like contact creation and identification in future versions, as well as automated activity and collaboration functionality.