Arguably one of the most reputed professional networking sites, LinkedIn, is aiming to befriend sales executives.

LinkedIn is going to start offering a new tool this week, Sales Navigator, which it says will make the lives of sales people easier and happier.

Costing $1200 per year, Sales Navigator allows sales people to efficiently look up potential customers who would be more inclined to meet due to shared personal connections. LinkedIn has tested this tool with companies like PayPal and Autodesk and claims to have gained good results.

LinkedIn says that sales people can turn out better results and be more productive since Sales Navigator lets them contact prospects through known people. Sales Navigator allows you to import existing contacts from Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics. Using this imported data, LinkedIn can bring up more information about those contacts. With the ability to draw more information about contacts imported from other tools like Salesforce, sales people can improve their productivity for prospects arising from platforms other than LinkedIn also

LinkedIn can also scan contacts’ social data for additional insights that will tell you if people are warm prospects or cold calls. Insight into contacts’ social behavior can enrich and make sales executives’ approach more relevant when contacting prospects.

LinkedIn will also allow whole companies to pool their sales executives’ connections. This can help sales people to connect with a prospect through another sales person’s connections even if they don’t know the prospect personally.

However, LinkedIn is also conscious of the effect this feature can have on users. To prevent people from being deluged by mails from sales people, LinkedIn is restricting Sales Navigator users to only 25 targeted InMails every month.

Check out these screenshots of the Sales Navigator tool:

 

 

Image source: Mashable

Do you think LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator will benefit sales executives? And, will it be accepted well by users?