LinkedIn continues to add more ways to utilize its data insights, this time through a new integration between its Sales Navigator platform and its employee advocacy system 'Elevate'.

According to LinkedIn, more than a third of the businesses which use its Elevate platform share content via Sales Navigator. In order to improve this process, and save users switching between the two, Sales Navigator users will now get alerts from Elevate within their Navigator dashboard, where they'll also be able to action them directly. 

As explained by LinkedIn:

"This integration connects Elevate and Sales Navigator in a simple, but effective, way; every day, Sales Navigator users will get one custom alert encouraging them to share a piece of content from Elevate. Even better, it will show up, front and center in their Sales Navigator homepage feed, keeping content sharing top of mind for sales teams and eliminating the friction of having to log into a new solution in order to share."

For example, each day Sales Navigator/Elevate users will get an alert like this in Navigator:

That, as LinkedIn says, will help keep content sharing front of mind, expanding the Elevate program to another highly utilized surface.

And that, according to LinkedIn, can have significant benefits:

"For sales professionals, sharing the right content with prospects and customers is key for building trust and nurturing them down the funnel. When done consistently and effectively over time, sales professionals can come to be known as thought leaders in their industry and trusted advisors to their customers, ultimately leading to more closed business. In fact, LinkedIn analysis has shown that sales professionals who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota."

LinkedIn's Elevate platform, which enables businesses to curate content for their team members to share, and provides metrics on the resulting performance, has been growing in usage, with a range of top businesses now tapping into the program to maximize their employee advocacy process. The expansion of that capacity into Sales Navigator will give LinkedIn another way to both amplify content - good news for publishers and creators - and showcase its improving data insights, based on topic trend data from across its network.

That's become a key point of focus for LinkedIn in recent months - just this week, LinkedIn expanded its API program to provide more content insights via third-party platforms. That specific expansion has come about as a result of LinkedIn utilizing hashtags and topic categorization processes, giving it a better understanding of what each member is engaging with, and what's of most relevance to each industry.

Building on this capacity through Elevate and Sales Navigator will help make the platform a more important tool in employee advocacy programs.

In addition to this, LinkedIn has also announced a range of new and coming updates for Sales Navigator as part of its quarterly product update.

• Save leads while connecting - Now, when you send a connection request from Sales Navigator, you'll also have the option to save that potential connection as a lead at the same time
• List sorting - LinkedIn's adding new options which will enable users to sort Custom Lead Lists by account name and/or geography
• List sharing improvements - Users will have more options for list sharing, including the capacity to copy a shared list and save from a shared list.
• Search limit increase - LinkedIn's expanding the total available Search results from 1,000 to 2,500, giving users a larger pool of potential leads.

In addition to these, LinkedIn is also adding its 'Active Status' green notification dots on profile images to Sales Navigator, enabling Navigator users to get in touch when potential contacts are online.

In combination, the updates will help improve the Sales Navigator process, and boost the effectiveness of LinkedIn's connection and data tools.