Unlocking Growth: Driving Sales Navigator Adoption through a Strategic Freemium Initiative on LinkedIn.

LINKEDIN SALES NAVIGATOR

When I joined LinkedIn, I got the chance to mix my skills in marketing with design, all while exploring ways to grow Sales Navigator, a LinkedIn product that caters to sales profesionals around the world.

As a growth designer, drawing from past experiences such as growing media platforms, I consistently experimented with new ways to attract attention. These experiences informed my approach to collaborating with my team to envision a new way to help potential customers understand how we could help them increase their sales pipelines. I teamed up with my product partners to run an experiment where we highlighted key decision makers our users could reach out to, nudging them towards that first step in the sign-up process.

The outcome was two million dollars generated in just four weeks. This success taught us that showcasing our value, rather than just telling it, was definitely a way forward to attract customers.

ROLE

Growth and Product Design

RESPONSIBILITIES

Growth strategy

Analysis

Design system collaboration

Context

The LinkedIn Freemium Upsell project aimed to enhance brand awareness for the Sales Navigator product by introducing an interactive module directly on LinkedIn profile pages that would pique  curiousity about Sales Navigator.

CHALLENGEs

Despite its potential, only 11 percent of LinkedIn sales professionals were aware of Sales Navigator's capabilities. So we did research to dig into what prevented people from becoming aware of our platform. Our research with eight sales professionals uncovered some interesting insights, including not being clear about our benefits, confusion about its differences from LinkedIn's main platform, and difficulty capturing attention. 

concept development

Past upsell efforts felt more like promotional ads. This time, we aimed to break from tradition and showcase the product's value by highlighting a key Sales Navigator feature within our flagship product. Our most effective previous upsell achieved 2-3 percent click-through rates and generated around 500k in sign-ups over a year.

key insights

With these insights, our goal evolved from an ambiguous vision to a clear strategy: enhancing awareness by demonstrating our product's value in connecting with key decision-makers at the right moment, during lead prospecting. To pinpoint the best location for an interactive module, we dove head first into platform analytics across our flagship product, identifying several key areas for potential placement.

exploration concepts

Based on the data, I explored upsell placements within features that could support salespeople's workflows. Ultimately, LinkedIn profile pages emerged as the optimal location to test showcasing a Sales Navigator feature to spark user interest, with more than 2 million profile visits occurring daily among our users. However, we had to consider the potential impact on LinkedIn's business, as other modules on the profile page were significant revenue generators. Balancing our initiative's impact with the platform's overall revenue goals was crucial.

OUTCOME

In just one month, our growth team's innovative upsell approach generated 2 million dollars in sign-ups. We also saw an average of 62,000 weekly clicks on profile modules, 16,000 clicks on "Connect" buttons, and 15,000 weekly clicks on "show all."

This was a clear step up in engagement and sign-ups compared to previous efforts. Excited by these results, our team became enthusiastic to test two more variations, incorporating minor copy tweaks. This journey highlighted the importance of experimenting with innovative strategies to better showcase the benefits of Sales Navigator.