LinkedIn Sales Insights can help your business spot all the latest opportunities

Sales teams can now leverage the data generated by the 700m users of LinkedIn as the Microsoft-owned company has launched a new data analytics platform called LinkedIn Sales Insights (LSI).

The company first debuted LSI back in December of last year but now the platform is generally available. LSI provides sales teams and leaders with access to the LinkedIn Economic Graph which is one of the most powerful datasets in the world.

By using LSI, sellers can gain real-time insights into potential opportunities based on data generated by the business-focused social network's members. The platform allows businesses to get an up-to-date overview of the size of specific departments or job titles to see how fast they're growing. Sales teams can also use LSI to compare opportunities across markets, locations and segments on a global scale.

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Staff engineer at LinkedIn Sabeer Thajudeen provided further insight on how businesses can leverage LSI in a blog post, saying:

“Understanding a company means knowing who works there and what they’re trying to accomplish, including how many people at that company could benefit from a product or service and how that number is changing over time. LinkedIn Sales Insights (LSI), powered by the Economic Graph, can help answer those questions because it maps the relationships between people, companies, skills, jobs, and schools.”

AI and data mining

As the raw data delivered to LSI from the social network is mostly unstructured, LinkedIn uses AI to turn it into reliable structures and useful insights.

For starters, the company defines what counts as a “company” as anyone can create a Company Page on its site. To do this, LinkedIn uses AI including character-level language models to help it decide whether a company page represents a real company or another entity such as a blog or spam page.

The social network also uses AI to detect and connect duplicate records in cases where it has separate records for the same business that each have a different address for their headquarters. LinkedIn's AI-powered record linkage model uses machine-learned measures of similarity to help it determine if these records represent distinct entities. The company even leverages deep learning and distant supervision to find addresses and to parse them into components that are structured and database-friendly.

In addition to finding new opportunities, businesses can even use the LSI platform to enhance their existing company databases. To do so, LSI needs to match customers' existing company records to the records stored in its company database.

Organizations interested in trying out LinkedIn Sales Insights for themselves can request a free demo from the company to get started.