Sales Intelligence can expand your referral network and get you warm introductions to your prospective buyers. Connections enable you to centralize and access the social and professional contacts that belong to you and your colleagues.
Why You Need Connections
After importing your contacts to Sales Intelligence, you can use connections to look for things you and your contacts have in common. You may have worked at the same company or attended the same school.
Connections in Sales Intelligence help you:
- Find decision makers: Use connection filters to identify people you connect to at a target company. This increases the probability of engagement and creates more potential business opportunities.
- Ask for referrals: Once you identify a prospect, ask your connections for a referral. This increases the chances for a faster response.
- Start conversations: Use the information provide by Sales Intelligence to identify conversation starters and become familiar with a prospect.
People Connections
The contacts identified as people you know and people your coworkers know were uploaded to your organizations' private connection network. These contacts are explicit connections that you and your colleagues identified as people you know personally.
Company Connections
The contacts identified from your employer, your previous employers, your coworkers' previous employers, reference customers, and education are implicit connections based on work and education history. Since these are not explicit connections, Sales Intelligence only recommends likely connections based on parameters such as the target account's size.
How Connections Work
When you import your LinkedIn, Gmail, and Outlook contacts, Sales Intelligence matches them against people in its database and creates your connection network.
Personal Connections: Sales Intelligence adds contacts that match people in its database as your personal connections. This includes people with a matching email address or people with a matching first name, last name, and company information.
Private Personal Connections: Sales Intelligence doesn't add contacts without matches to its database. These contacts become your private personal connections or your private network. You have the option to manually add contacts in your private network to the Sales Intelligence database.
Important:
- Connections don't allow for duplicate entries. If you have the same contact in LinkedIn, Gmail, and Outlook, Sales Intelligence creates a single connection for the contact from all three sources.
- It is recommended that you include first name, last name, and company name for your contacts to increase the chances of Sales Intelligence finding a match in its database.
- Sales Intelligence shows the number of contacts imported for each source, for example, 354 of 489. The first number represents the number of contacts imported that already existed in the Sales Intelligence database. The second represents the number of contacts that it attempted to import. The difference between the two numbers represent the number of contacts in your private network that were not imported.