Introducing Account Hub: What It Is And How To Best Use It

The best answer to the classic question “sell this pen?” — find someone who needs a pen, and sell it to them.

Because even the best salesperson in the world has a tough time selling to someone who isn’t in market. Meanwhile, even an average salesperson can sell to someone hungry to buy.

So, really, your sales success often comes down to identifying and prioritizing the people in market, with budget. It’s something Sales Navigator already helps with, as sellers who use it to its fullest extent see a 2.3X increase in average deal size and drive 72% more revenue.

And that’ll only continue with our newest feature, Account Hub.

What’s Account Hub in Sales Navigator?

Account Hub is a new feature in Sales Navigator released globally on May 16th. 

With Account Hub, once you upload your book of business into Sales Navigator, it’ll effortlessly prioritize your accounts, based on growth potential, buyer intent, or risk alerts. And with relationship intelligence signals, you're able to gather the context you need to build stronger customer relationships. Through that, you're able to network your way in or follow up with the exact person showing interest within those golden opportunities.

While Account Hub is available to all users, Buyer Intent and Product Category Intent functionality within it is available for Advanced and Advanced Plus users only. Opportunity data is only available to Advanced Plus with CRM synced enabled.

So, in a nutshell – it helps you prioritize your accounts, while also giving you real-time information to stay informed on them.

What are the benefits of Account Hub?

Here are the top three:

1. Make data-driven prioritization decisions with all the data you need in a single place: As a seller, you can log into Account Hub daily to keep updated on economic changes happening at your target accounts and plan which accounts to focus on based on our proprietary customer-level buyer intent data. Leverage filters like “growth alerts” or “high and moderate buyer intent” to instantly identify accounts in your book of business that have increased their headcount and are hiring or have expressed interest in your company - signaling they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.

2. Access insights to create stronger customer relationships: Once you've identified your top accounts, you can use Connection Paths and Recommendations to find new contacts and decision-makers to reach out to. And with company information and relationship intelligence data, like recently changed jobs or newly hired decision maker, you can tailor your outreach to your leads and maximize your window of opportunity.

3. Spend more time on the right opportunities to close more deals: Account Hub will continue to help you prioritize accounts with the highest likelihood of converting, find warm-paths into an account or multithread a deal, and gather key information to help tailor your outreach. All of this data empowers you to expertly plan, time, and implement your outreach for maximum impact.

So, how do you use this feature? Let’s dive in.

How to use Account Hub to maintain and grow existing accounts.

Some of the most common use cases are:

• Identify the accounts most likely to grow. One of the biggest indicators that your existing customer is a good upsell opportunity is if they’re growing quickly. With Account Hub’s recent changes and latest account alerts, see which of your clients is growing the most, to inform your path to quota.

And the ones most likely to churn. Conversely, your accounts most likely to churn are often ones shrinking in headcount, either via attrition or layoffs. With Account Hub, you can sort your accounts by risk, which shows which accounts have experienced a reduction in headcount or recently had layoffs. This gives you the opportunity to get ahead of losing the deal and can inform your forecasting.

• Use it to find compelling reasons to reach out while staying on top of your accounts. There’s nothing more worrying than when an existing customer goes dark. With Account Hub and the alerts it highlights – news, intent, growth – you have a compelling reason to reach out, hopefully reigniting the conversation and interest with your key accounts. When you see that one of your accounts goes through a recent round of funding, it may be a great way to reach out to congratulate them and see if there’s an opportunity to expand their offering. Account Hub will also highlight new contacts as well – giving you the opportunity to multithread. 

How to use Account Hub to prospect into new accounts.

Some of the most common use cases are:

• Prioritize your book of business. With Account Hub, you can prioritize the best accounts by both growth and Buyer and Category Intent, so you focus your time on the accounts most likely to close. Filter Account Hub to only show accounts expressing a moderate to high level of intent in your company and then layer on Product Category Intent to measure individual seller interest in a product.  
• Find compelling reasons to reach out. Account Hub, especially working in partnership with Relationship Explorer, shows you both the right accounts and people to reach out to, but also equips you with compelling reasons to reach out. For example, via Account Hub you can see if a customer is growing fast – if you sell HR software, perhaps it’s a good time to see if they’re having trouble onboarding employees so quickly.
• Stay on-top of your book. Lastly, unlike most other Sales Intelligence providers, Account Hub is updated in real-time, based on the real-time updates in LinkedIn. This empowers you to have a dynamic, flexible strategy throughout the year, while also helping you forecast more accurately.

What people are saying about Account Hub.

This might all sound great. But how are people really feeling about this new feature?

For the Account Hub beta, we worked closely with select companies and sellers, to find out their objective opinion. We were blown away by their feedback.

Here’s what early adopters said about using Account Hub:

• A Sales Director at a talent acquisition company used Account Hub as a starting point to visualize and plan their outreach. “The why behind Account Hub is the ability to have a one page view of lists you have created - a single dashboard of everyone I need to reach out to, allowing you to visualize and prioritize your outreach."
• A Sales Manager at a technology company loved how organized they stayed using Account Hub. “It helped me to stay organized with my accounts. Recent changes was the best thing. Especially with people that we were trying to get meetings with around buyer intent and hirings.”
• A Client Relationship Associate at an IT services company is using Account Hub to stay on top of a rapidly changing macro environment. "I really like the risk filter - right now in this market having that visibility is important. I'll call into an account to someone who I think is still at the company who hasn't updated their LinkedIn and they did huge layoffs and they're not even with the company anymore. Having that information of this probably isn't a company or client should be at the top of my list right now is insightful."
• The Digital Marketing and Sales Enablement Lead at a software development company now starts their Sales Navigator experience with the feature. "As soon as I access Sales Navigator, my first click is to go to Account Hub."
• A Sales Operations Analyst at a financial services company found Buyer Intent to be a hidden ace up their sleeve when talking with prospective buyers. "I want to have an extra edge when I'm on a call. Buyer intent being the most popular signal in the dashboard."
• A Trainer at a consulting company found theirself using the account-side of selling more after playing around with Account Hub. “It gives me a better starting point and creates more structure in the flow in terms of steps to take the ideal client."

Bottom line, in Beta, almost immediately, Account Hub became a “can’t imagine life without” feature. One of the biggest concerns our customers had was potentially losing access to it after the Beta was over.

The good news – that didn’t happen to them and it won’t happen to you either, as Account Hub is now available to all.

Bonus tips for getting more out of Account Hub.

1. Upload your book of business into Sales Navigator and save your target accounts.
2. If you're an Advanced Plus CRM-synced customer, make sure that your CRM is synced with Sales Navigator, so that you can opportunity data in Account Hub.
3. Keep your lists up-to-date by unsaving accounts you are no longer interested in.
4. Leverage the filters and sorting options in Account Hub to instantaneously hone in on the best opportunities.
5. If you are an Advanced or Advanced Plus customer, determine the level of interest a company has in your products or services by using a combination of Product Category Intent (available May 31st) and Buyer Intent.
6. Find new paths-in to an account by clicking on the top number in “Connection paths” to be taken to a Search highlighting your first-degree, second-degree, and TeamLink connections at that account.
7. Save time by starring your top accounts and then use the “Starred” filter to only see accounts you have marked as high-priority.

To learn more about Sales Navigator and how to get the most out of it, check out these posts:

• How to Be Great at Reaching Out: What Every InMail Sent in 2022 Told Us
• Sales Navigator Alerts: What They Are and How to Best Use Them
• Buyer Intent for Sales: What It Is and How It Can Help You Close Deals
• 3 Tips Worth Checking Out When Searching in Sales Navigator
• What is Relationship Explorer – And Why LinkedIn's Sellers Are Excited About It

Don’t have Sales Navigator? See how it can help you and your team here.