LinkedIn: Welcome to a new world of work - September 2021

OFFICES OF THE FUTURE Why we’ll be working with robots, not for them

THE HYBRID WORKFORCE Lockdowns have shown that hybrid work is a real option

PUTTING THE BUYER FIRST How you can get equipped to build trust with virtual customers

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THE FUTURE OF WORK • SEPTEMBER 2021

BUSINESS-REPORTER.CO.UK

Welcome to a new world of work

SPECIAL REPORT

Whether hybrid or home, the working landscape is changing. Here’s how businesses can make the most of the new normal DISTRIBUTED WITHIN CITY AM, PRODUCED AND PUBLISHED BY LYONSDOWN WHICH TAKES SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE CONTENTS

Win when buyers win. sales.linkedin.com

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Welcome to the future of work – and the future of business growth LIAM HALPIN VP SALES EMEA & LATAM, LINKEDIN SALES SOLUTIONS

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Put your buyer at the heart of everything that you do.

Find new ways to connect with your buyers with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

sales.linkedin.com

HE FUTURE of work is already here, and new landscape. In the UK, 63 per cent of taking shape all around us. Businesses in salespeople now use LinkedIn as their the UK are coming to terms with change on source of sales intelligence, which is 50 per almost every front: a new operational landcent more than those using any other sales scape; big shifts in priorities for their platform or tool. employees; labour shortages in areas that In many sectors, this has involved a were rarely identified as risks before. They’re wholesale transformation of the sales dealing not just with the impacts of the process. I’ve watched sales teams for export pandemic but with the rolling impacts of businesses, whose lives previously revolved Britain’s exit from the European Union. around international travel and events, In many areas of working life, it’s still not reinvent how they prospect, gather insight and certain what final form this unfolding future build relationships. With the future of will take. We don’t yet know how many large-scale trade fairs still uncertain, they’ve employees will return to offices, how willing turned to sales intelligence tools to fill the gap. people will be to travel for In doing so, they’ve found meetings or events, whether that they are able to reach out the current difficulties with a more informed “Buyers have taken involved in trading internaproposition from the start. control, shifted their tionally will remain – or how This matters, because expectations and long it will take to fill the gaps buyers are no longer prepared redefined the role that to give up their time for that have emerged in the they expect a salesperson salespeople who don’t already labour market. However, to play. This has changed know about their business. there’s one central area of life where the depth and the what it means to build They’ve learned that virtual duration of the change is buying is self-directed relationships with already clear. It involves the prospects, and what it buying, in which they no driving force of business longer have to depend on takes to close a deal” growth: the fundamental salespeople as a source of relationship between buyers information. That means they and salespeople. no longer need to give up I’ve had a front-row seat as this relationship their time to go through the salesperson’s has been transformed not just by technology process – or fit in with the salesperson’s and the pandemic but by a switch in who’s agenda. If they’re to take a meeting, on Teams, driving the buying process. Buyers have taken Zoom or in person, they want to be rewarded control, shifted their expectations and with value they couldn’t have generated for redefined the role that they expect a salesperthemselves through a Google search or a visit son to play. This has changed what it means to to the company website. In the UK, 80 per cent build relationships with prospects, and what it of B2B buyers say they’re more likely to takes to close a deal. consider products and services from a salesperson who challenges their way of thinking A new demand from buyers, – but only 46 per cent say this often happens. and a new role for sales Buyers don’t just want advisors. They want LinkedIn, more than any other platform, is advocates who are ready to work for their where the transformation of sales has played interests. That’s why the most successful UK out. With more than 775 million members and salespeople are almost twice as likely as their the highest trust levels in social media, it’s peers to put the needs of the buyer ahead of where professionals turn for information and their own. They know that the right to engage inspiration that can move their businesses with buyers involves embracing the future of forward. And it’s therefore the platform that work – and the new role of sales that comes salespeople trust to help them navigate the with it.

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A machine revolution where we’ll be working with robots, not for them…

“RPA platforms come with the promise of removing the machinelike aspects of work by automating dull but – thankfully – rule-based elements of jobs”

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VENTUALLY, EVERYONE will work in technology, and ubiquitous digital business platforms rather than intelligent robots will rule the office in the medium term.

Although cognitive agents such as IPsoft’s Amelia have already been deployed in some sectors, most of us won’t be working with robot colleagues any time soon. In the workplace of the near future, however, we can all expect to have to interact with and be assisted or monitored by some other breeds of artificial intelligence while accessing online platforms through gateways called application programming interfaces, or APIs, and exchanging data, services or goods on them.

The platform economy label was originally intended for digital matchmakers who had reached a gigantic scale thanks to the platform model. Think of Airbnb, Uber, eBay or LinkedIn. Gartner calls these enterprises high-level platforms to distinguish them from low-level ones, where they are leveraged to speed up innovation and improve customer service or productivity.

At the workplace of the future employees will spend a considerable percentage of

their working days navigating slews of this second type of platform. (According to current estimates, a platform-based company today operates between 20 and 40 of them.)

These integrated enterprise platforms are bringing together all the state-of-the art digital technologies that every company will need to transform and remain competitive: AI and machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), data analytics, mobility (enabling remote working options), the cloud, cyber-security and so on.

The competent navigation of the CRM, collaboration, employee engagement and decision-making modules of these digital business platforms will most probably be a more pressing concern for the office worker of the near future than the threat of intelligent robots snatching their jobs – as will be the protection of their own privacy on the new frontiers of AI and data-driven technological advancement.

How will the ubiquity of digital platforms affect work?

During the shift to remote work in the pandemic, we already witnessed how mobility, cloud and collaboration platforms can

make traditional office work much more flexible than before. On the downside, the popularity of employee engagement platforms to make up for the lack of face-to-face oversight have given us a taste of how speech recognition, sentiment analysis and performance analytics can become intrusive and undermine spontaneity and trust.

While AI and decision-making algorithms leave increasingly less room for human intuition and business acumen, RPA

platforms come with the promise of removing the machine-like aspects of work by automating dull but – thankfully – rule-based elements of jobs.

Whether the humanising or the mechanising trend will prevail and what form the timeline will take is hard to predict at this stage. But the platform economy in the broad sense of the word will no doubt redraw external and internal company boundaries, as well as create plenty of new job titles.

The new, improved tech-disrupted office The workplace has changed for good – and technology has been one of the key drivers

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HE WORKPLACE is changing more rapidly a nd more extensively than it has for decades. This is driven by a number of factors, chief among them technology.

In 2020, almost 90 per cent of UK adults owned a smartphone, and many used them for work purposes. And with UK mobile coverage approaching 100 per cent, the opportunity to work online is almost universal.

In addition, the cost of computing is dropping as its power is increasing.

Data analytics and process automation have already changed the way many people do their jobs, and artificial intelligence is increasingly enhancing the ability of humans to add additional value to their employment.

Alongside these changes, digital communication is getting faster and more reliable. The pandemic has driven many organisations to depend largely on remote working. That experience has demonstrated the many advantages of the hybrid

Drivers of change Rapid tech change

Explosion of data

Low-cost computing

Changing expectations

workplace, including productivity and flexibility. It has also shown up the disadvantages of the move away from office-based work, including feelings of isolation, weaker security and a reduction in creativity and innovation: these are problems that business must, and can, address.

The new workplace

Areas of concern

Hybrid working

Teamwork and innovation

Focus on soft skills Sustainable business

Worker wellbeing Productivity and security

Diversity and equality Non-linear careers Enhanced humans

Areas of uncertainty Emerging technologies

Lifelong learning

New technology ethics

Transferable skills

New roles and industries

Business must also address the changing expectations of their employees. Having tasted the benefits of working from home, many people are demanding that at least some of their working week will continue to be conducted remotely. Employees increasingly expect the organisations

they work for to display credentials in sustainability, equality and diversity.

Interestingly, the move to remote work ing can help meet these expectations. For example, by using a global workforce of remote workers, employers can reduce carbon emissions from large office buildings.

More difficult to address are some of the ethical issues arising from the use of new and only partly understood technologies such as machine learning and virtual reality.

Because of these forces, the skills that workers must have are changing.

The “half-life” of work skills has shortened drastically, prompting a need for lifelong learning. To avoid skill shortages, employers must recognise that many skills are transferable. In addition, the ability of almost anyone to interact with digital technology means that knowledge can be imparted easily. Technical skills are less in demand today than are the softer but harder-to-teach human skills of communication, persuasion, innovation and problem-solving.

In this rapidly changing world, it is only those businesses that are strongly engaged with technological change that can hope to navigate the dangers and opportunities that digital technology bring to the world of work.

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How sales technology enables business growth

Why learning on the job is the secret to good business T Continuous development is essential – and “soft” skills in communication and empathy have become more important than ever when it comes to upskilling in today’s fragmented world of work

HE PROFESSIONAL world is today marked more by disruption than by steady evolution.

Much of this was, until recently, owed to technology-driven innovations in the workplace. But with the Covid-19 pandemic further transforming our working lives, new technology is fusing with more pressing demands on employee capability to both widen the scope of change and accelerate its pace.

The result is a newfound need for continuous learning, and an ability to reposition how skills are developed and showcased.

Employees learn on the job, whatever the work might be. Yet the concept of continuous learning demands much more than just the passive acquirement of new skills. It emphasises the need for employees to actively seek out avenues for improvement, and for employers to create time and space for their staff to learn while they work. It thereby directly links what is being learned to what is actually required for the role.

At no time has this been more important than over the past 18 months, with workforces atomised and employees under pressure to quickly master new technologies. In the blink of an eye, demands on workers have

“Employees learn on the job, whatever the work might be.

Yet the concept of continuous learning demands much more than just the passive acquirement of new skills”

undergone profound change, and failure to operate video conferencing or to harness the powers of project management software now marks an individual out as lacking in two areas: agility, and an openness to new ways of working. The current work landscape demands they have both.

Yet the concept of continuous learning increasingly has to grapple with another related demand. The technical capabilities needed to exploit new technologies are one thing, but equally important are the social skills, or “soft skills”, without which the mastering of new tech wouldn’t be complete: the ability to communicate clearly and confidently online; the capacity to gauge and manage a staff member’s wellbeing from afar; the ability to ensure you can handle your own workload without colleagues on hand to help out.

Digital technology is changing many jobs, frequently by supporting people with additional insight, decision support and improved ways of communicating and collaborating.

• Focus relationship-building activities on the best prospects by uncovering the degree to which prospects are connected to key accounts in target industries

The job of the sales professional is no exception. Sales people are increasingly benefitting from technology that provides them with support throughout the whole of the sales journey, from the provision of highly targeted lists of prospects to instant access to the critical data they need when closing a sale.

Another technology that many sales professionals find essential is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Using this platform, sales teams can target the best prospective buyers, understand key insights and engage with personalised outreach.

One example of this technology is LinkedIn Sales Insights. This powerful tool provides access to LinkedIn data and insights at scale, giving salespeople the clarity they need for smarter sales planning, and enabling them to identify the strongest sales opportunities available. LinkedIn sales insights offers many benefits including the ability to:

• Uncover high-value leads with Sales Navigator’s “Lead Recommendation” and advanced search features

• Leverage high quality LinkedIn data to segment customer accounts accurately and build better books of business • Get an up-to-date view of the size and growth of specific departments and job titles • Identify the strength of different opportunities by comparing markets, regions and segments

These are all skills that need to be learned anew, because the context in which they first developed – one in which professional interaction tended to happen face-to-face, and where knowledge and best practice transfer was baked into everyday conversation in the workplace – is no longer, or at least is now only half of the picture.

Employees working in sales, for instance, have had to pitch to prospective clients over video calls where concentration is difficult to sustain and enthusiasm difficult to project. Their need for learning is far more than just mastering the new technology, it’s about how best to present themselves and engage their audience via a format that invariably flattens character and diminishes attention.

Social selling With the pressure on employees to continually flex to new modes of working unlikely to diminish, there is evidence of a growing public appetite for learning. This is not only via company-provided training programmes, but through self-teaching platforms.

Figures from last year show that the time users spent learning about “social selling” on the LinkedIn Learning Platform rose 46 per cent between

The platform enables them to:

• Understand what is top of mind for prospects with real-time updates about accounts and leads, including job changes • Build stronger customer relationships by sharing insights with customers and prospects, and tracking how they engage with these insights • Use their company’s combined network to uncover even more prospects You can find out more about LinkedIn Sales Solutions at business.linkedin.com/ sales-solutions

March and April 2020, largely as salespeople adapted to virtual modes of working.

Social selling is about leveraging social networks to find the right prosp e c t s , a nd bu i ld i ng t r u s te d relationships. The growing willingness among workers to take time out to engage with such learning is, once again, evidence of their understanding that constant upskilling is now essential to career progression. Unlike a decade ago, salespeople today need to go that extra length and engage with social media, position themselves as subject matter experts and hone their brand.

There is now a third rung, in addition to developing technical and soft skills, in continuous learning: branding skills.

The benefits to this are also now quantifiable. By measuring the outcomes of those who use its social selling function, LinkedIn has discovered that salespeople who are willing to go that extra length to develop their social selling skills are 51 per cent more likely to hit quota, and are netting 45 per cent more sales opportunities.

They are the cohort of workers today who understand the value, if not necessity, of continuous learning. They also understand that disruption needn’t be feared, but should be embraced.

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Hybrid workers: trusted, flexible and productive T

HE PAST 18 months have ushered in the world’s biggest experiment in remote working. The Covid-19 pandemic meant firms of all sizes were forced to transition to working from home almost overnight, drawing on only relatively recent advances in technology.

Now, as the world slowly starts to return to more normal conditions, businesses are starting to think about how to structure themselves, factoring in both the needs and desires of employees with their own considerations around workplace culture, productivity and cost.

“The workplace is undergoing its biggest change in a generation and businesses are grappling with how they operate in the future,” says Janine Chamberlin, UK country manager at LinkedIn. “Over the past 18 months, employees have shown that they can be trusted to work productively from home, and now they want greater flexibility around where and when they work.”

A recent survey from LinkedIn found that nearly half (49 per cent) of UK salespeople would prefer hybrid working – where some time is spent in the office and some at home – in the future, compared with 38 per cent who want to work remotely, and just 12 per cent who would prefer full-time office working.

This has inevitably had an impact on all areas of a business, not least the critical sales function. “The pandemic has completely normalised virtual conversations and virtual selling,” says Nick Gallimore, director of talent transformation and insight at performance management software company Clear Review. “The benefits to the customer or prospect are significant, as they no longer need to be physically present, and the benefits to the seller are huge, with the time-saving alone on not having to travel as much meaning they can spend more time selling.” And time saving is important: sellers report spending barely a third of their time actually selling, so their time is now more precious than ever.

But face-to-face selling will still have a role to play, believes Leeson Medhurst, head of strategy at office design firm Peldon Rose. “The first contact we have with new clients is often over the phone or via email, but meeting them in person is hugely important,” he says. “When it comes to any kind of sales role, it’s important to keep in mind that ‘people buy into people’.”

The shift towards remote or hybrid working has also created challenges for businesses, particularly in ensuring the work environment remains fit for purpose.

Telecommunications firm NTT, for instance, has reviewed and redesigned its office space

12% Only 12 per cent of UK salespeople now prefer to work in an office full-time, according to a new survey Source: LinkedIn

to support more collaboration and connectedness, and is using technology to help ensure the optimum mix between office and remote working for employees.

“We’re using platforms that allow us to know exactly how the office is being used, including who’s coming in and when,” says Marilyn Chaplin, chief HR and sustainability officer. “Our workforce can then plan how to make the most of their time spent in the office to ensure productivity.” Offering more distributed ways of working, though, has enabled the firm to attract a more diverse employee base, she adds, “from full-time employees to gig workers, across generations and cultures”.

Having people working remotely on a more permanent basis can require some adaptation. Software firm Commvault realised the planned nature of video calls was eliminating the kind of spontaneous

“The workplace is undergoing its biggest change in a generation […] Over the past 18 months, employees have shown that they can be trusted to work productively from home, and now they want greater flexibility” – Janine Chamberlin, LinkedIn conversation or calls that would ordinarily occur in an office setting. “We encouraged more spontaneous calls and conversations between managers and team members,” says Marco Fanizizi, vice president and general manager EMEA. “It required a series of mentality changes to be made to the format of everyday communication to help

put people at ease, such as removing the need to have video running.”

There are also concerns over the impact of a blended model on employee wellbeing.

“We don’t fully understand the impact of long-term hybrid on the employee experience,” says Gallimore. “Meetings which are currently happening 100 per cent remotely will feel and work very differently when 50 per cent of the people are in the room and 50 per cent aren’t. Going into a halfempty office might seem a little depressing for some. This is something employers may wish to consider when setting parameters of hybrid working.”

Simon Blake, CEO of Mental Health First Aid England, points out the importance of staying in touch with staff members working mainly from home. “Checking in with regularly with everyone, not just those who are visible, ensures you keep connected and create an environment where people feel safe and comfortable to express their opinions,” he says.

Any concerns, though, should be set against the benefits that many people have derived from more flexible working arrangements. “All of a sudden people are working where they live, and have realised that it can all be done differently,” says Irene van der Werf, people manager at remote team recruiter Omnipresent. “Some people are simply more productive if, for example, they take a longer lunch break. I see candidates not asking but expecting employers to offer flexible working hours.”

In fact, the combined effect of the pandemic and subsequent “new normal” could be to put more power in the hands of employees. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, 71 per cent of UK workers want the option to work flexibly and remotely to stay, and 28 per cent expect to leave their employer this year unless this is the case. “If businesses go back to the old ways of working nine to five from an office, employees will vote with their feet,” warns Dan Fish, chief people officer at Invosys.

Organisations, though, need to strike the right balance between ensuring they have the optimum set-up for their employees and remaining productive, efficient and, ultimately, profitable. “Flexibility and balance are the two key factors,” says Dean Rowland, director of digital marketing agency Receptional, which was an early mover in bringing people back into the office and developing a hybrid model. “Over the next few years, we’ll see new tools, new ways of working and new expectations from our people. It’ll be a case of adapting and remodelling until you find the right balance for your business and its talent.”

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Putting the buyer first: how top sales professionals succeed How can sales intelligence tools and a new approach help build trust with B2B customers in a virtual setting?

A new playbook for sales professionals Although virtual meetings are popular with customers, they are robbing sales professionals of their shiniest assets: interpersonal skills and the power to delicately influence decisions. Their workarounds need to rely on available data and a proficient use of digital technology.

Challenges of virtual selling

How to overcome them

The traditional image of the glib salesman flogging ice to Eskimos is already a thing of the past. Today, there are more sophisticated datadriven ways of exceeding sales quotas.

Being equipped with and understanding accurate, topical or real-time information ahead of reaching out to or engaging with customers now proves a much more effective way of building rapport.

Corporate decision makers nowadays tend to trust sales professionals who keep their buyers’ and their organisation’s needs in mind throughout the whole customer journey and follow up the deal into the implementation and project evaluation phase. They will gravitate to salespeople who are

Buyer first selling – a practice, as well as a philosophy Data collected and analysed by LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, with 774 million members globally, seems to bear out these new trends, with 63 per cent of UK salespeople reporting using

LinkedIn as a source of sales intelligence. But t he platfor m has undertaken not only to describe how the shift to effective virtual selling is taking place but also how to spearhead it. In order to turn “buyer first” into an established practice, the company has highlighted the gaping disconnect between buyer expectations and sellers’ presumptions about them.

As a recent LinkedIn survey pointed out, while buyers regard active listening as the attribute they value most from salespeople, this quality doesn’t even rank in the top five hiring criteria among recruiters.

There is a similar discrepancy in how the two sides see the buyer-first principle prevail. Almost half of the sales professionals participating claimed that they put the needs of their clients’ organisations first.

However, only 12 per cent of buyers agreed that this was actually the case.

Having identified these gaps, LinkedIn has developed sales solutions tools that enable salespeople to become the kind of informed challengers buyers value most, who can challenge their thinking and come up with ideas that they couldn’t have arrived at themselves – the type that currently only a meagre 10 per cent say they encounter in their professional lives regularly.

Discover how LinkedIn Sales Solutions can empower your organisation to create business opportunities

Communication

How can information from online professional networks oil the wheels of virtual selling?

knowledgeable about the strengths, as well as the limitations, of their offerings, and are ready to walk away from the deal and point the customer to a product of a different provider if they know that it’ll deliver a better solution to their problem.

But it’s not only the client’s company and alternative solutions across the market that the salespeople of the future will need to be conversant with, but also the handful of individuals who typically make up the client’s buying committee and are responsible for the different stages of procurement decision-making.

Buying committees comprise of individuals with different concerns and biases, therefore, it’s essential for the sales professional to collect relevant data about their background to offer tailor-made content or pertinent insights for them. Background searches on a prospect on professional social media platforms such as LinkedIn can also turn cold messaging.

This is a popular tactic although it often fails because it skips the necessary steps needed to build buyer-first relationships.

• Buyers give in to distractions more easily

• Base opening gambits on client’s posts, or events on professional networks

• Small talk and other social interaction staples become unnatural in a virtual environment

• Plan and gather data for even the exchanges that come naturally in-person

• Close-up eye-contact is absent face-to-face and causes fatigue

• Insert audio-only breaks against cognitive overload

• Salespeople often feel they talk to a wall

• Ask for feedback every four to five minutes

• Few non-verbal and body language cues to aid pivoting

• Enhance the quality of your message and visuals to increase your power to influence decisions

• Less opportunity to influence decisions through “pacing and leading” (imitating others to connect more closely with them) • People and presentation skills are contingent on good command of virtual technology

Technology

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N B2B sales, not unlike in other business areas, the shift to virtual lasted too long and proved too successful to expect any quick rebound to pre-Covid practices. As recent surveys have found, currently only 17 per cent of buyers’ time is spent meeting with potential suppliers in person, and 57 per cent of them are happy to buy from a salesperson they’ve never met face-to-face.

Although acutely aware of this new trend, sales professionals are often oblivious to the new approaches, attitudes and digital tools they need to adopt to thrive in this new medium.

Social norms

• Lack of proximity encourages • Tell clients how you expect buyer to overstep norms of face- them to contribute right at the to-face encounters start

• No control of the buyer’s videoconferencing standards or their internet stability

• Achieve pacing and matching through displaying competence and attention to the needs of customer’s business • Improve your online presentation skills • Insert feedback slides into your presentation at regular intervals • Develop a command of switching from sharing to video to whiteboard for variety

• Even extroverted salespeople may find staring at their own image while pitching challenging • Try polling and breakout rooms with larger groups

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Work is changing – and so are our expectations of it U

NTIL RECENTLY, career progression tended to happen linearly. Someone would start their employment after school or university, and remain in more or less the same line of work until their retirement. They would expect to rise up the professional ladder, sailing through various promotions until reaching a senior position. But the switching of careers midway through life, or the juggling of several different jobs at the same time, was a rare thing.

This is no longer the case. Increasingly, young people are doing exactly what their parents and grandparents had once baulked at: they are favouring contingent working arrangements.

The style of part-time or contract-based working might be less stable, and it might have less security than, say, a fully embedded staff member at a sales company would enjoy, but it also comes with benefits – or so they feel.

Indeed, one survey conducted last year found that 53 per cent of Generation Z respondents felt flexibility to be a key quality in any future career, while 61 per cent of millennials reported that learning new skills should be central to any job. Contingent working might have its downsides, but it does also boast these two characteristics in spades.

The reasons for this shift are many.

Gen Z, those born between the late 1990s and 2010, are coming of age at a time of economic precarity. Their parents may have been laid off from their jobs as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, and they will have seen the effects of that far outlive the economic downturn: the lack of confidence in their working capability that comes with dismissal; a sense of lasting un-

“Increasingly, young people are doing exactly what their grandparents and parents had once baulked at: they are favouring contingent working arrangements” certainty and anxiety. Any prior conviction that traditional ways of working – typified by the worker who remains in the same profession throughout his career, with a skillset applicable only to that role – were sustainable will have been further upset by the Covid-19 pandemic, when organisations laid off staff in their hundreds of thousands, and a significant portion of the workforce was left wondering what they could do with the skills they had.

The expectations of younger generations around work are proving disruptive elsewhere. Wider social change, especially with regards to gender and racial inequalities, is impacting on perceptions of the ideal workplace. No longer can it be populated largely by university-educated white men, with only tokenistic displays of diversity; rather, the pressure for diversity to be a core feature, not an add-on, is coming to bear on the growth prospects of organisations, especially those with a sales component: 80 per cent of UK buyers say they will buy from a sales organisation they see as more diverse.

The trend towards contingent working has a final driver. Young people no longer want to live to work; they value the time outside of work where they can develop the “soft skills” that traditional ways of working have done little to cultivate: emotional intelligence, management of wellbeing; agile communication. But so too do employers increasingly look for these qualities in their workers, and so there is a growing understanding among managers and within organisations that the old structures need to change. Young people are powering that shift, and the older generations would appear to be listening.

Effective selling starts with the buyer.

When it comes to successful selling, everything should be about the buyer. LinkedIn Sales Navigator empowers sales professionals everywhere to find the buyers they’re looking for, learn more about their needs, and engage with them. Today when 92% of UK buyers are more likely to consider a brand’s products or services if a sales professional has a clear understanding of their business needs, there’s never been a better time to invest in sales technology that puts your buyers first.

Source: LinkedIn, State of Sales Report 2021, UK Edition

sales.linkedin.com