A salesperson's typical LinkedIn stack
| Tool | What it's for | What's missing |
|---|---|---|
| Sales Navigator | searching and filtering people by ICP | conversation history, deal status |
| connections, messages, content | an overview of where you stand with whom | |
| CRM (e.g. Pipedrive) | deals, activities, team overview | the contact's activity on LinkedIn |
| Spreadsheet | leadlist, quick notes | being up to date, anything automatic |
Each tool does its own part well. The problem lies between them.
What fragmentation costs you
- Time. Switching, copying, looking things up. Salespeople spend only about a third of their time selling, and the admin around tools makes up a large part of the rest.
- Signals. The contact published a post today, but you only know about it if you happened to be scrolling.
- Team overview. A colleague approached the same person a month ago, but it isn't in the CRM.
- Data for decisions. Without the tools being connected, you don't know which outreach led to a deal.
What a sensible stack should look like
- One place for prospecting. Searching, monitoring signals and first contact, all together.
- A CRM for what is already a deal. A contact belongs in the CRM once an opportunity arises, not every random lead.
- Automatic transfer. No manual retyping. Whatever happens on LinkedIn should carry over.
- No shadow spreadsheets. When the team keeps its leadlist in Excel, the tools don't fit the process.
We describe how to get relevant contacts out of Sales Navigator in the article The largest B2B contact database? LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
How Pipelyx handles it
Pipelyx connects what happens between Sales Navigator and the CRM: it imports leads, monitors their activity, helps with outreach and sends a contact with an open opportunity to the CRM. It is deliberately neither a CRM nor a follow-up system. Its job is to open the door and start the conversation.