EY and LinkedIn have forged a first-of-its-kind strategic alliance with the aim of building new products and services for the enterprise market to help companies around the globe transform their sales capabilities using cutting-edge technologies including social media and data analytics. The alliance will leverage EY's business transformation knowledge combined with LinkedIn's massive network of more than 400 million professionals. Woody Driggs, EY's America's Digital Lead, also helms the alliance. Consulting sat down with him to talk about the partnership and what it means for the B2B world going forward.
Consulting: How did this alliance happen?
Driggs: We have 170,000 people on LinkedIn out of our 212,000 employees. That puts us in the top 10 of companies on the platform. So we have a lot of people who participate and we are also a customer of their HR services and have been for a while—with 212,000 employees, obviously we do a lot of recruiting. So it was a natural fit when they came out with the Sales Navigator and started looking at enterprises that might be interested. As we introduced our new CEO Mark Weinberger two years ago, he created a new vision for EY that was about building a better working world. Interestingly, when you look at LinkedIn's purpose, it's to connect the world's professionals and make them more productive and successful. So there was a real synergy there, our purposes are very much aligned. As you become a more purpose-oriented business you start to look at everything through that lens.
Consulting: What will this enable that was not previously possible?
Driggs: This is LinkedIn's first real alliance with a large advisory services partner. They started more as a B2C company but the solutions they're now creating for business are more and more complex, introducing more and more change into organizations, so more and more professional services will be required to implement them. All CRM type tools require some level of adoption capability, getting people to understand and use it, etc. In the case of sales navigator and the LinkedIn tools, you want your sales people to be out there building relationships through social media, leveraging their contacts to reach out instead of cold calling, reach out to relationships they know exist already.
Consulting: What trajectory do you see the partnership taking?
Driggs: We both hope this strategic alliance will be a long term innovative partnership around helping to build products and services for the enterprise market. LinkedIn's entry into the enterprise market in a much more significant way combined with our global footprint, advisory services in addition to other services provides a nice partnership to enable us to take new and innovative solutions to market. It starts with Sales Navigator, but we hope that will continue to build as LinkedIn looks at new products and services and we work with some of our insights into what our enterprise customers are looking for to help them think about what those buffers might look like.
Consulting: Did this come about organically or was it something clients were asking about?
Driggs: Both. Our advisory business is growing significantly. As we re-grew it we really started in the finance space because it was near and dear to our brand and heart. And then we added in the supply chain piece, and the last piece we added in was the customer piece, selling advisory services to marketing and sales and service professionals. We've been building a sales effectiveness and a marketing effectiveness practice. In that space, to be relevant to sales officers is really important. It's very infrequent that things come along that really get the chief sales officer's attention. We all know the chief sales officer is focused on short-term revenue, very measurable things, typically very quarterly-focused. Unless you have something that's going to impact them in a very short amount of time they typically have less interest. When we saw Sales Navigator our immediate thought was that this was going to be one of those things that got the sales officer's attention.
Consulting: Is this about relationships at its core?
Driggs: It really is. It's about building trusted relationships with your customers. In the past you might look for prospects in a number of ways. You might cold call, you might hire a company to do e-mail marketing for you or some kind of digital marketing. Now if you have access to a broad network of relationships that exist within your company and at the touch of a button you can see where the relationships are and who in your organization has them and you have a sizeable organization the likelihood of having a connection is pretty high. And when you are able to reach out to that executive in a more relationship-oriented way the likelihood to start the relationship and really connect to that individual is higher.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.