Photo Credit: Image
The Return On Investment (ROI) is a profitability measure that evaluates the performance of a business by
dividing net profit by net worth. It is a useful tool in tracking a businesses's progress and it enables decision makers to monitor which sales mix is doing well, which ones are lagging behind and make informed decisions on how to rectify it. For instance a business can track the ROI of an advertising campaign, this will help in identifying which campaign has been successful and discontinuing the failed campaign from running.
LinkedIn's current ROI is measured by its product mix of the talent and marketing solutions and premium subscription, According to the LinkedIn quarterly report 2
of 2014, revenue for the second quarter was $534 million, an increase of 47%
compared to $364 million in the second quarter of 2013.
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The Graph above depicts the revenues by product of LinkedIn from year 2010 to 1st quarter of 2014
Photo Credit licence, Amigobulls: Image |
It is too early to calculate the ROI of
LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator as it was only released 31 July this year, and would
require data from the next quarterly report to compute data. An excerpt from
the second quarter of 2014 report on LinkedIn states that” LinkedIn achieved
strong results across the business," said Steve Sordello, CEO of LinkedIn.
"The success of Sponsored Updates, scaling jobs, and the launch of the new
Sales Navigator underscore the positive impact of recent strategic investments,
and we will continue to invest aggressively in our member and customer
platforms." It could be inferred that LinkedIn Sales Navigator should
yield a positive ROI. It is also noteworthy to know that the number of sales professionals on LinkedIn is close to 6x the number of
HR professionals, so naturally the company sees a potential to create a tool that can help sales professionals to sell better and in turn this suggests that, if successfully target at and adopted by sales professionals, the Sales Navigator should prove yet another successful revenue generate for LinkedIn. (Personal Communication: in email from LinkedIn's account services manager Anthony Tsang).
Another sign for a positive Return on Investment
with LinkedIn Sales Solutions are examples of LinkedIn’s clients like PayPal
Australia, who achieved a ROI of almost 3000% after implementing LinkedIn’s
Sales Navigator standalone services.
A full report can be seen here.