Map Your Sales Connections, Visually, Through InMaps

Guest Blogger: Koka Sexton

Many people have hundreds if not thousands of connections on LinkedIn and keeping in contact with all of them is impossible. What if you knew who your major connections were and started building better relationships with them to reach a broader audience?

LinkedIn recently launched a new application in LinkedIn labs called InMaps. InMaps is an insight into who the major connections, bridges, and influencers are in your network. Contacts are identified graphically and with text: Those identified by larger dots and a name label in a larger font size are individuals with more connections (and typically more sway) in specific clusters.


At first glance, the application just looks like eye candy that lets you see your network in a different way. But after further investigation, it appears that InMaps could be a great tool for the sales person who wants to maximize their social selling productivity. Every dot on the InMap – besides being another point of connection – provides intelligence on how influential a specific contact is within your entire LinkedIn social graph.

A sales person looking at their InMap can quickly identify who their key influencers are, and take steps to be more engaging with these people, and leverage that relationship for additional referrals to new connections. This becomes more prevalent as your LinkedIn network grows but this can work if you have as few as 100 connections.

Using LinkedIn to find new opportunities and expand your sales reach is very effective. Using InMaps lets you get a laser focus on who your major connections are so that you can be more productive by using social media for sales. It also gives you a great starting point for creating new connections.

Koka Sexton started in inside sales and was an early adopter to using social media for sales. Currently Koka is the Inbound marketing Manager for InsideView the leader in Sales Intelligence. Learn more about social media for sales.