Microsoft Corp. subsidiary LinkedIn is continuing to evolve its Sales Navigator software from an extension of the social network into a full-featured sales force productivity application.

The latest release bears the first fruits of an open extension program the company launched last year via its Sales Navigator Application Platform initiative, with the goal of folding the tool into customer relationship management, marketing automation, business intelligence, sales acceleration, web conferencing and e-signature applications.

About half of the two dozen initial partners that were announced at that time, including Salesforce.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Marketo Inc., have now delivered integrations with Sales Navigator, the company said. New partners in the program include Demandbase Inc., InsideSales.com Inc., SugarCRM Inc. and Oracle Corp.’s Sales Cloud.

The latest release features redesigned account pages that “streamline the process of landing new accounts or building relationships within existing accounts, by giving you the information you need, when you need it,” according to Doug Camplejohn, head of product for sales solutions at LinkedIn. “Now you can better understand whether the account is a good match, who you should be targeting, and how you can get a warm introduction,” he wrote in a blog post Wednesday.

Account pages have been updated with company summaries, which combine factors like employee count, industry, revenue and contact information to help sales reps more quickly choose companies to target. A “new people” tab organizes account contacts as saved leads, recommended leads and connections into the account. In addition, the existing “News and Insights” tab offers updates when prospects or accounts are mentioned in the news, LinkedIn posts or in the context of headcount or personnel changes

Autosaved search preferences now store salespeople’s preferred factors like location, industry, company size and prospect seniority, and use that as a basis for customized lead recommendations. “You can easily hone or modify your searches to focus on the targeted people you care about most,” Camplejohn wrote. For example, sales reps can save preferences for a particular job title and press a toggle switch to apply those same criteria to other titles. Sales reps can now also get email alerts when saved leads view their profiles.

LinkedIn also said it will revise its release policies to deliver product updates on a quarterly cycle rather than as available in order to “provide advanced communications and training for administrators and users so they have adequate time to familiarize themselves with new features and take advantage of them properly,” Camplejohn wrote. Pricing begins at $64.99 per month for a single-user edition.

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