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LinkedIn launches the world’s first deep sales platform
Mumbai: Online professional network LinkedIn has launched what it claims is the world’s first deep sales platform, thereby opening up a new category of B2B sales intelligence technology. The technology solution for businesses learns from data to make predictions and recommendations at a scale that may not be possible for sellers to achieve on their own.
LinkedIn sales solutions is building the deep sales platform, which is the next generation of sales navigator, with the ability to deliver timely and actionable insights for organisations to focus on the highest-probability accounts and approach buyers with ‘welcomed and relevant outreach’ for better business outcomes. The deep sales launch comes after LinkedIn’s recent global research revealed that only 20 per cent of buyers are in-market for services in a given year, which makes understanding buyer intent critical for all sellers.
The LinkedIn State of Sales Asia-Pacific 2022 research reveals that 81 per cent of Indian buyers say that working remotely has made buying easier, while 84 per cent of Indian sellers say they have seen a deal lost or delayed in the past year because of a decision maker changing roles. This corroborates the increasingly important role of sales technology in helping sellers understand buyer sentiment and intent. The deep sales technology by LinkedIn Sales Solutions aims to help sellers build more effective B2B connections by delivering actionable insights and recommendations in three priority areas:
Account insights: Targeting accounts that have the best chance of success.
Relationship intelligence: Identifying decision-makers and finding the best path to reach them.
Buyer intent: Capitalising on the right moments to reach out, based on signals and alerts of key moments such as organisational growth, job changes, and change in strategy.
LinkedIn head of sales solution, India Abhai Singh said, “Over the past two years, a covid-stricken remote reality forced everything to move online, which made selling less personal and buying more complex. This upheaval in the way customers make buying decisions has caused many sellers to ‘shallow sell’—an endless loop of contacting large numbers of potential buyers in ways that no longer work. To break this cycle, sellers need deeper insight into buyer psychology, which our deep sales platform provides. In observance of all the privacy rules that our members expect from us, our platform helps sellers forgo the spray-and-pray approach and access more first-person, reliable data to develop deeper buyer relationships today.”
Some of the next-gen sales navigator’s features, as part of the deep sales launch by LinkedIn Sales Solutions, include:
An Account Dashboard, where sellers can see their list of saved accounts and their level of interest, based on a number of signals. Teams will also be able to monitor interest levels over time so they can determine the best time for outreach and the message that is most likely to resonate.
Alerts about accounts showing intent in the homepage highlights section and a buyer intent filter in search, where sellers will now have buyer intent information as part of their day-to-day sales navigator workflow, making it as easy as possible to prioritise the right accounts at the right time.
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Leonid Radvinsky, the man who made OnlyFans a $5.5bn empire, dies at 43
The Ukrainian-American entrepreneur transformed a niche subscription site into a $5.5bn cultural force, then kept almost entirely out of sight
LONDON: He owned one of the most talked-about platforms on the internet and almost nobody knew his name. Leonid Radvinsky, the billionaire majority owner of OnlyFans, died on Monday after a prolonged battle with cancer. He was 43. The London-based company confirmed his death in a statement, saying he had “passed away peacefully.” His family has requested privacy.
Radvinsky was not OnlyFans’ founder. That distinction belongs to British entrepreneur Tim Stokely, who launched the subscription platform in 2016. But it was Radvinsky who turned it into a money machine. In 2018 he acquired Fenix International Ltd, OnlyFans’ parent company, becoming its director and majority shareholder. What he inherited was a modest content platform. What he left behind was a global phenomenon, valued at roughly $5.5bn including debt, according to a Reuters report in January citing talks with investment firm Architect Capital over a potential majority stake sale.
Born in the Ukrainian port city of Odesa, Radvinsky moved to Chicago as a child and most recently lived in Florida. Long before OnlyFans, he had built businesses in the adult internet sector, including the live cam site MyFreeCams, and founded a venture capital firm focused on technology in 2009. He knew the terrain.
His masterstroke was timing, or rather, recognising what the pandemic would do. When Covid-19 lockdowns drove millions of people indoors and online in 2020, OnlyFans was ready. Creators poured onto the platform. Subscribers followed. The model, which allowed creators to charge users directly for content, much of it adult-oriented, became a template for the broader creator economy. OnlyFans did not merely survive the pandemic; it became one of its defining commercial stories.
Despite presiding over all of this, Radvinsky maintained a near-total public silence. He rarely gave interviews. His illness was never disclosed. OnlyFans said he had supported several philanthropic projects, including donations to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, open-source initiatives and the West Suburban Humane Society. A Wall Street Journal report noted that he and his wife supported a $23m grant programme for cancer research through a gastrointestinal research foundation in 2024, a detail that now carries a particular weight.
His death lands at an uncomfortable moment for the platform he shaped. OnlyFans faces growing scrutiny from regulators and policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic, even as it continues to redefine how content creators make money online. The sale talks with Architect Capital add another layer of uncertainty. Radvinsky built something vast, then quietly stepped back from view. The question now is who steers it next, and whether anyone can do so with quite the same invisible grip.
