How We Landed LinkedIn Sales Solutions' First 100 Logos

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Pete Ryan joined LinkedIn in 2009 as one of its first sales hires, went from AE to Head of SMB Sales, and started LinkedIn Sales Solutions, an experiment to test whether people would pay to use LinkedIn for sales. Its first product put LinkedIn profiles inside Salesforce. He landed its first 100 logos between 2009 and 2013 by selling to sales teams that were already using LinkedIn heavily, starting with Eloqua.

In 2009 I left Oracle, where I'd been an AE selling databases, and joined LinkedIn as one of its first sales hires. Over the next four years I went from AE to Head of SMB Sales. I started LinkedIn Sales Solutions, ran SMB sales for it as Head of SMB Sales, and landed its first 100 logos.

Most people know LinkedIn's sales product today as Sales Navigator, which relaunched as a standalone product in July 2014. This is the story of what came before that, and the lessons I still use.

It started as an experiment

I ended up at LinkedIn because my former Oracle colleague James Volpentest went there first, and I thought it was a really interesting company. The sales team was six or seven people, all hired at about the same time. LinkedIn had a few tens of millions of members back then. It passed 50 million in October 2009.

Sales Solutions started because we were seeing early demand for a sales product. Salespeople were already on LinkedIn, researching prospects and looking for a way in. So we ran an experiment with one question: is there a market for people using LinkedIn for sales?

Framing it as an experiment was the right call, and it's the first lesson I'd pass on. If you're launching a new product inside a company that already has a winner, don't ask for a big budget on day one. Follow the demand you're already seeing, and ask for permission to test one clear question.

Version one: LinkedIn inside Salesforce

The first version of the product was basically LinkedIn inside Salesforce. Reps lived in their CRM all day. Every time they wanted to look someone up, they toggled to another tab, searched LinkedIn, and toggled back.

We cut out the toggle. A rep could stay in Salesforce and see the LinkedIn profile tied to a contact, an opportunity, or an account, right where they were already working.

The lesson: put your product where your buyer already works. We didn't ask reps to adopt a new tool. We made the tool they already used better.

Sell to the teams already using you

Our first buyers were mostly mid-market tech companies. The person who signed was usually the CRO or VP of Sales, and sometimes the VP of Marketing.

The original pitch was a design-partner pitch. We were looking for companies that wanted to join the mission of building a tool for sales, give us honest feedback, and help shape the product.

Our first Sales Solutions deal was with Eloqua, the marketing automation company Oracle later acquired. Eloqua's sales team was already using LinkedIn very heavily. We didn't have to convince them LinkedIn mattered for selling. They were living it every day and wanted more.

That turned out to be the most important lesson of the whole run.

What didn't work: lots of outbound to heads of sales whose teams weren't using LinkedIn much yet. We were asking them to buy into a behavior change and a product at the same time. Those conversations went nowhere.

What worked best: customers whose sales teams were already bought into LinkedIn and wanted to supercharge what they were already seeing. The reps had the habit. The leader just had to make it official and give them better tools.

If you take one thing from this essay, take this: find the warm demand first. Look for the teams whose people already use your product, or something close to it, on their own. Selling to them is about scaling something that's already working, not changing minds. Cold outbound to people who haven't felt the value yet is the hardest sale there is, especially for a brand-new product.

Focusing on warm demand is also what made the motion repeatable. Once it was, the pitch changed. We stopped asking people to help us build something and started showing them what teams like theirs were already getting out of it.

Why sales was the bigger prize

In my view, LinkedIn's three biggest revenue lines were, and still are, Talent Solutions (recruiting), Marketing Solutions (ads), and Sales Solutions, in that order.

The public numbers back that up for the years I was there. In LinkedIn's last annual report as a public company, for 2015, Talent Solutions brought in about $1.9 billion, Marketing Solutions $581 million, and Premium Subscriptions, which included Sales Solutions, $532 million. Microsoft no longer breaks LinkedIn's revenue out by line. It reports one number, $19.8 billion for fiscal 2026.

Here's what always struck me: the market for selling software is bigger than the market for hiring software. Gartner puts CRM sales software at $25.7 billion in 2024. Global Market Insights puts talent acquisition software at $10.8 billion for the same year. These come from different firms with different definitions, so treat it as a rough comparison. Even so, sales software comes out more than twice as big.

That's why I believe LinkedIn had a chance to build something really special on the go-to-market side.

The DNA problem: why a sales InMail isn't a recruiting InMail

So why didn't sales become LinkedIn's biggest business? My take is that it may not have been in LinkedIn's DNA. LinkedIn was a consumer internet company, not a B2B software company.

There was also a real tension at the heart of the product. As I understood Reid Hoffman's thinking, you never want to disrupt the ecosystem. The network only works if members trust it.

A recruiting InMail fits that rule. A recruiter reaches out with a job, and a lot of people are happy to hear about one. Both sides win. A sales InMail is different. The buyer may not be looking for anything in that category, so the same message can feel like a nuisance.

The lesson for anyone selling into a platform or community: the buyer's success can't come at the expense of the people on the other side. If your growth makes the network worse, you're spending trust you can't easily earn back.

The network is the moat, and what I still use

Of all the companies I've worked at, LinkedIn really had something special. It laid the golden goose egg because it had the network, and to this day no one has been able to displace it. Features can be copied. A network of professionals who keep their own profiles up to date can't.

After LinkedIn, I led enterprise sales at Trello, which was acquired by Atlassian. I founded Gogohire and co-founded HiFive, where I was CEO until it was acquired by HeyLois in November 2025. Today I work on Growth at Supabase.

LinkedIn and Supabase are, in a lot of ways, both product-led companies. You build a groundswell of people who actively use the product. Then you go over the top and sell top-down: consolidate all that usage and bring everything under one roof. That can be a challenge, but it's also an amazing opportunity. It's the same lesson Eloqua taught me: the best deals start with people who are already using you.

If you're launching something new, here's the short version:

  1. Follow the demand you're already seeing, and frame it as an experiment.
  2. Put the product where your buyer already works.
  3. Sell first to the teams already using you. Skip cold outbound to people who haven't felt the value.
  4. Size the market honestly, and know which slice you're going after.
  5. Protect the ecosystem your growth depends on.

Pete Ryan works on Growth at Supabase. He's a two-time VC-backed founder (HiFive, Gogohire), led enterprise sales at Trello, and started LinkedIn Sales Solutions as one of LinkedIn's first sales hires, running SMB sales for it as Head of SMB Sales. He's based in Austin, Texas. More at heypeteryan.com.

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