LinkedIn's Lead Accelerator Product: Analyst Review

In a report published Tuesday, Macquarie Research analysts maintained an Outperform rating on LinkedIn Corp (NYSE: LNKD), with a price target of $248, after the company gave a demo of its Lead Accelerator (LA) product.

The Lead Accelerator or LA aims to leverage LinkedIn's huge member database and build a sales pipeline through customized email messages, online mobile display and social media. "LA's "nurturing" element is similar to other re-targeting solutions in the marketplace, but cleverly leverages LinkedIn.com member data to turn a B2B site's massive amount of nameless/faceless web traffic into a database of addressable leads," the analysts commented.

LinkedIn's new product is subscription-based and can be "turned on, and left on." The pricing of the product will be dependent on the number of people being targeted. The intro price of $1.60 per year includes data, software access, media, etc.

Some unique features of LA are the integration of the LinkedIn member data and other marketing automation tools like Eoqua/Marketo.

The decline in LinkedIn's share price after the company's 1Q results was overdone, according to Macquarie Research. "For one, the salesforce re-org was done with the LT health and up-sell potential of the business in mind. Lost 1Q Talent Solutions bookings will impact LNKD's P&L for a couple more qtrs, but we'd expect a relatively quick recovery in terms of bookings/dollar churn," the analysts mentioned.

LinkedIn has a robust product pipeline for 2016 and the company plans to expand in China, test new inside the enterprise offerings besides entering the $30 billion Learning Development market.