SalesLoft and the Tracking Pixel

Whilst working with a Client, I needed to do some troubleshooting on a member of the Sales Teams laptop. So began my introduction to something called LinkedIn Team which is a Sales targeted version of LinkedIn. SalesLoft and the Tracking Pixel.

With regards to LinkedIn Team, in all honesty, this wasn’t a huge surprise, there had to be a reason that Microsoft wanted to drop a cool $26b on a professional social network.

SalesLoft on the other hand, was completely new to me.

Troubleshooting

In order to troubleshoot a problem, one of the Sales people ran me through a typical lead generation strategy, this involved multiple steps but a big part of the work was scraping data from publicly available sources, like LinkedIn.

I knew that this was happening already, I often receive InMail’s email from someone that has no direct link to my network but feels we have enough in common to propose a shared LinkedIn Network.

LinkedIn Teams

LinkedIn Teams allows a team of sales folks to pool their connections and by relationship, get access to their connections networks.

For sales teams who want to harness the power of their shared network to build client relationships.

Essentially they are cheating. If I connect to just one person in that sales team, their whole team can see my details and the details of anyone in my network.

In this particular case, the sales person only wanted the connection in order to access the new connections network and to scrape job titles, names and contact info, or take the data that is publicly available and then scour other sources for data that may be hidden on LinkedIn (like the contact details for example).

This access to data, data scraping and data engineering eventually gives the sales folks a pretty powerful sales tool for targeted campaigns. LinkedIn is generally innocent here, but they are an enabler, they clearly know what people are doing with this data else they wouldn’t offer such a plan in the first place.

SalesLoft

SalesLoft made it to my blog title for similar reason, not for data scraping, or manipulating LinkedIn fair use policies, but for ways of tracking sales emails with no regard for the recipients privacy.

Again, following through the process with the sales person, I could see how the tracking pixel was being used by SalesLoft to record details such as:

• Mail Delivered
• Mail Read
• Mail Marked as (Read/Unread/Junk)
• Mail moved to Trash
• etc

Of course, SalesLoft aren’t alone here, many companies use tracking pixels to figure out what you’re doing with their emails.

The sales team-member would orchestrate a cadence via SalesLoft which has permission to send and receive email on this users behalf. The Salesperson then builds a cadence which defines a structure, sequence and frequency of mailshots that are highly targeted and appear quite personal (from a named person to a named person). If you’ve ever seen a mail merge in Microsoft Word (for example), it’s kind of like that but on steroids.

When the email arrives at the recipient, the salesperson receives a notification. Even before the user has been given a chance to send a read receipt for example.

This is accomplished through the use of Tracking Pixels or sometimes known as Web Beacons.

The Tracking Pixel

Web beacons embedded in emails have greater privacy implications than beacons embedded in web pages. Through the use of an embedded beacon, the sender of an email - or even a third party - can record the same sort of information as an advertiser on a website, namely the time that the email was read, the IP address of the computer that was used to read the email (or the IP address of the proxy server that the reader went through), the type of software used to read the email, and the existence of any cookies previously sent. In this way, the sender - or a third party - can gather detailed information about when and where each particular recipient reads their email. Every subsequent time the email message is displayed, the same information can also be sent again to the sender or third party.

“Return-Receipt-To” (RRT) email headers can also trigger sending of information and these may be seen as another form of a web beacon.

Web beacons are used by email marketers, spammers, and phishers to verify that an email is read. Using this system, they can send similar emails to a large number of addresses and then check which ones are valid. Valid in this case means that the address is actually in use, that the email has made it past spam filters, and that the content of the email is actually viewed.