According to its quarterly earnings report announced yesterday, the company saw a surprising acceleration in its growth rate during its second quarter of the 2014 fiscal year.

The professional social networking giant announced plans to focus on target sales teams, having been unsatisfied with the results from just corporate recruiters.

The company also revealed a new redesigned and improved version of its Sales Navigator software. LinkedIn will offer this service on its own as a subscription service. Prior to this announcement on Thursday, the Sales Navigator software was a part of LinkedIn’s main services and was directly primarily towards individual users. According to the company, the new software will cater to salespeople by searching LinkedIn’s 313 million user database, suggest potential customers for salespeople, find mutual acquaintances and connections, and help introduce the two parties.

For the second quarter, the company reported an increase in revenue of 47%, from last year’s $363.7 million to $534 million. This growth rate is slightly quicker than its growth rate during the first quarter, which was 46%.

However, the company was unable to turn a profit, and reported a net loss of $1 million. This is partially due to its acquisition in February of Bright, a company that makes use of data to connect job searchers with employers. In the same quarter last year, LinkedIn reported a profit of $3.7 million.

Excluding these costs, LinkedIn claimed that it would have earned $0.51 per share, and increase from the $0.38 per share one year earlier. Analysts had forecasted earnings of $0.39 per share.

Additionally, LinkedIn’s membership count increased from 296 million to 313 million in the first quarter of 2014. Unique visitors increased by a slight margin, but its total page views dropped from 26.9 billion views last quarter to 25.4 billion views this quarter.

The company’s chief financial officer, Steve Sordello, attributed this tumble in page views to the atypically high engagement that the company experienced in the prior quarter, due to the site’s new features.

After dropping 3.5% to $180.64 during day time trading, the company’s shares increased 7.5% in after hours trading. Over the past year, LinkedIn’s stock price has decreased 13%, which reflects weakening revenue growth rate.

According to the company, traffic from mobile devices make up 45% of its overall traffic, an increase from the 43% last quarter.

The company’s growth was likely supported by its mainstay Talent Solutions unit, which provides services to corporate recruiters and staffers for human resources. In that unit alone, revenue grew 49% to $322 million, accounting for about 60% of the company’s overall revenue. Revenue from advertising increased to 44% to $106 million. Premium subscription revenues grew 44% to $105 million.

An analysts from Sterne Agee stated that LinkedIn’s results were one of the best that the company has reported over the past 1.5 years. He believes that the company’s expansion into China earlier this year could yield long term profits and growth. Additionally, he praised the company’s new sales product as a good method for future growth as well.

With its deepening focus on sales, LinkedIn is trying to break into a huge market and drive its growth upwards. Back in May, the company’s chief executive Jeff Weiner announced that the company was involving itself in more research and development in the sales software business, and generated much excitement for a new lead generation service.

The new program could usher in new period of social selling, where salespeople use social media to learn about the thinking of potential buyers, find them, and get connected via common members of their networks of connections. The CEO of LinkedIn predicts that the sales tools of LinkedIn could possibly grow to be as large as the company’s recruiting business.

An analyst from JP Morgan stated that he saw promising prospects for LinkedIn’s new product, and sees it as more functional than previous versions in that it can be sold primarily to companies, instead of individuals.

According to a partner at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm, the concept of using machine learning technology to aid salespeople to develop leads is a rapidly growing and lucrative space.

Now that LinkedIn is moving into sales, it will need to compete against the leader in the sales industry, Salesforce.com.

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