What will you learn today?

In this blog post you’re going to learn about what LinkedIn Sales Navigator is, the main benefits it provides, and the main features that make it worthwhile. You’ll also learn about how to use it effectively in your prospecting efforts, the difference between Sales Nav. Pro and Teams, bottom line, if it’s worth your coin.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator or “Sales Nav” as it’s frequently called, is a sales management tool, with access to LinkedIn’s vast network of over 740 million users.

Sales Navigator allows you to search for leads for business to business lead generation. It’s perfect if you need to find prospective customers based on your Ideal Customer Persona. You can indicate the exact types of prospective customers you’re looking for, using its search criteria. LinkedIn lead generation is made easy with filters like keywords, geography, your relationship (or how you’re connected to the prospect,) industry, school, profile language, first name, last name, and more.

Once you’ve found prospects you want to reach out to, you can save them to a prospecting list, and even tell LinkedIn when you’d like to receive updates to that list. From there, based on your LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription, you can sync your data to the CRM of your choice, or reach out to the prospects of choice with a LinkedIn InMail.

With more advanced plans, you can also send content through LinkedIn which you can track for engagement, and even see your prospecting metrics at scale with their reporting feature.

Get Accurate Leads,
Emails & Phone Numbers

Simple to set up. Easy to use. Powerful integrations.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Features

When evaluating LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s important to understand its features in full.

Here is a list of features that come with each of their three different subscription plans, Professional, Team, and Enterprise.

1. Access to LinkedIn Subscriptions

Job Seeker, LinkedIn Learning Access
LinkedIn Job Seeker is a feature that allows you to appear at the top of any list of job applicants on LinkedIn, which can be a serious advantage if you’re hot on the prowl for a new career.
LinkedIn Learning Access (formerly Lynda.com) is a platform which allows you to grow your skillset with over 16,000 courses on everything to Learning Python, SQL Essential Training or Learning Data Analysis.
Plan: Professional

2. Extended Network Access

Unlimited search, Saved searches, Who’s viewed your profile in the past 90 days
Unlimited Search: Search for anyone on the LinkedIn platform by name or by one of LinkedIn’s many helpful search filters. There’s no limit to how many searches you can perform.
Saved Searches: Saved Searches allow you to save your search criteria, which makes it easy to perform the same search, and pick up right where you left off in your LinkedIn prospecting list.

prospecting.
Who’s Viewed Your Profile in the Last 60 Days: The feature is exactly what it sounds like. LinkedIn provides you a list of all of the people who have viewed your profile, unless they’ve turned on their privacy settings
Plan: Professional | Team | Enterprise

3. Reach out

InMail
InMails are the equivalent of emails that you can send on the LinkedIn platform to other LinkedIn users. This may be the biggest drawback of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Access to prospects must be conducted through the LinkedIn platform, and is limited to a maximum of 20 – 50 messages a month, depending on your plan. With the average SDR averaging 60 calls a day, it’s difficult to make much impact with so limited InMails, and when you’re limited to messaging prospects on LinkedIn (which has an 18% response rate, according to recent LinkedIn statistics).

Use InMail to do cold outreach on LinkedIn and gain an advantage over other sales reps who don’t use it! 

Plan: Professional – 20 Month | Team – 30 Month | Enterprise – 50 Month

4. Find the right people

Advanced search, sales spotlights
Advanced search:
Allows you to conduct your LinkedIn search, and build prospecting lists, based on search filters. You can indicate the exact types of prospective customers you’re looking for, using LinkedIn’s search criteria, searching for customers with filters like keywords, geography, your relationship (or how you’re connected to the prospect,) industry, school, profile language, first name, last name, and more.
Sales Spotlight:
Sales Spotlight is a feature which dog ears certain prospects above your search results. These are the prospects that may be most inclined to receive your InMails, according to LinkedIn’s data.
Plan: Professional | Team | Enterprise

5. Prioritize and qualify

Lead and account recommendations, sales preferences
Lead and account recommendations:
Based on the information you’ve already saved in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn will make recommendations about leads and key accounts to target.
Sales Preferences:
This is a helpful feature that allows you to indicate to LinkedIn which leads you’d like to see based on region, industry, function, and more. You can save multiple preferences, which will allow LinkedIn to make lead and account recommendations.
Plan: Professional | Team | Enterprise

6. Integrate with your sales tools

SNAP, Outlook web integration, Sales Navigator mobile app
SNAP:
SNAP stands for the Sales Navigator Application Platform, a limited-access program that allows you to submit your integration for LinkedIn’s review. According to LinkedIn, the integrations which will be considered are those which can deliver value to LinkedIn customers and allow for joint overlap with Sales Navigator.
Outlook Web Integration:
This allows Outlook users to receive highlights of an upcoming meeting automatically.
Sales Navigator Mobile App:
This allows you to access LinkedIn Sales Navigator main features via mobile. Key features include real-time updates, discovering new leads and accounts, reaching out to leads via InMail, saving new leads after connecting, and logging all of your activities in your Salesforce CRM (provided you’re on an applicable plan).
Plan: Professional | Team – SNAP for Team and Enterprise only | Enterprise – SNAP for Team and Enterprise only

7. Keep track of people and companies

Saved leads/accounts, Custom lists, Alerts, Notes
Saved leads/accounts:
Save up to 10,000 leads and accounts in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and up to 25 at a time.
Custom lists:
Organize your existing workflows, and manage your leads, accounts, and even your existing clients.
Alerts:
This feature gives you up-to-date information about saved leads and accounts.
Notes:
Store relevant notes and action items about saved accounts and leads.
Plan: Professional | Team | Enterprise – Buyer Interest alerts for Enterprise only

8. Engage with your prospects and customers using your team’s network

TeamLink, TeamLink Extend
TeamLink:
Allows you to view your team’s connections for those with Sales Navigator Team or Enterprise.
TeamLink Extend:
Increase the size of your network without giving remembers full access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Plan: Team – Only users on your contract | Enterprise – Users on your contract + 1000 others in your company TeamLink Extend

9. Advanced outreach – Package content and track engagement

Smart Links
Smart Links:
Smart Links allow you to share content with prospects and track engagement of that content.
Plan: Team | Enterprise

10. Administrative tools/Reporting

Usage Reporting, Account Center
User Reporting:
This is information an administrator can use to track usage, engagement, and adoption of the platform.
Account Center:
This allows admins to manage their user licenses and groups with ease.
Plan: Team | Enterprise

11. Centralized billing for contracts sold through LinkedIn corporate sales

Volume and multi-year discounts, invoicing, dedicated relationship manager
Volume and Multi-year discounts:
Click the “Enterprise” button to speak to a dedicated relationship manager, who can assist with volume and multi-year discounts for LinkedIn Sales Navigator plans.
Invoicing:
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides you with many helpful invoicing features, like viewing and printing receipts for your plan of choice. LinkedIn can also provide a copy of your contract, to change the name or address on your corporate billing, and more.
Dedicated Relationship Manager:
This is a personal sales rep that can help you through an enterprise sales process for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, works with you on a price offer, RFP, and can provide you with a personalized sales experience.
Plan: Team | Enterprise

12. CRM Sync

Auto-Save, Activity Writeback, & ROI Reporting for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sale
Auto-save:
This allows you to save your prospecting leads and accounts to your CRM in a single click.
Activity writeback:
This is a feature that allows you to save messages from InMails, Messages, Notes, and more from LinkedIn in your CRM.
ROI reporting for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and 365 Sale:
This is helpful reporting for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics and 365 sale users, which allows you to tie LinkedIn Sales Navigator to revenue generated.
Plan: Team | Enterprise

13. Enterprise tools

SSO, Employee Data Integration
SSO:
This allows you to sign into LinkedIn using your corporate credentials, rather than your LinkedIn account information.
Employee Data Integration:
This is mainly for the account administrator, and allows them to manage LinkedIn Sales Navigator licenses. You can add seats manually, add groups to a CSV file, change seat holder account permissions, remove seat holders, and more.
Plan: Enterprise

Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Biggest available B2B Network:

With one of the largest professional networks on earth, over 740 million prospects, LinkedIn has a serious advantage – being the social network of choice for business professionals to do business.

Because of this, LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it possible to find almost anyone in B2B.

Advanced Updates:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes it not only easy to create prospect lists according to your Ideal Customer Persona, but receive updates on important LinkedIn activity. This could be anything like a change of jobs, a news mention of their company, and even more granular changes like when they LinkedIn post. This gives you a great reason to reach out and reconnect with prospects who have gone cold, or engage with new ones.

Excellent Search Features, List Creation, Saved Searches, and View Similar

These are some of the features that make the platform stand out. The sheer number of search filters makes it easy to find customers in your ICP with ease.

Additionally, the ability to save searches, have LinkedIn update you when new prospects are found for that saved list, and the ability to view “similar” prospects to those that you have just found, give you endless possibilities to find those potential prospects.

The Biggest Pitfalls of the Platform

The Biggest Pitfalls of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform, is that the number of InMails is incredibly limited, ranging between 20-50 per month, when the average SDR needs to average 60 calls a day to make numbers. Additionally, with only an 18% response rate, there’s simply not enough value in sending InMails to new prospects which may or may not accept your InMail request – leaving you (and your sales results) hanging.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Lusha Extension for LinkedIn

In order to maximize the value of LinkedIn Sales navigator, and to use it effectively, we recommend pairing it with Lusha Extension for LinkedIn.

Lusha Extension for LinkedIn is a Google Chrome Extension that allows you to solve the problem of “not enough LinkedIn Inmails” by allowing you to make a direct connection with your prospect. To Clarify: Lusha is not a LinkedIn product nor has any association with LinkedIn.

After downloading the Lusha Extension for LinkedIn, simply find the prospect you want to reach out to in LinkedIn. Next, click the Lusha extension and, in one click, Lusha will show you all available contact data it has in its database, including direct dials and email addresses. With this information, you can reach out and speak to prospects wherever they’re working from, and make a direct connection.

You can also export LinkedIn contacts and easily create prospecting lists for your marketing and sales teams. 

From there, you can automatically save your prospect’s information into your CRM, like Hubspot, Zoho, or Salesforce, or Sales Automation tool of choice, like Outreach, Pipedrive, or Salesloft.

Lusha is the easiest way to find someone’s email address on LinkedIn, unless it’s in the About section of their LinkedIn profile. It’s fast, free to sign up for, with 5 free contact leads every single month. There are so many additional ways to earn free leads (we call them credits at Lusha,) that it makes it an absolute no-brainer. And, when paired in tandem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you get to experience the best of both worlds. Create lists of thousands of prospects with ease, and use Lush to supplement the missing contact data, make a direct connection, update your CRM, and speed up your sales cycle. Lusha Extension for LinkedIn combined with LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the most powerful sales prospecting tools, and the most effective way to conduct your .

Sales navigator professional vs. team vs. enterprise

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, there are three plans you can choose from, professional, team, and Enterprise.

Sales Navigator Professional, Team, and Enterprise are all outlined above, including all of their features and an in-depth explanation of every feature, as of December 2021.

At a glance, here are the key differences between the three plans:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Professional gives you all of the basic features, including the ability to perform advanced prospect searches based on advanced filters, create custom lists, and save searches. You also get 20 InMails a month.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Team plans provide you with all of the features found in Pro, plus the ability to share content and track its engagement, as well as create “warm introductions” from teammates, which gets you one step closer to Mrs. Hard to Reach Prospect. Combined with 30 InMails a month.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Enterprise provides you with all of the features found in Pro and Team plans, plus the added value of CRM updates, data validation, SSO, and advanced enterprise integrations. Add 50 InMails a month, with pricing that’s customized depending on the number of licenses and years you wish to purchase, and you’re sitting pretty with your prospecting.
Does LinkedIn Sales Navigator include LinkedIn Premium?

Yes, as of September 2021, LinkedIn made a decision to provide LinkedIn Sales Navigator users with Premium Career subscription at no additional cost. According to LinkedIn, LinkedIn Career allows you to get hired 2x as fast with its service, and claims that InMailing a recruiter using its Premium Career service is 2.6x as effective as email alone. It’s definitely a nice add on, and is great that it’s included in the price tag. Please note, that if you cancel your LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription, you will also lose access to LinkedIn Premium Career.

Bottom Line – is  Sales Navigator worth it?

Bottom Line: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful prospecting tool, which leverages LinkedIn’s network of almost 750 million business contacts. With advanced search filters, saved searches, the ability to create lists, save thousands of prospects at once, receive updates based on prospect and account activity of your choosing, this is a prospecting tool that’s an excellent resource.

While it’s an excellent start to your prospecting, its main pitfalls lie in the fact that connection must be made through the LinkedIn platform, via InMail. With InMails in short supply, ranging between 20-50 per month per license, you’re going to need more than that to hit your numbers. Additionally, you’re restricted to the LinkedIn platform, which means a prospect can keep you at arm’s length, or just decide never to accept your InMail, leaving you out in the cold.

When you combine LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Lusha Extension for LinkedIn, you allow yourself to leverage the strength of the LinkedIn network, and supplement your prospecting efforts with Lusha’s accurate B2B contact data. Whether you want to call your prospect by direct dial or you choose to email them, as long as the information is in the Lusha database, it’s easy to prospect your way. Lusha is also free to sign up for, with no credit card needed, and provides 5 free leads a month, making it an attractive option to prospect in tandem with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Liked reading this article? spread the word

Stay up-to-data on the latest in sales & marketing with our newsletter.

    Thank you for subscribing

    This information should not be mistaken for legal advice. Please ensure that you are prospecting and selling in compliance with all applicable laws.

    Reach your ideal customer with Lusha