LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool in the hands of a skilled sales professional that can transform prospecting from a miserable hit-and-miss slog into an effortlessly targeted process overnight.
But in untrained hands, it can be a staggering waste of time and money that sends innocent users down gimmicky rabbit holes that don’t justify the hype!
So let’s make sure you’re in the first category and not the second: here’s everything you need to know about LinkedIn Sales Navigator in 2022.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid-for service designed to help users with sales prospecting, by:
LinkedIn Premium is a different paid-for service, which is mainly aimed at jobseekers - but which includes some of the same features as Sales Navigator.
Both let you:
But Sales Navigator has far more functionality, as we’ll explore in the rest of this blog.
LinkedIn Premium isn’t exactly cheap, at £29.99 per month. But Sales Navigator is even more pricy (although there’s a month’s free trial available):
Those prices are for people who pay annually. If you want to pay month-by-month, you’re looking at $99.99 per month for the Core service and $159.99 per month for Advanced. We’ll look at the differences later on.
With a price tag like that, LinkedIn Sales Navigator had better be good, right?
And it is...
If you know how to make the most of it and you use it properly.
Where Sales Navigator excels is in the scope it offers for building out lists of people who fit your ideal client profile. It has some exceptionally useful filters for customizing your searches and finding things to start conversations around, such as:
There is even a “view similar” function: when you find a perfect lead, this will show you others who fit that profile.
Plus, when you’ve saved that list, Sales Navigator can alert you to a whole range of events concerning those leads and their companies.
Those are the best bits.
And if you work in B2B prospecting, you’ll know how important it is to be able to find the right people and get onto their radar. Sales Navigator can’t be beaten for that.
Where it’s less effective is in the tools it provides you with for actually reaching out and nurturing those leads.
Before we begin, you need to understand the difference between a “search” and a “list”:
You can create Account lists (of companies) as well as Lead lists (of individuals).
Sales Navigator has more than 20 different filters to refine your searches with.
Apart from those which concern the leads’ relationship to you (Connection, Connections Of, School, Activities and Shared Experiences, Past Company, TeamLink Connections Of), the most useful tend to be:
A few words of caution about some of the other filters though:
There’s a separate set of filters for Account searches:
Clearly, “Industry” doesn’t have the same problem for Accounts as it does for Leads, but there are other things to be aware of:
The best way to build a list of people fitting your ideal client profile in Sales Navigator is pretty roundabout, to say the least. This is it:
Using the Account filters shown above, identify the dimensions of your ideal client businesses.
Run the search to get a list of companies fitting the bill, and save these to create an Account list.
Now use the Lead filters to sketch out your ideal customer job role, in terms of title, seniority, function, etc. Don’t include anything that relates to the company they work for in this search - just focus on the role.
Under the “Workflow” section of Lead filters, you’ll see an option called “Account list”. Add this as a filter and select the Account list created in Step #1.
Et voila! Sales Navigator will return all the people working at your ideal companies in the appropriate roles. Finally, save them to a Lead list.
You can use the same process for creating a blacklist or exclusions list (eg to omit potential leads from companies you already work with):
When you first sign up for Sales Navigator, you’ll be asked for your “Sales Preferences”.
Don’t just click on a load of random criteria to get past this bit. It’s not like you’re telling Reddit what you’re interested in here… 🤣🤣🤣.
On the contrary, these Sales Preferences determine what’s going to come up on your home page Alerts dashboard.
This is separate from your searches and lists. Its main value is as a source of recommendations - about people and businesses that may be of interest to you.
That’s handy, but it’s the other kinds of notifications - or “Spotlights” - that are crucial here.
On the one hand, you can pin priority Accounts to your home page to display changes to their data that interests you - for example, new decision-makers who have joined the business within a set period.
On the other, you can view these insights on a saved list, enabling you to filter by one of several sets of dynamic criteria:
Posting on LinkedIn, sharing past experiences, and following your company all provide great starting points for conversations.
So, this part of the Sales Navigator toolkit can be excellent for picking the right moment at which to engage with a potential lead.
OK, we’re going to go out on a limb here. InMail sounds great, but it isn’t.
Yes, it’s great to be able to reach out to people you’re not connected to, but:
Given that you can send as many messages as you like to people you are connected to, it makes a lot more sense to nurture a lead using the intelligence Sales Navigator provides and use this to get them to connect than to reach out using a limited supply of second-class messages.
Another tool of ambivalent value is the ability to send Smart Links, which is available only on the Advanced package and above.
How do they work? Like this:
That’s actually how Sendspark works:
Although Smart Links allows you to share other types of content besides video, it has one major weakness. When a user clicks on the Smart Link, they’re asked if they consent to data collection before they’re shown the asset.
That extra click will cost you a lot of viewers! Why not just upload the asset to a subdomain on your own site and share from there?
We’ve already mentioned a few of the differences between the packages, but here’s a summary of the main points.
All packages:
Advanced and above:
Enterprise:
See the full comparison table here.
And that, dear readers, is how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator!
Although…
It’s not the whole story.
Let’s face it: Sales Navigator doesn’t make it much easier for you to reach out to all these wonderful leads you’ve identified than regular LinkedIn. If you need to reach out to large numbers of people fast, rather than patiently hunting a select few over a long period, Sales Navigator alone may not be enough.
So, what a lot of users actually do is scrape their lead lists using LinkedIn automation tools like Expandi to message them at scale.
While using automation tools like this is contrary to LinkedIn’s terms of service, it’d be kind of crazy to not mention it when talking about how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator!
If you’re not going to engage in such naughtiness, then you need LinkedIn prospecting videos to help make your InMails and connection requests grab leads’ attention and get them into conversation.
Sendspark makes it easy to get started with LinkedIn video prospecting. Ready to get started? Sign up now.