LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium subscription-based tool from LinkedIn designed to help sales professionals identify, connect with, and close more deals. With over 800 million members on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator helps salespeople tap into LinkedIn’s massive professional network to build relationships and generate more leads.
But at $79.99 per month for an individual license, Sales Navigator doesn’t come cheap. So is it really worth the investment for sales professionals and teams?
What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an add-on subscription service to a LinkedIn Professional account. It provides sales professionals with the following key features:
- Advanced search and filtering tools to identify your ideal prospects on LinkedIn
- Lead recommendations based on your ideal customer profile
- Notification when leads view your profile or content
- Contact information and lead insights on prospects
- Team linkage tools to identify connections across your team
- Lead tracking and saved lead list functionality
- Email templates and automated InMail sequences
- Sales analytics on your LinkedIn activity and performance
In summary, Sales Navigator aims to enhance a salesperson’s ability to identify, connect with, and close more deals through the power of the LinkedIn network. It does this by leveraging LinkedIn’s extensive profile data and network effects.
Key Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Here are some of the key benefits that LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides:
More Targeted Lead Search
Sales Navigator makes it much easier to identify your ideal prospects on LinkedIn through advanced search filters and saved searches. You can filter LinkedIn members by geography, company, job role, skills, groups and many other parameters to drill down to your target list.
Lead Recommendations
The platform proactively recommends leads for you to connect with through its lead recommendations engine. It leverages the depth of data on LinkedIn profiles to suggest leads that are most likely to convert based on your ideal customer profile.
Real-Time Lead Alerts
Sales Navigator alerts you in real-time when your target prospects are active on LinkedIn. This includes alerts when leads view your profile, make changes to their profiles, publish content and more.
Connection Insights
The tool provides helpful insights on prospects such as the best way to approach them, what you have in common, what interests them, and news mentions. This enables you to better personalize your outreach.
Team Linking
You can link your Sales Navigator account with your sales team to uncover connections across your team to leads and accounts. This helps coordinate outreach and leverage existing relationships.
Lead Tracking & Management
Sales Navigator makes it easy to track prospect engagement and activity history so you can focus your efforts on hot leads. You can also save leads into customized lists to segment and prioritize outreach.
Email Integration & Sequences
The platform allows you to integrate your email account to track email engagement with prospects. You can also leverage pre-built email templates and set up automated email sequences to scale personalized outreach.
Sales Analytics & Reports
Robust analytics help you track your Sales Navigator activity and performance over time. Useful reports provide insight into how you’re progressing towards your sales goals.
Who is Sales Navigator For?
Sales Navigator is designed primarily for B2B sales teams who sell to a targeted list of accounts and prospects. It is best suited for sales roles that can benefit from leveraging the breadth of LinkedIn’s professional network data including:
- Account Executives / Sales Representatives
- Business Development Professionals
- Lead Generation Specialists
- Sales & Marketing Leadership
- Sales Operations Professionals
- Sales Development Representatives
- Staffing / Recruiting Professionals
Sales Navigator empowers these professionals to tap into the power of LinkedIn to identify ideal prospects, obtain contact details, gain account insights, and build relationships at scale.
What Size Teams Does Sales Navigator Work Best for?
Sales Navigator is built to help sales teams of any size increase their productivity and performance. Here is an overview of its fit for different team sizes:
Individual Sales Professionals
The Sales Navigator Individual plan at $79.99 per month is designed for sales professionals who want to leverage LinkedIn by themselves. The individual plan allows you to benefit from lead recommendations, alerts, and analytics to boost your personal outreach.
Small Sales Teams
For small teams of up to 10 salespeople, the Sales Navigator Team plan at $79.99 per user per month helps them work together through team linking, alert sharing, and group analytics.
Medium & Large Teams
For larger teams of 10+ people, Sales Navigator provides enterprise plans to align personalized outreach at scale. Premium features like API access, custom analytics, and dedicated account management help drive performance.
Prospect Lists of Any Size
Whether you’re trying to connect with a targeted prospect list of 100 accounts or a database of 100,000 leads, Sales Navigator’s robust search and filtering makes it possible. The platform scales to help teams of any size identify and connect with their target accounts.
What is the Ideal Customer Profile for Sales Navigator?
Sales Navigator delivers the most value for companies that align with this ideal customer profile:
- B2B focused organizations with considered sales cycles
- Companies selling complex, high-value products or services
- Businesses with targeted lists of target accounts and contacts to pursue
- Companies that value leveraging social selling and relationships in the sales process
- Organizations with existing presence on LinkedIn seeking to maximize it
- Sales teams with capacity to process and pursue Sales Navigator leads
- Businesses with budget to invest in sales tools to boost performance
The more your organization aligns with these characteristics, the higher the likelihood you will derive value from investing in Sales Navigator.
How Much Does LinkedIn Sales Navigator Cost?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers several tiers of pricing based on team size and features. Here is an overview of LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing:
Plan | Price Per User/Month | Best For |
---|---|---|
Individual | $79.99 | Individual sales professionals |
Team | $79.99 | Small teams up to 10 employees |
Business | Custom Quote | Medium sales teams from 10-100 employees |
Enterprise | Custom Quote | Large sales teams with 100+ employees |
Key things to note:
- Volume discounts available for larger teams
- Premium features like API access, custom analytics at Business & Enterprise tiers
- Dedicated account management and onboarding support at Enterprise tier
- Minimum one-year contract for Business & Enterprise packages
Pricing may vary by location. Contact LinkedIn Sales Navigator sales for customized quote.
What is the Cost-Benefit Analysis of Sales Navigator?
The cost-benefit analysis of Sales Navigator will depend significantly on the size of your sales team and how well you leverage the platform. Here is an overview of investing in Sales Navigator based on team size:
Individuals
For an individual sales professional, the $79.99 per month price point may pay for itself if Sales Navigator helps you land 1-2 additional mid-market deals per year. The individual plan needs limited ramp up and training time, so ROI can come quick with proper usage.
Small Teams
For small teams up to 10 employees, Sales Navigator becomes cost effective if it helps increase sales productivity and velocity by 15-20%. The Team plan enables better collaboration and coordination for a small group. Sales Navigator pricing is reasonable up to 10 users.
Medium & Large Teams
With volume discounts and enterprise features, Sales Navigator pricing becomes more cost effective for sales teams of 10+ employees. Improved sales velocity, bigger deal sizes and shortened sales cycles need to outweigh the larger investment. But the platform scales well, so bigger teams can gain leverage.
Conducting a pilot first, tracking sales metrics pre and post Sales Navigator, and targeting high-value accounts helps medium and large teams maximize ROI.
Sales Navigator Alternatives
Some leading alternatives to LinkedIn Sales Navigator include:
LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn’s Recruiter product offers enhanced tools specifically for recruiters and talent acquisition at enterprise companies. Key features include InMail integration, candidate search, and pipeline management.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo provides in-depth B2B intelligence and lead contact data to identify prospects at targeted companies. It offers powerful filtering and list-building capabilities.
Outreach.io
Outreach provides a sales engagement platform supporting email, calling, and CRM workflow automation to streamline prospect outreach at scale.
Seamless.ai
Seamless is another sales engagement and email automation platform popular for its LinkedIn integration and tracking capabilities.
SalesLoft
SalesLoft focuses on sales cadences, email templates, and buyer engagement tracking to automate sales prospecting and outreach processes.
LeadIQ
LeadIQ specializes in finding and verifying B2B contact data like direct dials, email addresses and mailing addresses for inbound leads and prospects.
Conclusion
In summary, LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides a powerful set of tools for sales professionals aimed at leveraging the breadth of LinkedIn data to identify better prospects, gain customer insight, and build relationships more efficiently.
For individual salespeople, the platform can quickly create a positive ROI by enabling you to land more deals. The Value increases for sales teams who use it collaboratively and integrate it into their workflows.
While the larger Business and Enterprise plans require more significant investment, the sales productivity gains and volume discounts can make Sales Navigator cost-effective for big teams. And matched against the high cost of sales staff, the platform is reasonably priced for the leverage it provides.
For B2B sales organizations selling complex solutions, Sales Navigator integrates deeply into how they already use LinkedIn. And it operates as a true force multiplier by making social selling efficient at scale. The company, team size, and use cases make Sales Navigator a worthwhile investment for many sales teams.