LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid subscription service from LinkedIn that provides sales professionals with additional tools and information to help them find and connect with potential customers. The core benefit of Sales Navigator is giving salespeople access to detailed profiles and contact information for leads, allowing them to research and connect with prospects more effectively.
What does a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription include?
A LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription includes:
- Advanced search filters to find leads based on company, location, industry, job function, and more
- Contact information for leads including direct phone numbers and email addresses
- Lead recommendations surfaced through LinkedIn’s algorithms
- Newsfeed tracking to follow prospects’ LinkedIn activity
- Teamlink collaboration tools
- Unlimited InMail messages to contact prospects directly
- Summary profiles on prospects to quickly understand their background
- Saved lead lists and reminders for follow up
In essence, Sales Navigator gives sales reps a detailed dashboard to manage their most relevant prospects and accounts in one place. It enhances the basic LinkedIn experience with more robust profiling capabilities and tracking tools to streamline the sales process.
What are the benefits of Sales Navigator?
Here are some of the key benefits of a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription:
- Improved lead targeting – Sales Navigator makes it easier to identify your ideal prospects based on filters like industry, job role, company size, location, and more. This allows sales reps to focus their efforts on the leads most likely to convert rather than taking a spray-and-pray approach.
- More access to contact info – Getting direct contact info like email addresses and phone numbers is hugely beneficial. Sales Navigator provides this critical data to subscribe members.
- Lead recommendations – LinkedIn’s algorithms will automatically recommend relevant prospects based on your target accounts, saved searches, and profile. This surfaces new leads sales reps may have otherwise missed.
- Prospecting productivity – By combining many prospecting activities in one place – search, outreach, tracking, reminders – Sales Navigator makes sales reps more efficient by streamlining workflows.
- Team collaboration – With TeamLink features, sales teams can share accounts, leads, and opportunities with each other in Sales Navigator for improved collaboration.
Overall, Sales Navigator optimizes many of the tasks associated with sales prospecting to help teams find and land new business more quickly and efficiently.
What are the pricing options?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers four paid subscription tiers:
Professional
- Ideal for individual sales reps and small teams
- Starts at $64.99/month billed annually
- Up to 30 Lead Recommendations per month
- 3 TeamLink shared lead lists
- Unlimited InMail credits
Team
- Designed for medium sales teams
- Starts at $97.99/month billed annually
- Up to 50 Lead Recommendations per month
- 10 TeamLink shared lead lists
- Unlimited InMail credits
Business
- Built for larger, fast-growing sales teams
- Starts at $144.99/month billed annually
- Up to 75 Lead Recommendations per month
- 25 TeamLink shared lead lists
- Unlimited InMail credits
Enterprise
- For sales organizations with 500+ employees
- Annual contract required, custom pricing
- Unlimited Lead Recommendations
- Unlimited TeamLink shared lead lists
- Unlimited InMail credits
Volume discounts are available on the Team, Business, and Enterprise tiers. There are also options to pay monthly rather than annual contracts.
Is Sales Navigator worth the cost?
At $65-$145/month for individual sales reps, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a considerable SaaS investment. Is it worth the price? Here are some key factors to consider:
- For reps doing a high volume of outbound prospecting, the time savings of having robust lead contact info, lead recommendations, and tracking can add up to major productivity gains and justify the cost.
- However, sales teams that rely more heavily on inbound leads may find less use for some Sales Navigator capabilities.
- For larger sales teams, volume discounts on the Team, Business, and Enterprise tiers improve the ROI.
- Companies should analyze how many hours per week reps are spending on manual prospecting tasks that Sales Navigator could optimize.
- Looking at the potential value of landing 1-2 extra new accounts per month due to improved productivity could outweigh the subscription costs.
- For startups and smaller companies, the Professional tier offers core benefits that may deliver ROI at lower price point.
Overall the value depends greatly on each sales organization’s size, outbound prospecting processes, and existing productivity levels.Those with extensive outbound efforts can benefit most from Sales Navigator optimization and automation features. But the costs may be harder to justify for teams focused on inbound lead follow up.
How does Sales Navigator compare to other sales tools?
Here is how LinkedIn Sales Navigator stacks up against some other popular sales automation and intelligence tools on the market:
Tool | Key Features | Price |
---|---|---|
LinkedIn Sales Navigator | Lead recommendations, contact info, newsfeed tracking, TeamLink, InMail, prospect profiles | $65-$145/month |
Outreach.io | Email/call cadences, templates, sequence builder, analytics | $600+/month |
SalesLoft | Email/phone workflows, sales engagement platform, dialer integration, reporting | $100-$500/month |
Apollo.io | Chrome extension for LinkedIn automation, email finder, bulk messaging | $99-$199/month |
Luminate | AI-powered lead data cleansing, analytics, predictive lead scoring | $500+/month |
Seamless.ai | Meeting scheduler, email productivity, analytics | $29-$99/month |
Compared to more robust sales engagement platforms like Outreach and SalesLoft, LinkedIn Sales Navigator focuses specifically on lead intelligence and prospecting capabilities. It offers less workflow automation for outbound messaging at a lower price point. For sales teams already using a CRM or engagement tool, Sales Navigator can provide complementary lead research and targeting capabilities.
Conclusion
LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides valuable data enrichment on prospects to improve outbound sales prospecting efforts. For sales teams and reps who spend significant time on manual lead research and outreach, Sales Navigator’s suite of targeting, contact lookup, tracking, and collaboration features can drive real productivity gains. However, the subscription costs can add up, so companies should closely evaluate the volume of prospecting work that Sales Navigator would aim to optimize and automate based on their current sales processes. Overall, it remains one of the most popular sales intelligence tools on the market due to LinkedIn’s unparalleled professional data set.
Some key factors on the value proposition include:
- Volume of outbound prospecting activity
- Current productivity and workflow efficiency levels
- Potential value of landing additional new accounts from improved prospecting
- Size of sales team to take advantage of bulk discounts
- Complementary tech stack e.g. existing sales engagement platforms
Organizations with extensive outbound efforts stand to benefit the most from Sales Navigator’s capabilities and unlock significant return on investment. But those with more inbound leads may find less use cases from the subscription.