Let’s get straight to the point. Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth it? 

The short answer is: Yes. Businesses who are serious about LinkedIn lead generation will go out of their way to buy Sales Navigator and use it.

Why? Because LinkedIn Sales Navigator removes any restrictions you would have on a normal LinkedIn account and grant you exclusive LinkedIn features to accelerate your lead generation and grow your business.

If that’s what you’re looking for, then you’ve come to the right, here, we will cover the following:

  • Why you should get Sales Navigator
  • Getting started with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Advanced Sales Navigator lead generation & must-have Lead Lists
  • Expert Sales Navigator hacks & multichannel approach

Why you should get LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Most people will see this image below and decide it’s time to upgrade their LinkedIn account, and most make the mistake of choosing LinkedIn Premium to remove the search limit, but that’s very basic.

To help you get a better idea, here’s what each package has to offer:

LinkedIn Premium:

  • Unlimited search
  • InMail credits
  • Profile insights

LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

  • Access to LinkedIn subscriptions
  • Unlimited search
  • InMails
  • Advanced search, sales spotlights
  • Lead and account recommendations, sales preferences
  • Tools integrations (email, SNAP, LinkedIn Sales Navigator
  • Saved leads/accounts, Custom Lead Lists, Alerts, Notes
  • TeamLink, TeamLink Extend
  • Advanced outreach – Package content and track engagement
  • Administrative tools/Reporting
  • Centralized billing for contracts sold through LinkedIn corporate sales
  • Enterprise tools (SSO, Employee Data Integration)
  • CRM Sync
  • Advanced CRM integrations

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Core, Advance, Advance Plus

LinkedIn now offers 3 separate Sales Navigator packages, so the list may vary in size, but you can already see that it’s much more than an unlimited search.

LinkedIn launched 3 new Sales Navigator packages.

Now you may look at the price and think “oof… that’s a lot of money every month” and you wouldn’t be wrong, but there have been case studies where businesses saw up to 3000% ROI. That’s insane.

So if you do it right, you can see the same profit too by using the same tool.

Ok, now that’s out of the way, how can you get started? Don’t worry, we got you covered.

Getting started with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

At this point of purchase, it’s important for you to know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) because that’s how you’re going to get qualified prospects.

Sales Navigator Basics 

The basics start by familiarizing yourself with the search filters. We can already see your mind gears turning, you can now put your ICP requirements in the filters below to get prospect lists filled with your ICP in seconds. 

Well isn’t that convenient?

We recommend playing around with the filter combinations and seeing what results you get, this is mainly to familiarize yourself with searching on LinkedIn Sales Navigator so it becomes as easy as a Google search.

Some basic filters we recommend would be Title (decision-makers), Geography (for the region you cover), Company Size (what capacity can you handle), and Industry (who do you focus on).

And of course, the more you know about your Ideal Customer Profile, the more you can add to your search filter and the more accurate your results will be.

How to Write a Boolean Search

A boolean search is very powerful when used properly, combine that with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and you can find any prospect you want.

But how do you write a boolean search? It’s a lot simpler than you think, there are many boolean generators out there you can use, but honestly, they’re very basic so we always recommend learning how to write your own for Sales Navigator.

First, with every Boolean search, you start with open and close brackets. Set up like: (“Keyword” OR “Keyword”). Don’t worry, it’s still very simple, we even made a guide for you.

In any boolean search, normally you would want to include words to exclude from your results. The best way to do this is to keep the keywords you want in the inside bracket () and excluded keywords in the outside bracket. It would be written a little something like this:

((“keyword” OR “keyword”) NOT “keyword” NOT “keyword”)

Now, you may be thinking “great! I can shove everything into the keyword filter!” 

Well… yes, you can, but then you will get bad results, you’re better off using a normal LinkedIn search. 

Instead, find the search filter dedicated to your chosen keywords, then use them. For example, do a boolean search for Job Titles in the “Title” filter to get accurate results.

Things to take note of:

  • The OR, AND, and NOT must be in capital letters and not in quotation marks
  • You can’t use AND, OR, NOT in the same brackets
  • You can combine AND and NOT / OR and NOT but not AND and OR
  • Keywords must be written between quotation marks “like this” 

Creating & Saving Lead Lists

Now that you know how to create the search you want and find your ICP, let’s hit search! At this point, you can start collecting information about the leads, or you may want to connect with them or send them an InMail (remember you have 50 credits).

Here’s a nice message you can send to connect:

Hi  {first_name}, 

LinkedIn suggested that we already know each other, but I do not think that we have met. 

I see that you are the {job title} at {company_name} and I thought that it would be great to connect with you.

{Your name}

Remember, the key here is personalization, the more personalized a message the better. Check out our 100+ LinkedIn outreach messages template here for more personalized outreach.

Moving on! It’s time to create and save your Lead Lists.

When you search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you will immediately see results, but remember, these results are not saved, yet.

So before that, let’s save your search filters. In the search results, at the top right corner, you will see a save search option, this is useful, especially when you’ve used multiple filters and a boolean search, you don’t want to write it out again. That’s a lot of work to repeat…

Luckily for you, Sales Navigator allows you to save the search and use it again with a click of a button.

Now that’s out of the way, you can run your search again. Most likely the results would have changed, that’s inconvenient because you won’t be able to keep track of profiles properly. That’s where saved Lead Lists come in handy.

In your lead results, you have 2 options: 1) Add individual profiles to a list 2) Select multiple profiles and add to Lead List. Unfortunately, there isn’t an add-all option, mainly because LinkedIn wants you to handpick your leads and not spam people.

Adding Individual profiles to Lead Lists: In the leads results, you should see a save option, clicking that will give you a dropdown menu. In the dropdown menu, you will have any Lead Lists you created to add this profile to or you can create a new Lead List.

Selecting multiple profiles and adding them to Lead Lists: You can select multiple profiles and add them to Lead Lists, you can do this manually or you can hit select all and this will select all profiles on the Lead results on the page you’re on.

It will not select profiles from other pages, you’ll have to visit each page and select all. Inconvenient but at least you can see all the results and filter out any that don’t match your ideal customer.

Setting Sales Preferences

Included in your LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription are lead and account recommendations to keep your pipeline full with automatic lead and account recommendations. 

To make sure the recommendations align with your ICPs, you change your preferences in the Sales Preferences settings to what you’re looking for. These criteria include region, industry, function, and seniority level.

To add or modify these settings, click your profile picture in the top right corner and choose “Settings.” then scroll down to the Sales Preferences section, type your choices, and click “Done.”

One thing to take note of is, these recommendations that match the search filter you set in your sales preferences, it will not take into account your filters from your other saved searches or filters. This means that the results will include some profiles you will not get in your other searches.

Advanced Sales Navigator must-have Lead Lists

Creating Lead Lists is easy but it can get messy very quickly, especially when so many things are important. So, let’s take a step back and look at how we can do this differently.

No matter what, your ideal customer profile is not something you want to compromise on, sure you can refine it more but it’s not something you want to exclude or add irrelevant details to. Instead, what you can do, is add extra requirements outside of your ICP that will take them from a qualified lead to a highly qualified lead.

Here are some we recommend you have.

Account-based

Whilst your product may service any sized company, you may want to target large enterprises than SMEs. You can do that by selecting sizes 250+ in the “Company Size” filter. Add this to your ICP filters and you can generate higher value deals.

Interest-based

When it comes to outreach, personalization is key, like we mentioned above, the more personalization in your outreach the better.

You can use the Interested In filter to instantly figure out which buyers need your help and can benefit from your service/tool. This will give you a major advantage when reaching out.

For example, you can run your normal search for “Head of Sales” and in the Interested In filter, you can add “Business Development Tools”. You can use this to approach them and offer your services to complement their interests.

Activity-based

This one is self-explanatory. You would always want to reach out to people on LinkedIn who are active on LinkedIn, just because someone has a LinkedIn profile, doesn’t mean they’re active on there and you don’t want to waste your time on inactive leads.

So in the Activity filter make sure you select active in the past week, 2 weeks, or even 30 days. 

Recently Started a New Role

This one here is something that a lot of salespeople forget. When a high-level professional and decision-maker joins a new company, it’s because they’re there to make changes and improve the business. 

This is the perfect time to reach out to them and offer your services.

An easy way to reach out to them and to get a reply is to congratulate them on their new position.

Expert Sales Navigator Hacks

Well, that was intense! But now you know everything you need to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Next, we’re going to share with you some things that are not so obvious, we’re going to share with you some really good LinkedIn hacks that will put you above your competitors.

Let’s get started!

Sync Sales Navigator with your CRM & Validate your Data

LinkedIn has partnered with several CRM providers including HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zoho, and Infor so you can share leads information from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and your chosen CRM.

Unfortunately, the CRM sync feature is only available on the Sales Navigator Advanced Plus subscription, but if you do have this, it means you won’t have to do your data input into your CRM manually.

Only the Sales Navigator Advance Plus has CRM integration

Not only that but because Sales Navigator syncs directly to your CRM, it means that you can easily validate and keep your CRM data up-to-date automatically.

But how is this useful? Well, how many times has your point of contact in a company leaves for another company and they don’t update you? With the CRM sync, their title and company will be updated automatically once they update them on LinkedIn.

Bypassing LinkedIn InMails Limit

As part of your Sales Navigator package, you get 50 InMail credits per month, which is nice to have, but the credits are not enough for you to do all your outreach. Don’t worry, we got you.

If you want to bypass the InMail limit, target users with “Open Profiles,” they won’t count toward your InMail quota. When searching for leads, results will have the message option unlocked on their profile.

This profile is open, so their messages are open too! Messaging them will not use up your InMail credits.

Saved Leads Lists Alerts

Sometimes you want to reach leads at the right time, this means you want to create Lead Lists of people you want to reach out to but at a specific time.

For example, you can make a list of contacts from your won deals, and set alerts for job (Company or Title) changes, if they’ve moved to a similar position in a new company, then you can resell your service to them, this time it’s much easier!

LinkedIn Automation

Now that you have a powerful search tool, finding leads is easy, but what about outreach? You can do all of your outreach manually but that would mean a minimum 40hrs every month spent on sending messages only.

But what if you could use a LinkedIn Automation Tool for your outreach so you can only focus on leads that are willing to talk to you?
That’s where Salesflow comes in. Salesflow is the safest and easiest cloud-based LinkedIn Automation Tool on the market.

LinkedIn Automation at its finest!

You can natively integrate Salesflow with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and directly import your lists into your outreach campaigns to automate.

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1) Connect your LinkedIn Account to Salesflow

On Salesflow you can connect multiple LinkedIn accounts, it’s good when you’re managing multiple LinkedIn accounts, like clients.

Step 2) Create your hyper-personalized automation campaigns with follow-up messages. You can run 4 different campaigns on Salesflow

  • New connections (20 per day)
  • Existing connections (unlimited)
  • Groups and Events (50 per day)
  • Open InMails (50 per day)
4 different outreach campaigns, so you can reach 120 new LinkedIn, leads every day.

Step 3) Import your Sales Navigator Lists

You can integrate your Sales Navigator lists with Salesflow

Step 4) Track live statistics of your campaigns and only take on leads that engage with you.

Your dashboard should be the first thing you check every day to check the health of your campaigns.

From here you can do all sorts of amazing things that will generate you qualified leads, a few to list are:

  • Reach 120 leads every day
  • Set up multiple campaigns to target different ICPs with follow-up messages
  • Hyper-personalize your campaign messages
  • Integrate with your CRM and add the leads automatically

Using a LinkedIn Automation tool along with your Sales Navigator is a very efficient and powerful way to generate highly qualified leads that convert to business. Not only that but you will save an average of 10 hours every week and can see an average of 900% ROI.

Conclusion

Sales Navigator is a very powerful tool you can use to skyrocket your LinkedIn Lead Generation, and it is an investment that any serious business should use if they want to take their business to the next level.

Are you ready to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and up your lead generation game with Salesflow?

Get in touch and we will give you instant access to Salesflow to trial for 7 days, you and your team.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this post and if you did, here are some more growth hacks that you can leverage:

Step by step guide here:

4 Guides that cover all the important areas for LinkedIn Lead Generation: