Why Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and How to use it for Lead Generation

LinkedIn has become a staple in the grown-up world of professional networking and lead generation, being home to 10 million decision-makers across hundreds of countries. Sales Navigator is one of the forms of LinkedIn premium, and it allows users to utilise a far wider range of filters than those available in the main search function of LinkedIn. It has continued to roll out new features that are increasingly becoming more useful in the B2B (and surprisingly, B2C) space, with everyone from individual entrepreneurs, to small enterprises and large organisations turning to the platform every single day. With 4 out of 5 B2B social media leads being generated using Linkedin, now is the time to capitalise on the momentum thousands of others are harnessing on LinkedIn as part of their marketing strategy.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Sales Navigator is a premium feature on LinkedIn that helps businesses generate leads on LinkedIn, by allowing them to easily find their target audience and reach out to them in just a few clicks. It is described as the best version of LinkedIn for anyone interested in sales prospecting and lead generation, thanks to its many features specially designed with this in mind. Sales Navigator offers a distinct set of features that aren’t available in the normal search function of Linkedin, or in the other forms of premium, all optimised for finding new your ideal prospects and decision-makers.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Features

As briefly mentioned, LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a slew of features many businesses and sales reps will find useful. These include:

Advanced Search

This makes it easy to reach out to your target audience by narrowing down LinkedIn users within the search parameters that you define. Such as:

  • Profile Keywords
  • Location
  • Industry
  • Company Name
  • Seniority Level
  • Job Title
  • Function
  • Relationship
  • Company Headcount

While a free LinkedIn account comes with a number of these filters, the Advanced Lead Search in Sales Navigator gives you far more granularity. Combined with the other features, it also allows you to manage your searches, prospecting and pipeline far more effectively.

Sales Navigator lets you segment leads using more definite search criteria not available on free LinkedIn accounts, increasing your chances of not only finding more targeted leads but also picking up valuable specifics about them which you can leverage.

There is a separate function for using a different and even more targeted prospects by looking for further characteristics of the business that your ideal decision-maker works for. You can also filter for other details, such as people who have recently posted on LinkedIn (for finding the most active users), those featured in news or people who have recently changed jobs.

Lead Saving 

You’re able to save accounts and businesses as leads, once you have identified them as meeting whatever criteria you determine as being a lead. This means you can store your opportunities in one place, and easily access your conversation history. Higher-end forms of Sales Navigator also provide a seamless CRM integration for full pipeline management.

InMails

These are private messages you can send directly to any user on the platform. InMails are only available to premium account and Sales Navigator holders, and there is a limited number you can send each month based on your account type

InMail messages are growing in popularity, and Sales Navigator gives you up to 50 credits per month. InMails allow you to send messages to people who you’re not connected with, without them needing to accept a connection request. InMails will be sent to the recipients LinkedIn inbox as well as their email inbox, which helps to increase the visibility of what you’re sending them.

Sales Navigator Team

As the name might suggest, this feature is useful for any company with a sales or marketing team on LinkedIn. It enables users to collaborate more efficiently in reaching their lead generation goals, giving each member of the team an ability to:

  • Save up to 5,000 leads
  • Send 30 InMails per month
  • Access TeamLink, another LinkedIn feature that makes it possible to reach a large audience by making use of connections belonging to the team
  • Integrate with their own Salesforce/Dynamic account
  • Access regular reports to monitor sales performance

Sales Navigator Benefits

No Commercial use Limits – one of the drawbacks of using the free version of LinkedIn is the limit on output. For any business that is serious about generating leads on LinkedIn, the only way to go is to upgrade to the premium version or subscribe to Sales Navigator. Whilst there are still limits on how much outbound activity LinkedIn will allow, this is significantly higher with a Sales Navigator account. Now, if you are on a free account, the risks of your account being flagged or banned are marginally higher compared to paid users on LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator since you’ll likely be considered a spammer. LinkedIn is managed by algorithms that monitor whether or not you are abiding by the rules which tend to favour targeted connections over random and mass linking, so you can only go under the radar for so long.

Save your searches, so you don’t need to re-fill out the filters every time you go to conduct your prospecting. You also get unlimited search results and enhanced customer support.

Sales Navigator is without a doubt one of the best LinkedIn prospecting tools, and is perfectly designed for outbound lead generation. But it does come at a cost, and whether or not this cost is worth it will vary from one company to the next. If you’ve not used premium before, you’ll be able to make use of a free months trial to see how you can use the platform and explore the benefits.

We are a specialist agency, helping hundreds of clients globally leverage the power of LinkedIn to generate qualified sales opportunities, and book large volumes of sales calls. Everything we do is powered by Sales Navigator, and we’re experts in utilising every possible feature to maximise finding and reaching out to your target market at scale – taking away all the time you need to learn the platform, as well as the large number of hours each week required to then conduct the outreach and generate the sales calls. It’s a far better use of your time to be sitting the sales calls, instead of spending 7+ hours each week navigating Linkedin and doing the booking.For a quick chat about how we can help to maximise the functionality of Sales Navigator, and harness the power of LinkedIn, give us a ring on 0161 503 7654 or fill out the form below and someone will reach out to you.