Sales navigator is a sales tool developed by LinkedIn to help sales professionals find and connect with prospects. It provides various features to enable sales reps to identify ideal customer profiles, get contact details, gain sales insights and ultimately drive more sales. Understanding the key benefits of sales navigator can help you determine if investing in this sales tool is worthwhile for your business.
Better Prospecting
One of the biggest challenges in sales is finding qualified prospects to target. Sales navigator makes this process much more efficient in the following ways:
- Advanced search filters – You can search LinkedIn database using various filters like company size, industry, job title, location etc. This helps zero in on your ideal customers.
- Lead recommendations – Sales navigator crunches data to automatically recommend leads based on your ideal customer profile.
- Saved leads lists – You can save leads in custom lists to nurture and follow up later.
- Email tracking – See who has opened your emails and InMail messages to identify hot prospects.
By enabling better prospecting, sales navigator helps you focus your efforts on high potential leads instead of wasting time on cold outreach.
In-Depth Insights
Sales navigator provides detailed insights on your prospects by integrating LinkedIn’s data. You can gain the following useful information to make your sales approach more effective:
- Recent company updates – New funding, partnerships, leadership changes etc.
- Skills and interests – Useful to connect personally during outreach.
- Work anniversaries – Opportunity to send a personal note.
- Shared connections – Quicker way to get introduced.
- Recent content shares – Opportunity to engage.
These insights help you establish trust and credibility faster. You can have more meaningful conversations knowing their background and interests.
Team Collaboration
Sales navigator makes it easy for sales teams to work together through:
- Lead pools – Marketing and sales ops can add leads to a shared pool for the sales team.
- Annotations – Sales reps can add notes on leads to ensure continuity.
- Email templates – Shared email templates maintain brand consistency.
- Cadence tracking – Visibility into outreach campaigns run by the team.
Better collaboration ensures prospects don’t slip through the cracks and sales efforts are not duplicated. It also frees up seller’s time to engage with prospects.
Prioritize Leads
Figuring out which leads to focus on first can be difficult. Sales Navigator makes it easier to prioritize with the help of:
- Lead recommendations – Top recommended leads based on fit.
- Lead scores – Scores assigned to each lead based on fit, engagement and account potential.
- Custom tags – Tag leads to denote priority follow-up.
- Saved lead lists – Lists can be created for high priority prospects.
With visibility into your hottest leads, you can focus effort on the accounts that are more likely to convert and have the biggest potential.
Detailed Lead Profiles
Sales navigator provides a centralized dashboard with detailed lead profiles. These include:
- Contact details – Direct phone numbers and email addresses.
- Digital footprint – Social media profiles and activity.
- Qualification criteria – Details like company size, industry, role.
- Recent news – Timely news and events related to the prospect.
- Enriched profiles – Deeper employment details, education, volunteering etc.
With such detailed lead profiles in one place, sales reps can quickly determine if a lead is qualified and craft personalized outreach messages.
Access Content Insights
Sales navigator surfaces real-time insights on content consumption of your prospects. You can see:
- Recent content shares – Useful to start meaningful conversations.
- Content topics – Gives insight into interests to personalize outreach.
- Channels – Find out which social platforms they prefer.
- InMail acceptance rates – Optimize outreach strategy.
These content insights help craft relevant messaging that resonates with prospects. Personalized and contextual outreach cuts through the noise.
Stay on Top of Accounts
Monitoring your prospect accounts is easier with sales navigator through:
- Watching accounts – Get alerts when new decision makers join.
- Account statistics – Track number of employees, new hires, churn rate etc.
- Stacking accounts – Identify other stakeholders within the account.
- Seeing related leads – Find additional leads in accounts of interest.
Staying updated on your key accounts enables you to identify new opportunities and engage with new decision makers sooner.
Smooth Contact Management
Managing prospect contacts is simplified with sales navigator as it:
- Shows contact details – Direct contact information of prospects.
- Updates profiles automatically – Profiles are kept up-to-date.
- Has contact management integrations – Integrates with CRMs like Salesforce.
- Exports contact lists – Leads can be exported in a spreadsheet.
Smooth contact management ensures you have the right information to engage effectively with prospects.
Powerful Search
Sales Navigator allows searching not just within LinkedIn but external websites and documents using AI. You can:
- Search across lead databases – CRM, marketing automation etc.
- Search company domains – Find emails and names easily.
- Search web pages and documents – Quick access to relevant content.
The advanced search capabilities help you find any information you need to understand prospects and accounts.
InMail Integration
Sales Navigator integrates LinkedIn’s InMail messaging capabilities. You can:
- See InMail read status – Know if your messages are being opened.
- Get InMail credits – Credits to send InMails to prospects.
- Track response rates – See your InMail response rates.
- Manage InMail templates – Create and reuse templates.
InMail integration ensures your outreach gets delivered and helps optimize your messaging.
Mobile Access
Sales Navigator provides mobile apps for iOS and Android. This allows sales reps to:
- Access profiles on-the-go.
- Receive notifications and updates.
- Log calls, emails and notes.
- Stay updated even when out of office.
Mobile access keeps reps always looped in so they never miss a beat with their prospects.
CRM Integrations
Sales Navigator integrates with popular CRM platforms like:
- Salesforce
- Dynamics 365
- Zoho
- Pipedrive
It can push prospect data and activity directly into the CRM so all customer details are available in one place.
How Sales Navigator Works
Sales Navigator enhances the basic LinkedIn platform with advanced features through the following:
- Browser based dashboard – This is the main console with prospect leads, recommendations, search etc.
- LinkedIn integration – Direct access to LinkedIn data like profiles.
- Custom lists – Leads can be organized into custom lists.
- Prioritization – Scoring and tags to denote priority.
- CRM integrations – Sync with platforms like Salesforce.
- Mobile apps – iOS and Android apps are available.
These capabilities take LinkedIn’s powerful social data and make it accessible and actionable for sales teams.
Pricing
Sales Navigator offers multiple pricing tiers based on the package features and number of licenses needed. Some key details include:
- Team plan – For 5+ licenses costing around $64 per user per month.
- Professional plan – For individual reps at $79.99 per month.
- Premium plan – Extra features like news alerts starting at $99.99.
- Discounts for annual plans – Roughly 20% lower for annual durations.
- Free trial – 14 or 30 day free trials available.
Actual pricing depends on the country, package chosen and number of licenses. Multi-year discounts are also available for larger teams.
Key Differences from Free LinkedIn
While LinkedIn is free to use, Sales Navigator offers advanced capabilities including:
Sales Navigator | |
Limited search filters | Robust advanced search filters |
No lead recommendations | Automated lead recommendations |
No email tracking | InMail email tracking |
No mobile apps | Mobile apps for iOS and Android |
Public profiles | Enhanced private prospect profiles |
No prioritization | Scoring and tagging to prioritize leads |
Sales Navigator sits on top of LinkedIn to provide vastly superior prospecting and sales acceleration capabilities.
Conclusion
In summary, the key benefits provided by Sales Navigator are:
- Better prospecting through lead search and filtering.
- Deeper prospect insights for personalization.
- Collaboration within sales teams.
- Prioritization of hottest leads.
- Detailed lead profiles in one place.
- Content insights for targeted outreach.
- Easier account and contact management.
- Advanced search across multiple sources.
- Integrated access to InMail.
- Mobile access to stay connected.
- CRM integrations.
Considering these significant advantages, Sales Navigator is a valuable investment for sales teams looking to boost productivity and accelerate growth. The platform transforms the vast amount of data within LinkedIn into actionable insights for sales reps. With better prospecting, optimizing outreach and converting high value leads, companies can target the right accounts and grow revenue faster.