How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for prospecting for many different reasons 🤯. To target new prospects, understand their buying behaviors, and interact with them to bring them into your sales funnel.

Sales Navigator is especially designed for salespeople and recruiters who want to maximize their ROI on their marketing strategy with social selling. In this guide, you’ll discover everything you need to know about LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get maximum performance.

We’ll also give you some insider secrets 👄 to help you increase your sales. With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you don’t actually need a large sales team. Sales Navigator works for you!

Let’s start with the reasons why you should use this LinkedIn feature...

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Before entering the core of our subject, maybe we should understand what this tool is 😁.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful sales tool designed specifically for B2B sales professionals. It is a premium subscription-based service offered by LinkedIn, which is the world’s largest professional networking 🥸 platform.

linkedin-sales-navigator

The primary goal of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is to help sales professionals  find and connect with the right prospects ✅, build stronger relationships with them, and ultimately close more deals. It provides advanced search and filtering capabilities, lead recommandations and alerts, InMail messaging, and integration with CRM systems.

One of the main advantages of LSN is that it allows sales professionals to focus 🤓 on the most relevant and promising prospects, saving time and effort.

With its advanced features, you can quickly find and target 🎯 prospects based on specific criteria such as industry, location, job title, company size and more.

Why use Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful ⚡ tool designed specifically for sales professionals and businesses looking to generate leads, build relationships and grow their customer base on LinkedIn.

It is the premium version of LinkedIn. It is very often used and celebrated for its advanced search functionality (particularly the filter function).

Because yes, LinkedIn limits the search filter on the classic version of LinkedIn.

classic research linkedin

Let’s talk about this feature in particular, shall we?

Advanced search and filtering capabilities

One of the main reasons to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for sales is its advanced search and filtering 🚰 capabilities. With this tool, sales professionals can quickly and easily find prospects  based on specific criteria (as we said before). These criteria can be:

  • Industry.
  • Job title.
  • Company size.
  • And much more.

This feature allows you to focus 🧠 on what’s really matters and save time for other tasks.

This makes it an indispensable tool for sales professionals looking to connect with the right people and drive revenue growth.

By leveraging this feature, you can be more efficient and effective in your sales efforts, ultimately leading to more closed deals and increased success.

Advanced People Search on Sales Navigator

In this category, you can find many filters like:

  • The size of the company in which a person is.
  • The type of company (public, private, etc).
  • If they are still at the company (current, past, past OR current, past NOT current).
  • Exclusion of prospects already contacted.
  • Exclusion of prospects already saved in a list.
  • The first name of the person.
  • The person’s current position.
  • The industry in which the person operates.
  • The last name.
  • Leads following the person’s company.
  • Prospects mentioned in the feed.
  • Prospects with a recent job change.
  • Prospects with recent LinkedIn activity.
  • Prospects with shared work experience.
  • Their sign up date on LinkedIn.

 

Advanced company search on Sales Navigator

And there are also many criteria for filtering prospects via the advanced company search.

  • Company’s headcount growth.
  • Company revenue 💸.
  • Company size.
  • The growth of the workforce in a specific area of the company.
  • Size of a specific business unit
  • Location of headquarters (by zip code, region, country)
  • Whether or not the company is on the Fortune 50/100/500 list.
  • Whether or not the company is recruiting on LinkedIn.
  • The industry in which the company operates.
  • The job opportunities offered by the company.
  • The number of subscribers on a company page.
  • Recent changes in the company’s hierarchy.
  • The companies of the relations.

By playing with all these parameters, you can precisely target 🎯 the people you are looking for.

 

Lead recommandations and alerts

One of the key 🗝️ features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is its lead recommendations and alerts. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to suggest leads that match your search history and activity.

It makes it easier to manage their pipeline and prioritize their outreach efforts based on the most promising leads. You can have alerts when there are updates or change your saved leads on LinkedIn, such as a job change or company update.

It will help you to stay informed and up-to-date on your prospects, making it easier to tailor ✂️ your outreach efforts and build stronger relationships.

InMail messaging and Custom Templates

InMail can allow you to send messages directly to prospects, even if they are not already connected with you on LinkedIn. This can be a powerful 💪 tool for reaching out to new prospects and starting conversations that can lead to valuable sales opportunities.

You can also create custom InMail templates, allowing you to quickly and easily personalize your outreach based on the prospect’s industry, job title nad other relevant information.

LSN also provides you analytics on InMail messages such as:

  • 📩 Open rates.
  • 📩 Response rates.

You can then make data-driven decisions about your messaging and overall strategy.

CRM Integration and account management

LinkedIn provides integration with several popular customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, including:

The integration allows you to seamlessly transfer information between LinkedIn Sales Navigator and your CRM platform.

You can also organize your leads and prospects by account. It can be helpful if you sell to multiple stakeholders within a single organization.

Also, the account management features provides insights and updates on each account, such as job changes or company updates, allowing you to stay informed and proactive.

Why these features have a cost

💡 What you should know: LinkedIn does not warn you when you’re near the quota, nor does it offer the option to cancel or reset this amount. The reason? To encourage you to take out a paid subscription with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn knows that if you’re looking for a lot of people, you’re trying to find new leads. And prospecting means business, which results in paying for an advanced service. The reason for this limitation is therefore twofold:

  • ➡️ Keep users who don’t want to be receiving spam happy.
  • ➡️ Generate revenue through LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

But don’t worry. If you want to contact people on LinkedIn without signing up for a paid subscription, you can do so by using our Chrome extension. You can of course decide to use LSN (LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator) alongside Waalaxy.

In addition to advanced search features,LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator gives you access to several other features, such as:

  • Advanced filters, including Boolean combinations.
  • Instant alerts of company updates.

This is a tool that can become very difficult to use, especially when you’re new to lead generation on LinkedIn.

Sales Navigator is undeniably powerful for sales and marketing strategies, but its price may make you hesitate, and we understand! 😬

What are the perks ?

It allows you to perform advanced searches and get much more precise results. For this, Sales Navigator offers different filters like: 👇

  • The hierarchical level: this filter is ideal when you want to address a specific person in a company.
  • Company size: a good tip if you only want to target large B2b companies for example.
  • By recent publication: this filter allows you to search for people who have published in the last 30 days for example. This tip is ideal for filtering out people who have left a company without updating their profile.

Of course, Sales Navigator offers other functions to reach a new target, but it seemed interesting to recall the most used ones!

The price of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription

Count on approximately 79.99$ per month for the monthly subscription without commitment or 20% savings by switching to the annual version, i.e. approximately 65 dollars Now that we have seen why it is highly recommendable to switch to Sales Navigator, let’s see the top techniques to use it in the best possible way.

How to get started with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If you are a sales professional looking to take your prospecting to the next level 🛗, LSN is a very powerful tool to add to your arsenal. With all we talked about at the begining of the article,  let’s cover the basics of how to get started with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Setting up your LinkedIn Sales Navigator account

Before you can start using LinkedIn Sales Nav, you’ll need to set up your account ⚙️. Here’s how to do it:

  • Go to the website, and click on the “Start Your Free Trial” button. (You have two choices, make the one that suits you).
  • From here, you will need to enter your payment information but you won’t be charged until the end of the trial period.

linkedin-sales-nav

  • Complete your profile. Your LinkedIn sales navigator profile should include photo, job title, your company name and a summary of your experience and skills. This will help you establish credibility and make it easier for prospects to find and connect with you.
  • Connect your LinkedIn account because Sales Navigator is designed to work in conjunction with your regular LinkedIn account, so you’ll need to connect the two.
  • Set your preferences. You can customize your preferences 💓 based on your sales goals and target audience. This includes setting up alerts for lead recommendations, saving leads to lists, and filtering your search results based on specific criteria.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you’ll be ready to start using LSN.

Creating and saving lead lists

LinkedIn Sales nav offers you the ability to create and save lead lists. Lead lists allow you to organize your prospects by criteria such as:

  • Job title.
  • Industry.
  • Location.
  • Company size.

To create and save a lead list, here’s how to do it:

  • 🟢Perform a search using the advanced search and filtering capabilities in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This could be based on criteria as mentionned before.
  • 🟢 Select the leads you want to save by clicking the checkbox next to their name.
  • 🟢 Click the “save” button at the top of the page, then select “Save to a new list”.
  • 🟢 Give your list a name that describes the criteria you used to create it.
  • 🟢 Choose whether you want your list to be private or shared. If you choose to share your list, you can collaborate with other members of your team.
  • 🟢 Repeat this process for each search you perform, creating new lists as needed.

Obviously, you can use them to streamline your prospecting efforts.

 

As we’ve seen in previous parts of this guide, there are many solutions for prospecting on LinkedIn.

  • Option 1: use LinkedIn Sales Navigator where you’ll have to pay a subscription fee at a high cost 💰.
  • Option 2: use a secure and inexpensive external LinkedIn prospecting tool like Waalaxy.

 

Boolean algebra is an advanced method you can use here. Using a combination of keywords with Boolean operators like👇:

  • AND (and).
  • NOT (exclusion).
  • OR (or).

Here’s the step-by-step ✅ process for using Boolean search with LinkedIn Sales Navigator to filter your LinkedIn search.

If you are looking for a specific expression. For example, “Growth Hacker” in the title field. Not using the quotation marks may produce results with only “Growth” or worse only “Hacker”.

By adding the quotation marks, LinkedIn will only display people whose job title exclusively contains “Growth Hacker”. If you had to keep only one, it would be this one.

 

Enter your main keyword in the search bar (example: “seo consultant”). You will then find people that are only working in this profession.

The exclusive search (NOT)

Enter your keyword followed by the Boolean operator NOT and finally the precision (example: “seo consultant NOT”). In this case, only consultants are targeted and not any professional in the natural referencing sector.

 

The choice search (OR)

Enter several keywords spaced by OR in order to define the choice between a sector of activity rather than another (example: “seo OR sea OR smo”).

 

The additional search (AND)

Same as the choice search, except that it is not one or the other, but the addition of keywords spaced by “AND” (example: “seo AND sea AND smo”). Boolean search is an advanced technique for targeting your prospects with a laser beam.

 

Use the company search

From there, you have 2 choices:

  1. Send an invitation to the person to become part of your network.
  2. Send them a message with or without an invitation (you can do this automatically with Waalaxy).

If you want to add the person to your network, do the following:

  • Step 1: Go to the profile of the person you want to add.
  • Step 2: Click the “connect” button.
  • Step 3: Wait for the person to accept or decline your invitation.

On the other hand, if you want to initiate contact with the person, you could send a message.

Here the first message is not aggressive 💡. It has a bit of mystery and gives the person the feeling that they are respected and a winner in the deal. It is better to ask a question at the end of your message than to send a link. The reason: the Yes-set effect and the principle of consistency.

Firstly, as soon as a question is asked and the person answers with “yes”, then the person is more likely to accept the proposal you are going to make.

Secondly, as soon as the person says “yes”, the principle of coherence gives them the impression that they are committed and will therefore continue the process. However, this is only an example. You have to be ultra-personalized for it to work. Tailor your pitch:

  • The type of company structure (private, public, etc).
  • To the gender and age of the person.
  • And much more.

For more prospecting messages, we invite you to read this article on 20 LinkedIn canvassing message templates.

 

LinkedIn Groups

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you have the ability to target 🎯 people in certain LinkedIn groups. Often the names of the groups are composed of keywords specific to their themes. For example:

And also groups of institutions. This can be very useful for so-called satellite solutions to your product/service (around your theme). You can find websites but also reputable schools.

  • Harvard Business School.
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Take a concrete example. You have a SaaS in the field of creating an online course platform (LMS). You want to target the LinkedIn group of your direct competitor. Here is the step-by-step process to follow:

  1. Perform an advanced search on the group in the name of your competitor.
  2. Write a message for the people in the group.

Again, you can automate this step in just a few clicks using our free tool, Waalaxy.

 

Job Change Alerts

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is great for a tool to contact people who have just changed companies. You can target them and grab their attention with their job change. Here is the template for the message you could send:

This is a great way to start a conversation in a very simple and effective way. As soon as the person has responded, you can send them a message which arouses his/her interest using the classic Hook-Interest-Desire-Action structure.

 

Prospect Tags

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can assign a series of tags to a group of people and perform specific marketing actions for each group of tagged people. For example, you can send them:

  • An invitation 📩 to join their network.
  • A welcome message or a message where you directly propose your services, etc.

 

Recording of searches

Now that you’ve targeted your potential customers, there’s something you need to know. You can save your search simply from the Sales Navigator dashboard. What’s more, you can rename them in just a few clicks. This way, you can come back to them later to conduct a prospecting campaign for each list of people. From now on, we will see much more advanced marketing techniques…

 

LinkedIn Profile scraping

LinkedIn Sales Navigator also allows you to browse LinkedIn Groups. But there’s an even more powerful trick you can apply to successfully prospect people registered in certain LinkedIn groups… Follow this step-by-step process:

  1. 🟢 Log into your LinkedIn account.
  2. 🟢Find a LinkedIn group in your target audience.
  3. 🟢 Use Waalaxy to directly scrape the number of people you want.
  4. 🟢 Launch a sequence campaign, or a single-action campaign (e.g. an invitation note), with Waalaxy.
  5. 🟢 Watch the magic of automation at work.

Prospecting on published keywords

In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you have the ability to target people who have written posts with specific hashtags. For example, if you want to reach out to people who have used the “#seo” hashtag, then you can add this to the filter section. Add as many LinkedIn hashtags as you like. Then in your sales prospecting message, you could write something along these lines:

Here the example is a digital book, but you can do the same for any other lead magnet:

  • Series of videos 📱.
  • A checklist.
  • A white paper.
  • A free trial.
  • A webinar.
  • A telephone meeting.
  • A video meeting.
  • A physical meeting.
  • And much more.

Targeting people on LinkedIn Sales Navigator with published keywords is a great way to drive qualified traffic to the entrance of your conversion tunnel.

Create strong branding to build and engaged community

In this section we’ll look at several ways to find leads on LinkedIn. With and without LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Prospecting on LinkedIn with Outbound Marketing

Stone cold prospecting on LinkedIn Sales Navigator has it’s place in any outbound marketing strategy. That is, strategies where you go to people to prospect. It’s a method that may seem aggressive, but it’s effective if you address the right message to the right audience.

Cold calling on LinkedIn is a practice that requires a certain level of technicality, in the sense that you must be careful not to offend your prospects. In the years 2000-2010, outbound marketing was working at its peak because there were still few players present on the Internet. Since 2015-2016, the rules have started to change to:

  • More human marketing.
  • A longer and longer buying journey.
  • A growing presence of dark patterns among users.

However, by combining a highly personalized approach with a prospecting tool like Waalaxy and a precise targeting of leads, you are guaranteed to have your messages hit all the right inboxes.

Examples

Here is an example of a conversion path you can apply with an outbound LinkedIn marketing strategy:

 

This type of prospecting campaign can last several days depending on the price of your product, the open and click rate of your sequence, the conversion rate of your landing pages, and more. You should know something.

The outbound marketing strategy works very effectively on prospects who are highly susceptible to a half-decent sales technique. For low-priced products, it is the best. However, for more expensive products, a more developed marketing strategy is needed.

You can apply this marketing method via our tool, Waalaxy. The multi-step campaigns are particularly useful for thism as each action is automated. Now that we have seen an example of an outbound strategy, let’s look at a powerful yet underused strategy for generating leads on LinkedIn.

 

What is the price of doing LinkedIn automation with Waalaxy?

With Waalaxy, you can contact your prospects in just 10 minutes a day!

It’s crazy, right? 🤩 Access all prospecting features on LinkedIn with one of our subscriptions. (Cheaper than our competitors). 😉

We have a Freemium version and paid versions of marketing automation, discover our pricing here! 👈

 

How to Automate Your Prospecting Connections on Sales Navigator? With Waalaxy!

Waalaxy is a great way to automate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with your advanced researches. 😏

For example, you can: 👇

  • Export your searches from Sales Navigator,
  • Run scenarios based on these searches,
  • Get much more accurate search results.

How? Waalaxy allows you to customize your entire lead generation campaigns. This feature is a real time saver in your LinkedIn prospecting strategy and allows you to immediately test your strategy and see what works best or not.

Basically, you can do an A/B testing. 😜

Some campaign management features you can set up include:

👉 Basically, the idea is to set up a series of automated actions based on your prospect’s path. It goes like this (this is just one example of the 50+ scenarios out there):

 

💡 To learn more about the scenarios, here is a short video webinar:

Conclusion on LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a good tool for prospecting on LinkedIn. As we have seen previously, Sales Navigator allows you to target users in a very specific way: by region, city, tag, hashtag, etc.However, you should know that it is still an expensive tool in comparison to a Waalaxy plan.

However, it remains a good tool for Sales Managers and recruiters to find the right people for their products and services or their institutions.

Discover Waalaxy 🪐

Integrate the Waalaxy Inbox to save time

Finally, to save you even more time, we developed Inbox waalaxy. This marketing automation tool is a messenger for LinkedIn with additional features. 👏

Inbox Waalaxy is a Chrome extension like Waalaxy and Podawaa, which looks like an email templates interface. 📨

In addition to exchanging with your prospects and contacts, Inbox Waalaxy allows you to use the following features: 👇

  • Tag your contacts to do segmentation (lead qualification) and easily filter your messaging, it makes it easy to find a conversation,
  • Put a conversation in “Snooze” mode to make it disappear and come back later,
  • Automatically relaunch your contact list by selecting the date of a message’s return.

In short, enough to save you time with Sales Navigator and perform more actions, so you can go further in your B2B lead generation process.

But, what if I told you that you could automate LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get it for free, would you want to know more? 😜

FAQ of the article

It’s almost the end of the article but we do have some things you might find useful.

Can I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free?

No. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the premium version of the social network. You need a monthly or yearly subscription to use it for your lead generation strategy.

Should I choose LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Waalaxy?

The two are complementary, but if I had to recommebd one, it’d be Waalaxy. The reason being that it costs next to nothing but allows for a more precise and effective lead generation strategy.

Prospecting on LinkedIn with Inbound Marketing without LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Inbound marketing is a much gentler and progressive lead generation method.

It consists of attracting people to you in a natural way, without forcing them to listen to you. This strategy has worked better and better over the years.

As we have seen before, it is this digital strategy that has been gaining ground over outbound strategies for several years.

It’s a 4-step method:

  1. Attract.
  2. Convert.
  3. Engage.
  4. Build loyalty.

You attract people via so-called “organic” channels such as:

  • SEO (natural referencing).
  • SMO in brand content.

Here what we are interested in is the second point – more specifically the use of SMO in relation to LinkedIn. Let’s now discover the advantages of using a brand content strategy on networking sites to prospect in a natural way.

The advantages of using a brand content strategy on LinkedIn

It is a natural prospecting method with many advantages:

  • Focused on H2H (human to human) and bringing value to its audience.
  • Without advertising costs 🤑.
  • With the highest ROI.
  • The cheapest lead acquisition method.
  • A very effective way to build a community of fans in your field (B2C or B2C).

The strategy to establish a brand content strategy on LinkedIn

To be successful on LinkedIn when you first start out, you need to post often. There is no secret. In fact, there are 4 types of posts that work great on LinkedIn:

  1. 🟢 Rants.
  2. 🟢 Value-added posts.
  3. 🟢 The “authority” posts.
  4. 🟢 “Inspirational” posts.
“Rant” posts

This type of LinkedIn post consists of you expressing 👄 yourself on a fact related to controversy, where polarities of opinions exist. Generally-speakng taboo topics make great “hot button” posts (those that trigger a strong and immediate reaction in readers):

  • Generational topics.
  • Topics about money.
  • Topics about religions.
  • Topics about sex.

This is a type of LinkedIn post that allows you to polarize audiences. In other words, they allow you to express your opinion and either be liked or disliked. These topics are full of emotion and appeal to the ego. Everyone wants to feel respected and believe that their views are more important.

Value-added posts

These are the posts where you will give your subscribers the maximum amount of directly actionable content. Your best tips for example. For example, LinkedIn carousels are a good way to offer value in a “snackable” content (very easy to digest, both on mobile or desktop).

Authority posts

Posts where you prove your expertise are incredibly powerful because they act on the pillar of authority, influence factor. Te more you publish this type of content, the more you will appear to be an expert in your market 🤑.

Inspirational posts

Emotionally charged posts work well, which is why posts of this type achieve many more views than traditional posts. Here, you’ll put your storytelling skills on display by using an anecdote following the following structure:

  1. Before (your situation with the problem you encountered).
  2. Now (your situation with the problem solved).
  3. Solution (what you did to change things and how others can do the same).

When doing brand content on social media, the goal is to vary your LinkedIn post types by focusing on these 4 LinkedIn post categories. You could, for example, write in a scheduled manner by alternating types of posts. You can schedule your LinkedIn posts with Podawaa.

And that’s it, you now know everything 🧠 about LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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