What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator & How To Use It?

Finding customers should no longer be a problem in 2022. It should even be easier with all the tools at our disposal.

Among them, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a formidable tool for :

• Prospect on LinkedIn in multiple ways,
• Target new prospects,
• Understand their buying behavior,
• And interact to bring them into your conversion tunnel.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is especially designed for sales reps and recruiters who want to maximize the ROI of their marketing strategy.

In this guide, you’ll discover everything you absolutely need to know about LinkedIn Sales Navigator to achieve maximum performance. On the program ⬇️ :

• Description and definition of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• Why, when and how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscriptions and pricing.
• The best lead generation features.
• Outbound and inbound marketing on LinkedIn.
• Brand content on LinkedIn and its benefits.
• Automating LinkedIn to facilitate prospecting.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator VS Waalaxy.
• Start prospecting with or without LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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.

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, it works for you!

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 premium subscription-based sales tool offered by LinkedIn (like Recruiter Lite, Business Plus and Job Seeker), which is the world’s largest professional networking 🥸 platform.

Aimed at B2B sales professionals and, more generally, anyone with a sales strategy looking to sell a good or service. For finding and connecting with the right prospects ✅, build stronger relationships with them, and ultimately close more deals.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an advanced LinkedIn search engine, offering more powerful and precise filters than the standard version.

It provides advanced search, filtering capabilities and useful features fort prospecting : lead recommandations and alerts, tagging, InMail messaging, and integration with CRM systems…

In a nutshell, it allows sales professionals to focus 🤓 on the most relevant and promising prospects, saving time and effort.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator facilitates social selling, a four-step method for identifying the right people to sell a good or service, creating and reinforcing your professional brand, exchanging information with your prospects, and building trusting relationships.

Why & When Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

When using LinkedIn to prospect for new or potential customers, the first step is to perform a search – so far, so good.

The problem is that LinkedIn’s standard search function, while very useful for recruiting or generating leads, is very limited and often inaccurate in its search results.

LinkedIn limits on the one hand, to protect users from spam, and on the other, to encourage paid subscriptions (and thus generate revenue for LinkedIn Sales Navigator).

Indeed, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is very often celebrated for its advanced search and precise filter functions, unlike the limited classic version.

If you decide to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, advanced features are available, such as :

• Filters and Boolean combinations.
• Profile update alerts.

You’ll benefit from the undisputed power of marketing targeting and search, despite a high cost that may make you hesitate. The main filters available are :

• Hierarchical level: to target specific positions.
• Company size: to target large groups.
• Recent publications: to find people who are active on the network.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool ⚡ that delivers far more precise results, but it can be complex for beginners to LinkedIn prospecting.

If you’d rather avoid paying, the Chrome extension Waalaxy enables you to contact people on LinkedIn on a massive scale.

Now that we’ve seen why and when it’s necessary to switch to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, let’s take a look at the top techniques for using it in the best possible way.

How to Get Started With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is a comprehensive premium plan for professionals to boost sales prospecting and find new customers.

It’s an incredible too 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.

Before using it, you need to know:

• Your primary target.
• How to adapt your conversion tunnel to the temperature of your traffic.
• The content your audience appreciates.
• Their fears and aspirations.
• Their socio-professional characteristics.

Once you’ve defined your customer avatar, you can start using it. But there’s no magic formula: for that, you’ll need to subscribe.

Setting Up Your LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account

⚙️ Here’s how to subscribe and set up your account :

• 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.

• 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 done that, you can start using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and it will enable you to obtain very precise marketing targeting 🎯 , or specific information about your prospects.

How To Do My Research In LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

By varying the different combinations according to the advanced features, you should find exactly what you’re looking for.

You can search for people or institutions by :

• Location: cities, regions, countries…
• Languages: native, secondary…
• Industries.
• Specific positions: SEO strategy consultant, SEO manager, etc.
• Years of experience.
• Structure size: VSE, SME, ETI, GE…
• Other keywords…

Please fill in the criteria precisely, without overly restricting your target.

Now that you know how to accurately target your future prospects, it’s time to move on to the best LinkedIn Sales Navigator features to use.

Best Search Functions In LinkedIn Sales Navigator

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

• Option 1: use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and pay a high subscription fee.
• Option 2: use a secure and inexpensive external LinkedIn prospecting solution such as Waalaxy.
• So here are our top 7 features for automatic lead generation with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Finally,

Boolean Search

Boolean algebra is an advanced method to use on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You can refine your search by combining keywords with Boolean operators like👇 :

• AND (include).
• NOT (exclude).
• OR.

Use Quotation Marks In The LinkedIn Search Feature

How do I use Boolean search? Use/add quotation marks to search for an exact expression. For example:

• “Growth Hacker” in the title field. Without quotation marks, you might get results with only “growth” or “hacker”.
• LinkedIn will only display people whose title exclusively contains “Growth Hacker”. If you had to remember just one tip, it would be this one.

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

Classic Search With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Enter your main keyword in the search bar (example: “seo consultant”). You’ll find only people in this profession.

Exclusive Search (NOT)

Enter your keyword, followed by the Boolean operator NOT and then the precision (example: “seo consultant NOT”). In this case, the search is for consultants, not SEO consultants.

Choice Search (OR)

Enter several keywords separated by OR to define the choice between one sector of activity rather than another (example: “SEO OR sea OR SMO“).

Additional Search (AND)

Same as the choice search, except that it’s not either/or, 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.

Advanced Search With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Most people sign up for a LinkedIn Premium account for this feature, which gives access to several dozen advanced search filters divided into two categories: to find people or companies.

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 LinkedIn Sales Navigator

In this category, you can find :

• The size and type of company the person belongs to.
• Existence (current, past, past OR current, past, NOT current).
• Exclusion of prospects already contacted or saved in a list.
• First name, last name and current position.
• Industry.
• Prospects: following company, mentioned in the feed, recently job change, active on LinkedIn, with shared professional experience, sign up date…

Advanced Company Search On LinkedIn Sales Navigator

And there are many other criteria for filtering prospects:

• Headcount growth (overall and within a specific business unit).
• Size and revenue (global or within a specific business unit).
• Location of headquarters (by zip code, region, country).
• Whether or not the company is on the fortune list (fortune 50/100/500).
• Whether or not the company is recruiting on LinkedIn.
• The industry in which it operates.
• Job opportunities offers.
• The number of subscribers and contacts on a company page.
• Recent changes in hierarchy.
• The companies of the relations.

By playing with all these parameters, you can target 🎯 exactly the people you’re looking for. From there, you have two choices.

1. Send the person an invitation to join your network.
2. Send them a welcome message with or without the original invitation (you can do this automatically).

Finally, we’ve covered the best LinkedIn Sales Navigator features to use!

To make things clearer for you, we’re now going to get our hands dirty with a complete tutorial on how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for sales professional looking to take your prospecting to the next level.

Tutorial: How Do I Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you search by keyword. Let’s say you’re looking to generate a list of prospects with CEOs. It’s very simple:

• Log in to your Sales Navigator account.
• Enter your keyword (here, we’ve chosen CEO).
• On the screen, you’ll see a whole list of potential prospects, but they may not all match your criteria. That’s why, on the left, you’ll have a column with additional information where you can do much more precise targeting.

• Once you’ve selected all your criteria, you can save the search and name it.

You now have your list of prospects and can start sending out messages. Speaking of messages, remember that a good automated message is a personalized message.

Targeting Decision-makers

This is one of LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s most effective filters: the hierarchical level (even if we don’t know how LinkedIn’s algorithm determines this information).

When you want to sell, it’s rarely to a junior (and if it is, you can always filter on “recent graduate”).

It is recommended to use it in combination with other properties. If you’re looking for people in marketing automation, add the hierarchical level you want to address and you’ll get a much better quality search.

Rely On Seniority

Seniority in the company or position is another interesting and complementary indicator. If the prospect has been with the company for less than a year, he’s probably less likely to be able to buy a service or product from you (except in exceptional cases).

Use Company Size

For me, this is one of the most useful filters in LinkedIn Sales Navigator. A product/service or approach is often defined by a specific size (you don’t sell the same things in the same way to CAC40 companies as to a very small company).

Here, you can target from “Independent” to “Over 10,000 employees”. This is a good way of dividing up your approaches and keeping your sales pitch tailored to each prospect.

Published Within The Last 30 Days

Want to contact only people who are active on LinkedIn? This is a great option!

You only contact prospects who have published within the last 30 days, and who are therefore at least active, with a profile that’s at least up to date (or so we hope).

For this, you can use Boolean operators. But you can also use include or exclude functions.

For example, you can add a “France” region filter and exclude prospects in “France” by replicating on the filter.

Any other filters you’d like to highlight? Don’t hesitate to contact me to suggest an update for this article!

LinkedIn Groups

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can target people in specific LinkedIn groups, often named with relevant (theme-specific) keywords.

This can be particularly useful for so-called satellite solutions to your product/service (around your theme). For example:

• Digital communication France.
• Growth Hacking.

And, of course, groups of institutions such as :

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

Let’s take a concrete example. If you have a SaaS for creating online courseware platforms (LMS) and want to target your direct competitor’s LinkedIn Group, here are the steps:

1. Perform an advanced search targeting your competitor’s group.
2. Write a personalized message for group members, for example (see sample template below):

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you don’t need to join the LinkedIn group to filter the prospects who belong to it, which is very powerful and allows you to get up to 50% acceptance with this method.

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

Send An Invitation

If you wish to add the person to your network, proceed as follows:

• Step 1: Go to the profile of the person you wish to add.
• Step 2: Click on the “connect” button (you can send an invitation message with Waalaxy).
• Step 3: Wait for the person to accept or decline your invitation.

To start a contact, you can send a message like :

This message should be respectful and interesting. Ask a question at the end rather than sending a link directly, to benefit from the “Set Yes” effect and the principle of consistency:

• Asking a question encourages a “yes” answer, making the person more likely to accept your proposal.
• An initial “yes” commits the person to continuing the process (principle of coherence).

However, this is only an example. Ultra-customization is essential for this to work, and the message must be adapted according to :

• The type of structure (private, public, etc.).
• The person’s gender and age.
• And much more.

To find out more, check out our article on the 20 LinkedIn canvassing message templates.

InMail Messaging And Custom Templates

When someone upgrades from the classic version of LinkedIn to LinkedIn Premium, they get a distinctive advantage: the golden LinkedIn lozenge, which immediately enhances the profile.

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, in addition to this lozenge, you can send InMails, directly to prospects, even if they are not already connected with you on LinkedIn

This is a form of LinkedIn message that stands out from conventional messages and generally results in a higher open and click rate. 📩

You can then make data-driven decisions about your messaging and overall strategy. You can also create custom InMail templates, allowing you to quickly and easily personalize your outreach.

To make this message stand out from the crowd, use the A.I.D.A. copywriting structure:

• Attention: Grab your prospect’s attention right from the start.
• Interest: Generate interest using the “Set Yes” technique described above.
• Desire: Create desire with a bulleted list filled with more for your prospect.
• Action: End with a call to action, whether it’s advice, an action to take, or a question.

This can be a powerful 💪 tool for reaching out to new prospects and starting conversations that can lead to valuable sales opportunities.

Job Change Alerts

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is perfect for contacting people who have recently changed companies. You can target them and grab their attention by mentioning their new position.

For example, you could use this message template to send:

This is a simple and effective way to start a conversation.

Once you’ve received a response, follow the classic A.I.D.A. model to maintain interest and keep the conversation going.

Lead Recommendations And Alerts

One of the key 🗝️ features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is its lead recommendations and alerts. It uses AI 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.

Prospect Tags

With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can assign tags to individual prospects or to a group of people, and carry out targeted marketing actions for each tagged group.

For example, you can send them:

• An invitation 📩 to join their network.
• A welcome message/direct prospecting, etc.

Recording Of Searches

Now that you’ve targeted your potential customers, there’s something important to know.

You can save your searches directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator dashboard and easily rename them.

This allows you to come back to them later to launch a prospecting campaign for each list.

From now on, let’s take a look at some much more advanced marketing techniques… so you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator like a pro!

LinkedIn Profile Scraping

LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you browse LinkedIn groups, but there’s an even more powerful trick for successfully prospecting group members.

Follow the step-by-step process:

• Log in to your LinkedIn account.
• Find a LinkedIn Group in your target market.
• Use Waalaxy to directly scrape the number of people you want.
• Launch a sequence campagne, or a single-action campaign (e.g. an invitation note), with Waalaxy.
• Watch the magic of automation at work.

Prospecting On Published Keywords

In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can target people who have written posts with specific hashtags.

For example, if you want to reach out or prospect people who have put “#seo” hashtag, then :

• Add it to this filters section.
• Add the number of LinkedIn hashtags you want.
• Send your sales prospecting message, such as:

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

• Video series.
• Checklist.
• White paper.
• Free trial.
• Webinars.
• Appointments/Meeting by phone, video conference, in person.
• 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.

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 (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.

CRM Integration And Account Management

LinkedIn provides integration with several popular customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.

The integration allows you to seamlessly transfer information between LinkedIn Sales Navigator and your CRM platform (like Waalaxy for example).

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.

Strategies For Building An Engaged Community On LinkedIn

In this section, we’ll look at how to prospect on LinkedIn, in a variety of ways. With or without LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it’s possible!

Prospecting On LinkedIn With Outbound Marketing

Prospecting on LinkedIn Sales Navigator is outbound marketing.

This method may seem aggressive, but it’s effective if you address the right message to the right audience. Cold prospecting on LinkedIn requires technicality to avoid offending your prospects.

Since 2015-2016, the rules of outbound have evolved to become:

• More human.
• With a longer buying journey.
• A growing presence of dark patterns.

However, by personalizing your approach with precise software and targeting, you can effectively reach your audience and hit the nail on the head with every campaign launched.

Here’s an example of an outbound marketing conversion path to be applied on LinkedIn:

• Visit of the prospect’s profile (D+0).
• Sending an automated message asking to be added to your network (D+0 – H+1).
• Sending a 2ᵉ automated message to promote your lead magnet after asking a question (“Set Yes” technique, on D+3).
• Tag the person on “prospect step 2” if they show interest.
• Send the lead magnet after a positive response.
• Send a message with interesting content or a customer testimonial a few days later.
• Send a message with your commercial offer, such as a discount.

This campaign can be extended depending on the price of your product, the open and click rates of your sequences, the conversion rate of your landing pages, etc.

Examples

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

Outbound marketing is very effective for low-priced products, where the impulse to buy is stronger. For more expensive products, a more developed strategy is required.

You can apply this method via Waalaxy, in particular thanks to the scenario function and multi-step campaigns.

Now that we’ve looked at outbound, let’s discover another powerful yet little-used strategy for prospecting on LinkedIn.

Prospecting On LinkedIn With Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a gentle, progressive lead generation method and approach to your customers’ buying process. It consists in naturally attracting people to you, without forcing them to listen to you.

In the face of outbound marketing, this digital strategy is becoming increasingly effective over the years. There are 4 stages to inbound marketing:

• Attract.
• Convert.
• Engage.
• Retain.

You attract people by so called “organic” channels (without LinkedIn Sales Navigator) such as:

• SEO (search engine optimization or natural referencing).
• SMO in brand content.

Let’s focus on SMO in brand content on social networks, and in particular its advantages when applied to the LinkedIn social network.

Brand Content Strategy On LinkedIn And Its Advantages

The brand content strategy is a natural prospecting method with many advantages:

• Focused on H2H (human-to-human) and bringing value to your audience.
• No advertising costs.
• With the highest ROI.
• The least expensive lead acquisition method.
• A highly effective way of federating a community of fans in your field (B2b or B2C).

To succeed on LinkedIn when you’re just starting out, you need to publish often. There’s no secret to this.

Of course, the goal is to vary your LinkedIn post types to establish your personal branding. Here are the 4 types of posts that work superbly:

• Authority” posts to prove your expertise and influence.
• Rant” posts, to be either loved or hated (example of a post by our Chief Customer Care, which was a hit): to express your opinion on controversial issues, polarized opinions, taboo subjects or emotional issues (appealing to the ego)…
• Value-added” posts (e.g. via LinkedIn carousels): actionable content, best tips, snackable (easily available on mobile or desktop)…
• Inspirational” posts: emotionally charged content to reach many more views than “classic” posts (storytelling, anecdote, situation…).

You could, for example, plan a writing rhythm in your editorial schedule to alternate types, then schedule your LinkedIn posts with Podawaa.

What Are The Benefits Of Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

An improved search engine, is that all? Yes, but that’s all that matters.

Being able to precisely segment your prospects is essential to starting prospecting on the right footing. It’s what enables you to target the right people, compare your campaigns and personalize your approaches.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator delivers a high level of depth thanks to :

• Workforce size filters,
• Years of experience,
• Seniority in current position and in current company,
• Hierarchical level.

It also allows you to search for members of a specific group, even if you’re not part of it, which is an ideal feature for interest-based searches.

Another advantage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that it displays up to 2,500 search results (100 pages of 25), compared with just 1,000 for the standard search (100 pages of 10).

In all cases, it’s crucial to segment to access all results.

Finally, with Waalaxy’s offer, a single Sales Navigator subscription is enough to feed all your profiles with leads, making the investment largely worthwhile. 🔥

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Subscriptions And Rates

As one of the LinkedIn Premium solutions, using this platform naturally comes at a price.

How Much Does LinkedIn Sales Navigator Cost? Is It Free?

No, unfortunately, you won’t be able to get LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free, at least not indefinitely.

LinkedIn is offering you a free 30-day trial of Sales Navigator (with no obligation), so you can get a feel for it.

You’ll be able to make the most of its power, discover all its features and see whether or not it matches your organization’s objectives and operating methods…

Once your trial month is over, the offer will begin in earnest, unless you decide to cancel it because it doesn’t suit you.

A little tip: if you’re afraid you’ll forget to remove your bank details, you can remove them directly after taking the trial period.

You can also use an alternative such as Waalaxy. And, what’s more, it’s free!

Yes, free 🎁 to prospect in just 10 minutes, along with lots of other benefits. It’s crazy, but it’s real.

Which LinkedIn Sales Navigator Subscription Should I Choose?

Well, the solution is all very well, but how much does LinkedIn Sales Navigator cost? There are three options, and again, it all depends on what you need.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Core (€99.99/month and per access), but on a yearly basis this will cost you less (€959.88/year and also per access).

This simple/basic package lets you perform advanced searches 🔥 on your prospects:

• Exclude certain terms for more precise targeting and thereby be able to prospect more effectively,
• Receive alerts on your prospects and accounts you’ve registered,
• Create personalized lists to segment your different targets
• Access to LinkedIn Learning, unlimited searches, Inmails, third-party tool integration.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced (€129.99/month or €1190/year), again, if you decide to go for an annual fee, it will cost you less than a monthly subscription.

Advanced contains the same features as LinkedIn Sales Navigator Core, but you’ll also be able to interact with prospects through your team’s network (TeamLink):

• Optimize your lead generation,
• Access administration and reporting solutions.
• Access internal platforms and centralized billing.

3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Plus, the budget will be determined according to your needs, you can request a demo and then make a commitment.

Waalaxy VS LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Which to choose?

The two are complementary, but if we had to recommend one, it would be Waalaxy. We explain why.

Automate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Waalaxy

Waalaxy is ideal for automating your searches with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and launch lead generation campaigns 😏

Here’s what you can do 👇

• Export them from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• Run scenarios based on these searches.
• Get more accurate results.

How do you do it? Waalaxy lets you fully customize your campaigns, offering valuable time-savings in your LinkedIn prospecting strategy. You can also optimize it with A/B testing. 😜

Here are some examples of automated campaigns features you can set up on Waalaxy:

Setting up automated actions

The idea behind Waalaxy is to create a series of automated actions based on your prospect’s journey, with over 50 possible scenarios.

👉 This looks as follows (this is just one example of the 50+ scenarios that exist):

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

Use Waalaxy to optimize your LinkedIn prospecting and launch effective personalized lead generation campaigns.

Waalaxy subscription and rates

With Waalaxy, you can access LinkedIn Sales Navigator free of charge and contact your prospects in just 10 minutes a day!

What’s more, with our Freemium version, developing a customer base won’t cost you a thing. That’s a good place to start, isn’t it?

Thanks to our Chrome extension, import your LinkedIn searches and send personalized invitations and messages. It’s incredibly simple and effective. And we love it. 🤩

Access all the prospecting features on LinkedIn with our “marketing automation” subscriptions. Find out more about our pricing here! 👈

Developing a customer base with Waalaxy costs nothing using our Freemium version, a great place to start.

We promise you one thing, if you merge LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Waalaxy, your sales prospecting will soar into space. 🚀

Automate your prospecting process

We’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, whose aim is to maximize your potential and turn your prospects into customers.

But what is a sales prospecting plan? It’s all about taking action to create a link between your contacts and you (or your product).

It’s also a process that will enable you to acquire new customers, which is vital for any structure.

There are various forms of sales prospecting, all of which can be automated to save you as much time as possible, whatever your business.

Telephone prospecting

Also known as “phoning” or telephone canvassing, this is a technique where you contact your prospects by telephone. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Although phoning ☎️ is becoming less and less common (except for certain energy or cell phone suppliers who call on Saturdays at 7pm), it remains a method of commercial prospecting and closing.

It is also possible to prospect by fax, but this practice has become very rare indeed. 🤡

Physical prospecting

This type of prospecting belongs to direct marketing, and is even rarer, being called “door-to-door” or “field prospecting”. It involves meeting customers face-to-face.

Someone comes to your home to present their products or services.

With the development of digital technology, people are naturally turning to digital tools because prospecting in the field is tiring.

Digital prospecting

Now we come to what we’ve been waiting for: digital prospecting. This covers all actions carried out online via :

• Social networks.
• Blogs.
• Emailing.
• Websites.

The key element is inbound marketing. The aim? Get prospects interested in your solution without soliciting them directly.

To do this, think about the content you want to convey to your potential leads. Use SEO to position yourself on relevant keywords so that users find your articles when they search for those terms.

Although less tiring than the field, online prospecting requires good preparation (sales skills, knowledge of the target, its expectations and pain points).

To make sure you’re well prepared, here are our top tips for getting started (with or without LinkedIn Sales Navigator).

How to start prospecting?

You know what prospecting is, but how do you go about it? Don’t panic, we’ll walk you through it step by step.

Create your persona

Before you can start selling your products, you need to know who you’re going to sell to, and that means creating your persona.

It’s often said, but it’s crucial to know your ideal customer. Take the time you need to do this because automation isn’t useful at every stage of prospecting (including this one).

Here’s the information you need to create your buyer persona on LinkedIn:

• Prospect’s first and last name.
• Photo (a visual representation helps you get closer to the prospect).
• Age and place of birth and/or residence.
• Marital status 💍
• Job title or function.
• Company name and workforce.
• Prospect’s needs.
• Pain points.
• How can we meet their needs?

This information is essential both to convert the prospect and to build loyalty.

Finally, you can create a “buyer journey” to understand the stages of your targets’ journey and their needs at each stage.

Audience analysis and personalized interactions

You have a prospecting funnel, and it’s crucial to understand what stage your prospect is at.

A prospect discovering your page for the first time will not behave in the same way as someone who already knows about your solution and has visited your site several times.

That’s why it’s essential to analyze your audience so you can offer them the right message at the right time. Without this analysis, you’ll struggle to satisfy your prospects and get your business off the ground 🚀.

Once you’ve understood and analyzed your audience, send them personalized messages to capture your target’s attention (definitely not generic messages).

When you send a message, don’t talk about yourself, talk about the prospect. Show them that you’re interested in them and understand their needs.

The prospect doesn’t want to know who you are or why you’re doing it; he wants to know how you can help him. An initial message 📩 should pique your audience’s curiosity.

Conclusion – Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator Essential For Prospecting On LinkedIn?

Acquiring new customers is a top priority in business development. That’s why a number of software products have emerged ☀️ to help marketers in their quest.

LinkeDIn Sales Navigator is one of these little nuggets that will help your sales teams. Of course, there’s no one way to use it: you can prospect both B2B and B2C customers.

It’s a great way to prospect on LinkedIn, but it’s still expensive compared to our Waalaxy web application.

LinkedIN Sales Navigator doesn’t replace the Waalaxy Chrome extension, which allows you to generate lots of qualified contacts, perform social selling and integrate a CRM with your prospect data.

As a reminder, LinkedIn Sales Navigator enables highly precise targeting of users, to find the right people for their products, services or institutions… as well as boosting your prospecting and sales.

Especially if you combine it with your CRM tool such as Waalaxy. 😉 To sum up, we’ve seen that LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to 🛍️ :

• Target decision-makers.
• Use a person’s seniority as a criterion.
• Target by company size.
• Filter by group without belonging to it.
• Contact active people (posting within the last 30 days).
• Exclude undesirable terms.
• And more.

Frequently Ask Questions (FAQ)

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

Is LinkedIn’s Standard Search Enough?

LinkedIn’s standard search function offers interesting filtering at first glance, but it’s designed to push you towards a paid offer for more results.

If you want to find an old classmate or manager by searching for their first and last name, the standard search will suffice.

But for more complex searches, it can be imprecise. For example, searching for “IT Manager” may return “Managers” and people in “IT”.

Even using quotation marks, the search can be imprecise as early as the 8th page. Imagine page 70 or 80…

If you want to guarantee maximum precision in your search results, you won’t get far with the standard search function. ❌

However, if you simply want to expand your network without precise or high-quality segmentation, it may be sufficient.

We don’t recommend it, but you can achieve your goals using Waalaxy with standard search.

To Pay For LinkedIn Sales Navigator Or Not?

Customer prospecting can be done in several ways. You can either use the standard version of LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Good reasons to use the standard search function:

• You’re new to LinkedIn and simply looking to grow your b2c or b2b network,
• Your persona is broad, and the basic criteria will give you interesting results,
• You’re broke,
• You only use one profile.

Good reasons to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator :

• You already have a network of over 250 contacts,
• You want to be able to segment your personas precisely,
• You want to optimize your prospecting, so that it is targeted and has access to categories of prospects that would otherwise be unavailable,
• You use multiple profiles for prospecting.

In addition, follow our complete guide to prospecting for your business here!

How do I get an invoice on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn will not provide you with invoices for Premium offers 😁. However, you will be able to retrieve your purchase history by :

• Connecting to your LinkedIn page.
• Clicking on your portrait.
• Selecting “Preferences and privacy”.
• Clicking on “Subscriptions and payments”.

How Do I Install LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

You don’t need to install or download anything to install LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

What’s more, it’s very easy to use, so go straight to the site. From the home page, you can request a demo and get access with a 30-day free trial.

This period allows you to test it and start your first prospecting searches, before subscribing.

To link LinkedIn Sales Navigator to your personal LinkedIn account, you’ll need to enter your credit card details, but you won’t be charged for the first month.

Then, once active, the logo will appear in the top right-hand corner of your LinkedIn page. Click on it to access the LinkedIn Sales Navigator dashboard.

A reminder will be sent to you 7 days before the end of the free trial, allowing you to decide whether to continue using it.

How Do I Unsubscribe From  LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

If you think you’re done with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can unsubscribe:

Click on your portrait and select “Preferences”.
Go to “Account type” and cancel your subscription.

Please note! You will lose all your information once the subscription is cancelled 🚨. If you take one up again at a later date, the entire database will be permanently lost. Don’t forget.

Sales Navigator Training With LinkedIn Learning

When you take LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you also get access to LinkedIn Learning. There are many interesting courses on the platform, covering a wide range of topics:

• Digital marketing.
• Online and programmatic advertising.
• Personal development.
• Technology.
• And much more…

Thanks to this solution, the world of prospecting is opening up to you! But you’ll need to put in place the right practices to turn your prospects into potential customers who are loyal to your brand.

As a reminder, we recommend that you use Waalaxy to automate LinkedIn Sales Navigator and get it for free. 🤑

Free LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Waalaxy

Now that you have access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the idea is to build your prospect base for the coming months. So you’re going to carry out your searches via Sales Navigator, and export the corresponding profiles to Waalaxy.

1. Profile Extraction in Waalaxy

With Waalaxy, you can reach up to 50,000 prospects. To import more, you’ll need to delete some of them.

Please note that LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches only display the first 2,500 results. If your search produces more, you won’t be able to export all the leads. In this case, use the filters to split your search into several segments.

We can even give you access to more than 2,500 search results.

2. Prospecting With Waalaxy

Waalaxy allows you to send between 80 and 100 connection requests per day. Setting up Waalaxy for 5 days a week, this equates to around 450 requests per week (90×5).

By exporting 25,000 leads to Waalaxy (that’s just 10 searches), you’ve got a whole year’s worth of prospecting ahead of you!

Once you’ve exported your lead base for the next few months, you can cancel LinkedIn Sales Navigator without being charged by LinkedIn if you do so within 30 days. Your Waalaxy actions will continue as normal, even without access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

🎁 Bonus

This technique can have one drawback: prospects may change jobs or activities between export and campaign launch, reducing the quality of leads.

If there are several of you, you can chain LinkedIn Sales Navigator trials with different accounts and export leads from one Waalaxy account to another (with the Export/Import CSV feature or the Team offer).

Here’s a video demonstration of how to do it:

Then all you have to do is import these leads back into your main account, the one you use for prospecting.

Integrate The Waalaxy Inbox To Save Time

To save you even more time, we’ve developed Inbox waalaxy, a mailbox for LinkedIn with additional features. 📨👏

Inbox Waalaxy is a Chrome extension like Podawaa, which looks like an email templates interface. 📨 It lets you exchange with your prospects and contacts, while offering the following features: 👇

• Tag your contacts for easy segmentation, quickly find a conversation and filter your messages.
• Set a conversation to “Snooze” mode to make it disappear and come back to it later.
• Automatically relaunch your contacts by choosing when to resend a message.

In short, Waalaxy Inbox saves you time with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and lets you perform more actions to go further in B2B lead generation and multichannel prospecting.

🎬 That’s it! You now know a lot about the best way to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator 😉 Prospect, go! 🎈