How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator? [2024 Tutorial]

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has become an indispensable asset for salespeople worldwide.

But how can you unlock its full potential?

In this article, we delve into the intricacies of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, providing you with practical tips and insights to leverage this tool effectively.

Whether you’re a seasoned sales veteran or a newcomer to the field, this in-depth guide will help you navigate LinkedIn Sales Navigator like a pro, transforming your lead generation process and boosting your sales performance.

Ready to get your LinkedIn game to the next-level?

Let’s dive in the best LinkedIn plan for salespeople.

You’ll see.

How Does LinkedIn Sales Navigator Work?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows sales experts to nurture relationships and drive sale. Users can search for qualified leads and save them in lists. Then, they receive notifications about their lead and account activities that they can use in their outreach.

How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Prospecting?

Here’s how to use Sales Navigator for lead generation:

1. Use advanced filters search filters
2. Use Boolean search
3. Create lead lists
4. Send connection requests or InMails
5. Use alerts to follow-up
6. Export leads to CSV and get emails
7. Automate your lead generation with saved searches
8. Exclude clients & competitors from search results
9. Send free InMails to Open Profiles

1. Use advanced search filters

Sales Navigator is a LinkedIn Premium product that gives sales professionals access to advanced search features with more than 30 search criteria to find their target audience.

This video will show you in details how every filter works:

Unlike with the basic LinkedIn search, there is no limitation on the number of searches for Sales Navigator users.

With a Sales Navigator account, you can do as many search as you want.

Filters are divided into several categories:

• Company
• Function
• Personal
• Workflow
• Spotlight
• Posted Content
• And much more…

Spotlight category is interesting as it includes dynamic filters that detect job changes, mentions in the news, sharing of experiences, etc.

They are the best filters to find leads on LinkedIn because they provide good icebreakers for your messages, you can mention:

• a post they recently published
• an experience you share
• a common connection with TeamLink intro
• a recent job change

All this data is really useful to write personalize sales messages to your prospects.

Another interesting filter is “Posted Content”.

This will give all LinkedIn profiles that have posted or commented a post containing a specific keyword.

You’re able to see the post by clicking on “Posted on LinkedIn” below the About section.

If someone is creating or engaging with content related to your niche, it is likely to be a good prospect right?

A good way to find potential customers.

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Knowing how the Sales Navigator search filter work was the first step.

You really want to get the most out of the search engine?

Then you must master Boolean search.

2. Use Boolean search

Sales Navigator Boolean search is really simple programmatic language to make your searches much more precise.

It works with combinations of logical connectors and punctuation:

• AND
• OR
• NOT
• Parentheses
• Quotes

It has a strange name but it’s really simple.

Here’s a video that guides you through it.

Boolean can be used in 2 places: the keyword and the job title search bar.

The global keyword search will look for the keyword into the whole profile:

• Description
• About Section
• Job experiences
• Education
• Skills
• Recommendation
• in short, everything…

The job title filter will only look for your keywords into the current job experiences of your prospects.

Now let’s see how to use each Boolean operator.

There are 5 Boolean operators you should know about:

1. Quotes: to look for exact expression
2. AND: to look for several keywords
3. OR: to look for at least one keyword in a list
4. NOT: to exclude keywords
5. Parentheses: to combine AND, OR, NOT

Here’s a simple template you can follow for your Boolean searches:

(Seniority Keywords) AND (Function Keywords) NOT (Blacklist) 

Let’s say I am looking for decision-makers in Sales and Marketing.

I can add all the seniority related keywords in the parenthesis:

(VP OR "Vice-President" OR "V.P" OR "Vice President" OR Head OR Manager OR Chief) 

Then all the field related keyword in the second parenthesis

(Sales OR Marketing)

And then all my blacklist in the last parenthesis

(Assistant OR "Right Arm" OR Founder OR "Co-Founder" OR Cofounder)

Then put all together into the same Boolean query

(VP OR "Vice-President" OR "V.P" OR "Vice President" OR Head OR Manager OR Chief) AND (Sales OR Marketing) NOT (Assistant OR "Right Arm" OR Founder OR "Co-Founder" OR Cofounder)

This expression will look for a lot of job titles:

• VP Sales
• VP Marketing
• Head of Sales
• Head of Marketing
• Chief of Sales
• Chief of Marketing
• and more…

This template is super convenient to stay organized as your Boolean query get bigger and bigger.

3. Create lead lists

Once your search results are ready, you might want to handpick some leads to save them into a list.

Here’s how to create a lead list on Sales Navigator:

1. Select leads with checkboxes
2. Click on “Save o List”
3. Click “+”
4. Give a name to your list

Once your leads are saved into a list, you will be able to access them through the “Lead List” tab.

4. Connect and send InMails

Once your leads are added in a list, you can send connection requests and InMails directly from the interface.

InMails are premium LinkedIn messages that allows you to skip the connection request.

That way, you and your messages can land on the inbox, even if you’re not part of their LinkedIn connection yet.

With Sales Navigator, you get 50 InMail credits per month, so you use them carefully.

Send a connection request first, and use InMail messages as a last resort if your connection request is not accepted.

The lead list feature allows you to take notes and your leads and keep track of the InMails sent to them.

If the vast majority of your leads are on LinkedIn, your sales team can use this interface as your outreach CRM.

To get the most out of InMails, make sure to check our guide LinkedIn InMail best practices.

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Connecting and taking notes is not the only benefit of adding leads into list.

Let me show you.

5. Use alerts to follow up

Once you add a lead to a list, Sales Navigator alerts will track their activity on LinkedIn and send you updates like:

• the post they publish or share
• job change

This social selling feature is really valuable to send personalized follow-up messages.

You can bookmark alerts to save them for later.

If you click on View, the LinkedIn post will open on the left, and you will be able to like and comment directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Also a great way to follow-up on a prospect.

This is really convenient for B2B sales if you want to break the ice or follow up with your prospect by commenting the content they publish.

6. Export leads to CSV and get emails

You use Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive and you want to get your lead list into a CSV to upload it to your CRM?

Sales Navigator is a great tool, but it doesn’t allow you to export leads to CSV and find their emails.

For that, you will need to use a Chrome extension like Evaboot. Here’s how it works:

When you make a search, you can see a maximum of:

• 2500 results for leads searches
• 1000 results for accounts searches

But sometimes, your search has more than 2.5K leads or 1K accounts in it.

If you want to export more than 2500 leads from a Sales Navigator search, you need to split your search into several chunks.

Here’s a video tutorial that explains the process:

Using Evaboot is an easy way to build email lists from Sales Navigator.

If you also want to get phone numbers from Sales Navigator, you can combine Evaboot and Datagma.

Here’s a tutorial:

Another benefit of Evaboot is that the tool will also automatically convert Sales Navigator URLs into LinkedIn URLs.

7. Automate lead generation with saved searches

Ok, so you made your first searches, extracted the results…

Great.

But what happens after that?

People will change jobs, accounts will grow.

LinkedIn database is alive.

You need to do some follow-up on your searches.

And LinkedIn built a tool for that: Saved Searches.

The Save Search feature allows you to get notified when new people match your search results. It’s one of best lead search automation tool.

It’s a great way to identify new ideal customers, get lead recommendations and reach out to people as soon as they get into their new position.

If you click on the New, you will get access to the list of leads that recently matched your search filters.

To save a search, it’s really simple.

Just click on “Save Search” on the top right of the search interface.

This feature is so underestimated, yet so useful for LinkedIn outreach. No need to look for new leads every week, they will come directly at you.

8. Exclude clients & competitors from search results

When you’re doing prospecting, you want to make sure that you won’t contact your past or current clients and your competitors.

To do that:

• Look for your clients and competitors
• Add them into an account list

Then, when you’re on the lead search:

• Go to Workflow
• Select the blacklist
• Click on Exclude

All the people working in the companies inside your account list will be excluded.

9. Send free InMails to Open Profiles

Sales Navigator comes with 50 InMail credits per month.

InMail are basically messages you can send to people you’re not connected with to skip the connection request step.

This amount is obviously way too low if you want to prospect on LinkedIn at scale.

In this video, you will find 3 tips to get unlimited InMails on LinkedIn. One of them is to identify and target open profiles.

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Ok.

So now, you know the basic.

But to really be in the top 1% of Sales Navigator users, you still must learn a few things.

Especially on how the search engine works.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Best Practices

Sales Navigator has many benefits. It’s clearly one of the best tool to prospect on LinkedIn.

However, if you trust it blindly, you will end up reaching out to people that have nothing to do with your client.

We did a study on +100K searches. On average 31% of your search results don’t match with your filters.

Here’s a post I’ve seen on Reddit confirming the study:

The consequence is that many sales spend hours cleaning lists of prospects.

Still, LinkedIn is the best B2B database in the world.

So we have to deal with it.

Let’s see all the tips and best practices around Sales Navigator search filters and how Evaboot can help you with that

1. Use keyword filter carefully

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator keyword search will look into the entire profile of your prospect.

So if you are typing “Marketing'” in your search, you will get every people that have mentioned “Marketing” at least one time in their profile.

Here’s an example of a lead that came out on a “Marketing” keyword search:

You can see that using this filter can bring a lot of irrelevant leads in your search results so you need to use it with caution.

What Evaboot does to fix this

Our double check the profile to see if your keywords are presents in the current job description or job title of your prospects. Using Evaboot, this profile above would have been automatically detected as an unqualified lead.

The most common error is to use the keyword filter to look for job titles.

Keep that for the title filter.

Here is an example.

I have compared the results of the same search using the keyword filter and the title filter with Evaboot.

You can see that the error rate is higher with keywords search.

If you are looking for job titles, you should always use the Title filter, forget about the keywords.

So how to use the keyword filter then?

The best way to use it is to look for niche keywords that will not appear on the job title but rather on job descriptions or company descriptions.

Like offline marketing for example.

Probably no one will mention this on their job title, but it can appear on a job description.

Even if you use the job title filter correctly, you may end up with unqualified leads.

This is because they don’t update their profile correctly.

Let me show you the problem.

2. Be aware of the “several current experiences” issue

When you use the job title filter, LinkedIn will search within all the job experiences marked as Present.

The thing is, many people forget to correctly update their job position when they change jobs.

They create a new experience, but they don’t close the previous one, which is still marked as present.

Ex: here’s a prospect in a search for the keyword CEO

What Evaboot does to fix this

We detect the real current experience of the people and check if this experience match the job titles you were looking for.

3. Don’t use the Industry filter in the lead search

Many people think the industry filter on the lead search looks for the industry of their company.

But it’s looking for the industry of the profile

But what’s the industry of the profile?

This is the industry you can change here:

Most users consider this field as Department and enter Sales if they work in Sales, even if they work in a Software company.

Ex: I have changed my industry from Computer Software to Chemicals and this is what happens.

If you use this filter, there will be some garbage in your search for sure, but you can still use it with Evaboot if you want as some people will correctly fill their profile industry.

What Evaboot does to fix this

We extract the company industry on the prospect company page, and we check if it matches with the industry you selected on your lead search. Basically, we correct this filter to make it search the right information.

4. Don’t use Function and Seniority filters

With the Seniority level filter, LinkedIn tries to guess the seniority level with this information:

• the job title
• the hierarchical relations between people.

So if you’re a CEO, there is high chance that LinkedIn classify you as Owner for example.

They will also use the information given by users when they add their managers or add managers for other people.

This info is poorly informed, and the algorithm will give unpredictable results.

LinkedIn will create a Seniority Level for every current experience on your profile.

So if you have 4 opened experience, you will have 4 different Seniority Level attached to your profile.

You can see in this example that a CEO can be considered as in intern.

That is why If you know exactly which job title you want to target, our advice is to not use this filter.

After all, if you know the job titles you want to target, you don’t need this filter.

You should use it in only one case: discover new job titles.

Like in this example where I tell LinkedIn: “Just give me decision-makers in Sales”

For this, I’ll just enter “Sales” into the job title filter, and I add the highest seniority levels.

The function filter has the same problem as the seniority level filter.

With Function, LinkedIn tries to guess your Function with your job titles

This once again, an unpredictable algorithmic decisions.

Same as Seniority Filter, LinkedIn will create one function for every current experience you have opened on your profile.

Don’t use this filter at all if possible.

If you really know your personas, you know what job titles they have, and you don’t need this filter.

Now let’s discuss the worst filter on Sales Navigator:

The technology filters.

5. Don’t use Technology filter

There is absolutely no information on LinkedIn’s documentation about how they find technologies used by companies.

It makes it really hard to trust them on this.

If I use What’s Run which is a reliable plugin to find technologies used on a website, it doesn’t mention Webflow on the website to detect

You want to target companies based on which technology they used?

It’s much better to use services that have been built especially for that, like Wappalyzer or BuiltWith.

You can see the process and details in the 3rd part of this video.

This example is about finding ecommerce using Shopify, but you can apply this technique to any technology.

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One of the best ways to reduce the number of unqualified leads in your Sales Navigator search results is to make account-based searches.

Let me show you how it works.

Sales Navigator for Account Based Marketing

How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to target accounts:

1. Search for account with advanced filters
2. Create an account list
3. Find the right decision-makers
4. Combine Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Ads

1. Search for accounts with advanced filters

When you do Account Based Marketing on LinkedIn, you start by searching for account pages, then you find the decision-makers.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the perfect tool to do that. This technique is used by the best sales managers and guarantee you to get relevant leads.

It offers 14 search filters to look for accounts that would be perfect clients for your business.

You can filter by:

• Company Size
• Location
• Industry
• Global headcount growth
• Department headcount growth
• Recent activities
• And much more…

The headcount growth and hiring filters because it allows you to target growing companies.

In terms of event detection, LinkedIn allows you to detect companies with recent funding events on Crunchbase.

LinkedIn also detect when they are a Senior Leadership change in the last 3 month in a company.

The arrival of a new top decision-makers is a great opportunity to launch a conversation with the account.

Newcomers tend to come with new ideas and new ideas require product and services.

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The next step?

You guessed it.

It’s to create account lists.

2. Create an account list

To create an account list on Sales Navigator:

1. Ticking the checkboxes
2. Click on Save to list
3. Click on +
4. Give a name to your list

Once the account are added on your list, you will be notified when the company:

• Is mentioned in the news
• Publishes a post with company page
• Has a senior leadership change

LinkedIn will also track your targeted companies on the web and send you the blog post mentioning them.

If you click on View article, you will be able to see an abstract and read the post.

Another super useful tool for LinkedIn Account Based Marketing is the LinkedIn company page.

In there, you can build you account map by drag and dropping leads into several categories (Tiers 1, Tiers 2, Tiers 3).

Get some insights about growth, the size of the department, the hires, and job openings on LinkedIn.

This is really useful, to get to know your account to write super personalized sales prospecting messages.

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But to whom should you send the messages?

How to find the decision-makers?

3. Find the right decision-makers

Here is how to find decision-makers within an account list using Sales Navigator:

1. Go to the lead search:
2. Go to Workflow
3. Open the filter Account List
4. Select your account list

Once you have selected your account list, all the people working at these companies will appear in the search results.

Your job is now to add filters to get the right decision-makers. Obviously, the job title filter is a great way to do that.

4. Combine Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Ads

The efficiency of your LinkedIn prospecting strategy can be boosted by LinkedIn marketing using LinkedIn Ads.

There’s a hack to create super-targeted LinkedIn ads with your Sales Navigator extractions.

Instead of trusting LinkedIn Algorithm, you provide LinkedIn the exact list of people to target.

When you are choosing your audience, click on List upload > Contact List or Company List.

I’ve explain all the process in this video!

By running ads on the people you are prospecting, you multiply the touchpoint your prospects have with your brand and increase the chances to get a reply.

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers 3 different plans:

1. Core
2. Advanced
3. Advanced Plus

For now, we’ve only covered the features of Sales Navigator Core.

Let’s explore the functionalities of Advanced and Advanced Plus so you can see if it can benefit your business.

How To Use Sales Navigator Advanced?

Sales Navigator Advanced costs $149.99/ month. It offers everything included in Core plus:

1. CSV Upload
2. Smart Links
3. TeamLink

1. Create account lists through CSV upload

If you’re using other sources of data than LinkedIn to identify accounts, this feature can really change your life.

Account upload allow importing CSV on Sales Navigator with account information, so LinkedIn can try to find these account into its database.

Here’s a video tutorial:

This process can automate Account list building and allow to identify decision-makers inside companies you have scraped on:

• Google
• Crunchbase
• Madyness
• Job boards

If you can get the LinkedIn URL of the company page for every account, the match rate will be 100%!

2. Use Smart Links to track your prospects

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Smart Link is an underestimated feature for LinkedIn lead generation.

Smart Links allow you to create PowerPoint like presentation directly from Sales Nav, send them to your prospect and track how they interact with it.

In this video, you will find many tips about how to use Smart Links to generate leads.

3. TeamLink

LinkedIn TeamLink helps sales team detect warm introduction opportunities with their prospects. TeamLink is doing that by showing you if people in your search results are among the 1st degree connections of your teammates.

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Sales Navigator Advanced is built for companies with sales team between 5 and 10 people.

If you’re working in an Enterprise with much more sales reps, you might be interested in Sales Navigator Advanced Plus.

How To Use Sales Navigator Advanced Plus?

Sales Navigator Advanced Plus doesn’t have a public pricing. You must go through LinkedIn Sales Team to get. It offers everything included in Advanced plus:

1. TeamLink Extend
2. CRM Synchronization
3. Real Time Contact Update

1. TeamLink Extend

TeamLink Extend which allow you to see if your prospects are connected to anyone in your company (not just your sales teammates).

TeamLink connections dramatically increases the number of warm introduction your Sales team can get from people working in their company.

2. CRM Synchronization

If you use a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot or Pipedrive, you can sync your CRM with Sales Navigator.

For example, you can exclude from your Sales Navigator searches leads already present in your CRM.

3. Real Time Contact Update

Sales Navigator Advanced Plus is super helpful to keep your contacts updated. People don’t stay in the same company for 10 years anymore.

That’s why your CRM must stay up to date with job changes.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Plus allows you to be notified every time people in your CRM change jobs or companies.

How To Use Sales Navigator For Recruiting?

Sales Navigator has been built to optimize sales process, but you can also use it for recruiting.

Indeed, the search filters you use to look for leads can also be used to find candidates.

LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you access to the same data.

The only thing that changes is the interface.

You don’t have all the filters available in LinkedIn Recruiter, but you can also use it to find people open to work.

The cool thing is that you can use the same tool to new prospects and reach out to ideal candidates to join your company.

All that for $99 /month.

Not bad right?

Conclusion

Mastering LinkedIn Sales Navigator can significantly enhance your sales and prospecting efforts. Investing in this tool really worth it.

With its advanced search functionality, personalized lead recommendations, and real-time sales updates, you can target the right buyers, understand key insights, and engage with personalized outreach.

By doing so, you can streamline your sales processes, save time, and focus more on building meaningful relationships with potential clients.

If you start using Sales Navigator for free, they offer 1 month free trial.

So go ahead and apply this tips right now!

FAQ

Here, we answer most common questions about LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

When should I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

For sales professionals seeking to build relationships, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is invaluable. Use it when you want to target specific companies or roles, and then leverage its advanced features to stay updated on important milestones and opportunities with your leads. Pairing this with other LinkedIn tools, such as Ads, can further enhance your outreach strategy.

What is the difference between LinkedIn and Sales Navigator?

While LinkedIn aids career growth, Sales Navigator is a sales-centric tool with specialized features. LinkedIn Premium offers user insights, but Sales Navigator is designed for optimized lead discovery.

How much is Sales Navigator on LinkedIn per month?

Sales Navigator offers different pricing plans. Sales Navigator Core (Professional): $99/month. Sales Navigator Advanced (Team): $149/month. Sales Navigator Advanced Plus (Enterprise): starts at $1600/year