Sales Navigator. Is it worth it?

The short answer: yes.

The long answer: before I dig in, let’s take a follow-your-own-adventure quiz.

Question 1: Do you sell products or services?

If your answer is no, Sales Navigator is not for you. If your answer is yes, move on to the next question.

Question 2: Do you form your target audience around professional attributes?

In other words, can you find your target audience by conducting a search through LinkedIn? If your answer is no, Sales Navigator is probably not for you. If your answer is yes, move on to the next question.

Question 3: Is your audience active on LinkedIn?

If you aren’t sure, that’s okay, because this is (sort of) a trick question. There isn’t an easy way to know whether your audience is active on LinkedIn unless you’re using Sales Navigator … which brings me to one of the primary reasons to subscribe in the first place.

Reason 1: Pinpointing Active Profiles

If you are leveraging LinkedIn as a selling tool, you will need to connect with relevant individuals, either through personalized reach-outs or InMail. Without knowing whether a profile is active, you may waste a lot of time reaching out to people who haven’t logged into LinkedIn for years.

We all speak to those people. You ask if they have a LinkedIn profile and they say, “Oh, LinkedIn? Yeah, <insert boss’s name here> had us create one, but I never use it. I still get connection requests to my email. Do you know how to turn those notifications off?”

Time is money … so why waste it on people who don’t use LinkedIn?

This is an example of Sales Navigator search results:

There are 2,903 profiles that fit my search criteria, but only 433 have posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days! That’s a huge difference! I could waste my time reaching out to 2,470 dead profiles. Instead, I can target my communication to those 433 active profiles and know that I’m reaching out to someone who actually uses LinkedIn.

Reason 2: Detailed Search Results

Yet another time saver: the ability to narrow a search further than with the standard LinkedIn search. Yes, there is the ability to conduct a search on “regular” LinkedIn, but you will end up trying to find a needle in a haystack instead of searching through a pile of needles.

I provide my clients with detailed LinkedIn marketing strategies. If they don’t already have Sales Navigator, I compare their search criteria with Sales Navigator vs. without Sales Navigator to illustrate the power of the tool.

One of my clients was searching for physicians in the Chicago area who had been in their current position for the past 6-10 years.

With Sales Navigator:

Industry: Medical Practice

Title: Physician

Years in Current Position: 6-10 Years

Location: Greater Chicago Area

The results? There are 550 total profiles that matched this search criteria and five had posted on LinkedIn the past 30 days. Five. It’s fair to say there was a need to refine the search to focus on a different group or alter the strategy altogether.

Sales Navigator shows us right out of the gate that there are no active profiles within that target, so we waste no time reaching out to those individuals.

Without Sales Navigator:

Industry: Medical Practice

Title: Physician

Location: Greater Chicago Area

Without Sales Navigator, we can’t narrow the search by the number of years in the current position, but we can use the other three fields. The results? There are 4,071 profiles that match this search criteria.

At first glance, this might seem like a fantastic route to take. The only problem: when we put that same search criteria into Sales Navigator, we receive similar general results: there are 3,914 profiles that match … but there are only 55 that posted on LinkedIn over the past 30 days. See how Sales Navigator saves us a lot of time? If you’re hiring someone to engage on LinkedIn for you, you’re also saving money.

Reason 3: Targeted Engagement

My final reason for subscribing to Sales Navigator is targeted engagement. I will admit that I haven’t used this much for myself, but that might change considering a recent added feature that has me excited.

Sales Navigator has always allowed users to save leads, which adds it to a list. You can then go into Sales Navigator and select “Lead Shares” for a feed of recent posts by your saved leads. This allows you to stay top of mind with users you believe will give you business.

The feature recently added? We can now save leads into lists, much like with LinkedIn Recruiter. That way, if I have multiple target audiences, I can divide them into those audiences through lists:

My System

Sales Navigator is a key piece of my LinkedIn funnel system, which includes optimizing the LinkedIn profile for keywords and inbound marketing, sending targeted reach-outs to add relevant individuals to your network, and then posting optimized content to nurture those leads.

Engaging with leads — whether they’ve connected with you or not — is also critical in the process. If they don’t remember you exist, they won’t remember to buy from you!

What is your opinion of Sales Navigator? Do you use it now? If you don’t, would you consider using it in the future? Why or why not?

Feel free to comment or add questions below!

Chrissie Wywrot is a LinkedIn specialist working with passionate entrepreneurs and professional athletes. To learn more about her services, visit her LinkedIn profile or email her at chrissie@chrissiewywrot.com.

Make sure to check out Chrissie’s free LinkedIn guide at chrissiewywrot.com/linkedin.