Sales Navigator - Great for sellers, needs improvement for admins
October 16, 2017
Sales Navigator - Great for sellers, needs improvement for admins
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is primarily a demand generation tool internally for the sales org- pre-sales, SDRs and AEs. The tool is primarily used to research prospective clients and to drill deeper into an organization (i.e. looking for multiple people internally that could be buyers). To a much lesser extent it is being used to deliver social selling content and track team activity in LinkedIn (with the limited admin features). It is currently not being used by any other functions in any real capacity.
- TeamLink - connects everyone at your company to the service so you can see if anyone at your company (even those not on sales navigator) have a connection in common with the person being reviewed. Great tool for looking for friendly introductions or ways to expand one's network.
- Advanced company targeting tools enable users to drill into specific orgs, make notes on departments / functions and ID the right people to begin following. This can also be a great tool for recruiting.
- Inmail - great tool for dropping messages to prospective leads or networking contacts.
- No connection to activity tracking or BI tools in CRM - can't track inmails or response rates from CRM to match with deals or specific ops.
- Admin function lacks SSO so requires manually addition and subtraction of users (rather than being tied to SFDC license or Google account, etc.).
- Limits to inmails done by person rather than a shared pool of inmails - i.e. each rep only gets 30 inmails a month, but admin users might have an additional 30 unused each month.
- Hard to measure exact ROI, but certainly an excellent tool for getting information about individuals and organizations.
- Best for targeting individuals inside a company a sales team is already targeting. Ideally enterprise B2B sales efforts in which the sales rep knows the target list and is using Sales Navigator to find specific people at the company. Not as useful for generating mass lists of companies or targets.
There really isn't a clear comparable to Sales Navigator given its unique combination of targeted information, ability to reach out, assistance in posting and sharing content, and reviewing real-life connections to others in your network. This tool is really a must for enterprise B2B sales teams trying to ID the right individuals at previously ID'd companies.
If you are looking for a tool to generate lists of potential companies or pure 'company info' data dumps, then this is the wrong tool.
If you are looking for a tool to generate lists of potential companies or pure 'company info' data dumps, then this is the wrong tool.