Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
December 01, 2018
Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
In my prior role, I used Sales Navigator to research companies, contacts, and to reach out to those contacts with direct messages. It was not used across the organization at the time; I was the only one using it. It served as a mechanism for lead generation by providing accurate and mostly up-to-date information on contacts. It enabled me to reach out directly to contacts to start conversations, or to seek out introductions from my contacts to those I wanted to meet.
- The contact information is generally up-to-date, as it's produced by the individuals themselves. This beats out other sources of data that are generally 30% obsolete.
- The ability to directly message individuals is helpful. What's more, there's an ability to include multiple people on a message, leading to introductions being offered or made. The result is a higher response rate because of the referral capability.
- Sorting by industry, title, geography and other characteristics really makes it a helpful database.
- Some databases do significant research to pull in large org charts. SN depends on the individuals to put in their own data, so if they don't, it's not there.
- There seem to be regular changes to access to various forms of data, which is frustrating. By "regular," I mean annual. While this may be standard practice elsewhere, I'd prefer just knowing what I will and won't have access to at various tiers for more than a year.
- This isn't a knock on the functionality, but I'm starting to get too many messages on SN from people trying to prospect me. It's a "too popular to be valuable" issue now; so many people are trying to prospect on there that those they're seeking out may be fleeing SN.
- In my last business, it enabled me to quickly target high value prospects and reach out to them. It led to enough success that I used it regularly.
- It also offers and (I took advantage of) the ability to seek out introductions. This led to a large number of prospect conversations and some sales.
- In my current business, we used it to beta test heavy outbound email campaigns, which it proved out because of the accuracy of the data.
Before DiscoverOrg, I used SN. After moving to a business that requires more prospecting and at heavier volumes, I moved to DiscoverOrg. DiscoverOrg offers more data on more points in the industry we desired. SN was great in doing fewer, larger sales and because of how relatively inexpensive it is, I'd use it again in that environment.