LinkedIn Sales Navigator is powerful, but I
don't recommend it to most organizations, because the truth is that most clients just don't use the features that differentiate it from regular LinkedIn Premium. And trust me, I have implemented Sales Navigator and trained sales teams at multiple companies on how to use it. I've seen big investments in time and money fail to deliver because the hardest thing to change is human behavior.
It doesn't matter whether it's enterprise sales, inside sales, or sales development. Salespeople love LinkedIn Sales Navigator for only a few reasons. These are the features they use:
- Great search capabilities that make it easy to discover and research the right prospects
- See who's viewed your profile
- Integration/syncing with CRM and sales automation tools
- Centralized billing and user admin
That's all great, but you don't have to buy LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get #1 or #2, and it's hard to justify the cost of this very expensive product just to get #3 and #4.
Here are the other features that really make LinkedIn Sales Navigator worthwhile, if you can get your team to use them:
- InMail: Send up to 150 in one month (because you can roll over unused InMails)
- Saved leads, accounts, lists, and alerts (stalking your targets)
- TeamLink and TeamLink Extend (leveraging contacts of others in your enterprise)
I have rolled out all of these features to teams at multiple companies. I have built them into sales methodology. I have conducted training sessions with managers and sales professionals. I have published monthly reports showing managers who's using the features, and who isn't. I have told teams that if they don't use it, we're going to take it away. I have tried everything imaginable. What always happens is a spike in usage for a few days, then back to normal.
And here's what normal looks like: For every 100 users, 80% never use it for anything but conduct a search. 10% save a company or a lead. 10% send an occasional InMail. 0% ever come close to using their allotted number of InMails -- even when InMails are part of programmed sales cadences.
For a long time, I thought it was me, but the LinkedIn professional services and training teams that I've worked with have told me that "your engagement looks great... you're doing all the right things..." In other words, just having our users use any of the features at all put us among the more engaged LinkedIn S/N clients.
This is a VERY expensive product. It costs more than twice as much as LinkedIn Premium Business, and most users don't take advantage of the extra features. This is why LinkedIn won't let enterprises license and be billed for LinkedIn Premium Business for their employees (you have to use a credit card). If they did, they wouldn't be able to sell Sales Navigator. It's just not worth it.
