LinkedIn is the world’s largest B2B network. But the free version has real limits – limited searches, limited visibility, and no serious prospecting tools. That’s where LinkedIn Sales Nav changes the game.
Sales Navigator gives sales professionals access to advanced filters, real-time prospect insights, AI-powered recommendations, and direct messaging to anyone on LinkedIn – whether you’re connected or not. It’s the difference between fishing in a pond and fishing in an ocean with a GPS.
This guide walks you through everything you need to know: what Sales Navigator is, how to set it up, how to use its core features, and how to get the most out of every dollar you spend on it.
What Is a LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
LinkedIn Sales Nav is LinkedIn’s premium sales intelligence and prospecting platform. It’s built specifically for B2B sales professionals, SDRs, account executives, and sales teams who need more than a standard LinkedIn account can provide.
Where basic LinkedIn lets you browse profiles and connect with people you already know, Sales Navigator lets you search the entire LinkedIn database with precision. You can filter by job title, company size, industry, seniority level, geography, years of experience, and dozens of other criteria. You can save leads, track account activity, receive buying intent signals, and integrate directly with your CRM.
Moreover, Sales Navigator goes beyond search. It surfaces real-time alerts when prospects change jobs, post content, or show signs of buying activity. This means you can reach out at exactly the right moment – when relevance is highest and receptiveness is strongest.
For any team running structured outbound B2B lead generation, Sales Navigator is one of the most powerful top-of-funnel tools available.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Pricing in 2026
Sales Navigator offers three subscription tiers. Each is designed for a different scale of use.
Sales Navigator Core – $119.99/month (or $89.99/month billed annually at $1,079.88 per year). This plan is designed for individual sellers. It includes advanced lead and account search, 50 InMail credits per month, lead recommendations, real-time alerts, and the Account Hub for tracking priority accounts.
Sales Navigator Advanced – $159.99/month (or $149.99/month billed annually at $1,799.88 per year). This plan adds team collaboration tools, AI-powered Account IQ for faster research, Buyer Intent Signals, Smart Links for tracking content engagement, TeamLink for leveraging your company network, and CRM embedded profiles.
Sales Navigator Advanced Plus – Custom pricing. This tier is built for enterprise teams running Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. It includes everything in Advanced plus native CRM integration, automatic CRM data updates, and enterprise-level onboarding and support.
All plans include a 30-day free trial. If you’re evaluating the tool, start with Core and upgrade once you understand your team’s actual usage patterns.
How to Set Up LinkedIn Sales Nav: Step by Step
Getting set up correctly from day one saves hours of confusion later. Follow this process to get your account working properly before you run your first search.
Step 1 – Start your free trial Go to business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions and click “Start Free Trial.” You’ll need a LinkedIn account to proceed. Use your existing LinkedIn profile – Sales Navigator builds on top of it.
Step 2 – Define your target audience during onboarding. Sales Navigator walks you through a setup wizard when you first log in. It asks you to define your target industries, company sizes, geographies, and job functions. Take your time here. The recommendations and alerts you receive going forward are based on these preferences.
Step 3 – Connect your CRM. If you use Salesforce or HubSpot, connect it during setup. This allows Sales Navigator to sync your existing accounts and contacts, surface LinkedIn data inside your CRM, and log your Sales Navigator activity automatically. This step is critical for teams that track pipeline and activity in a CRM.
Step 4 – Set up your Account Hub. The Account Hub is your workspace for tracking priority companies. Add the accounts you’re actively working or targeting. Sales Navigator will then deliver alerts specific to those accounts – news, executive changes, new hires, and content activity.
Step 5 – Save your first lead list. Run an initial search using the Advanced Lead Search filters. Save the results as a named list. This becomes your working prospecting list. You can create multiple lists organized by territory, persona, campaign, or product line.
Step 6 – Configure your alert preferences. Decide which triggers matter most to you – job changes, mentions in the news, content posts, or connections at target accounts. Sales Navigator can send email digests or in-platform notifications for each. Configure these to match your outreach workflow.
Core Features of LinkedIn Sales Nav and How to Use Them
Advanced Lead and Account Search
This is the engine of Sales Navigator. The Advanced Search lets you filter prospects by over 40 criteria including job title, company headcount, industry, geography, years in role, seniority level, and whether they’ve posted on LinkedIn recently.
The key is combining filters to narrow down to your ideal buyer profile. For example: VP of Sales + SaaS company + 50 to 200 employees + United States + posted in the last 30 days. This combination gives you a list of active, relevant prospects – not a spray-and-pray database dump.
Additionally, you can use Boolean search logic in Sales Navigator. Searching for “VP OR Director” in the title field, combined with “software OR SaaS” in the keyword field, gives you a much more targeted result set than a single keyword.
Save your best searches. Sales Navigator will notify you when new prospects match your saved search criteria – so your pipeline gets automatically refreshed over time.
InMail Messaging
InMail lets you message anyone on LinkedIn – even if you’re not connected. Core plan users get 50 InMail credits per month. Advanced and Advanced Plus users receive additional credits.
Use InMail strategically. It’s not a blast channel. Every message should be personalized, short, and specific. Reference something the prospect has posted, a company milestone, or a relevant result you’ve delivered for a similar company. Generic InMail messages get ignored or declined – which permanently removes that credit from your account.
A good InMail structure mirrors a strong cold email outreach approach: hook with relevance, deliver a specific value statement, and close with one low-friction ask.
Lead and Account Alerts
Sales Navigator sends real-time alerts when prospects or accounts trigger key events. These events include job changes, promotions, company news, funding rounds, new hires, and content posts.
These signals are gold for outreach timing. A VP who just started a new role is actively building a team and solving problems – that’s a perfect window for a relevant outreach. A company that just raised a funding round is in expansion mode – another natural trigger to reach out.
Set your alerts to deliver a daily or weekly digest. Review them at the start of each outreach session and prioritize prospects based on recency and relevance of their trigger event.
Relationship Explorer and Relationship Map
Relationship Explorer shows you the best path to reach a decision-maker based on existing connections – yours, your team’s, or your company’s. Instead of cold outreach, you can request a warm introduction through a shared connection.
Relationship Map is available on Advanced and above. It builds a dynamic organizational chart for each target account, showing you who the key stakeholders are, how they’re connected, and where your existing relationships sit within the organization.
For complex B2B sales with multiple decision-makers, Relationship Map dramatically improves your ability to navigate accounts and build multi-threaded deals. This pairs directly with the kind of multi-stakeholder B2B sales strategy that wins enterprise deals.
Smart Links (Advanced Plan)
Smart Links lets you package content – case studies, one-pagers, demo videos – into a single trackable link. When a prospect opens the link, you see exactly who viewed it, which pages they spent time on, and when they accessed it.
This is powerful for follow-up timing. If a prospect opens your Smart Link at 9 AM on a Tuesday, that’s your signal to call or message at 9:05. Engagement data replaces guesswork with intent signals.
Buyer Intent Signals (Advanced Plan)
Buyer Intent Signals identify prospects and companies that are actively researching solutions like yours. LinkedIn infers intent from the content they’re consuming, the profiles they’re visiting, and the searches they’re running on the platform.
This feature narrows your outreach to the subset of your target list that is already in a buying mindset. In practice, it allows you to prioritize the hottest prospects and reach them before competitors do.
How to Build an Effective Prospecting Workflow with Sales Nav
Having the tool is one thing. Using it systematically is another. Here’s a weekly workflow that turns Sales Navigator into a consistent lead generation engine.
Monday – Review alerts and prioritize. Check your Account Hub and lead alerts from the weekend. Flag any job changes, news events, or content posts from your saved leads and accounts. These are your highest-priority outreach opportunities for the week.
Tuesday and Wednesday – Run new searches and build lists. Spend 30 to 45 minutes refining and running new searches. Add new prospects to your saved lists. Remove leads that are no longer relevant. Keep your lists clean and current.
Thursday – Outreach and InMail. Execute your outreach against this week’s prioritized list. Personalize each message based on the alert or signal that prompted it. Reference the specific trigger in your opening line.
Friday – Review and log. Log activity in your CRM. Review response rates from the week’s outreach. Note which messages performed best and refine your templates accordingly.
This rhythm keeps your pipeline moving without letting Sales Navigator become a passive tool you open once a month. If your team is also generating leads through LinkedIn Sales Navigator, build this workflow around their cadence to keep outreach synchronized.
Common Mistakes That Waste Your Sales Navigator Investment
Saving too many leads without a system
Sales Navigator lets you save thousands of leads – but without a clear naming and segmentation system, your lists become unusable. Organize by persona, territory, or campaign from the start.
Sending generic InMail
InMail credits are limited. Wasting them on copy-paste messages burns budget and hurts your sender reputation on the platform. Every InMail should reference something specific to that prospect.
Ignoring alerts
Alerts are one of Sales Navigator’s most powerful features – and one of the most underused. Reps who review and act on alerts daily outperform those who don’t by a significant margin.
Not connecting Sales Navigator to your CRM
Without CRM integration, your Sales Navigator activity lives in a silo. You lose visibility on what’s been touched, when, and with what result. Always connect the two systems.
Treating it as a one-time search tool
Sales Navigator is most powerful as an ongoing system, not a database you pull from once. Saved searches, recurring alerts, and weekly list hygiene are what separate teams that get ROI from those that cancel after 90 days.
Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator Worth the Investment?
For B2B sales teams with a clear target market and an active outbound motion, yes – Sales Navigator typically pays for itself quickly. The Core plan at $119.99 per month costs less than one hour of a mid-level rep’s time per week. If it helps that rep book even one additional meeting per month, the math works.
However, the tool only delivers ROI when it’s used consistently and correctly. A Sales Navigator seat that’s opened twice a month is money wasted. A rep who builds it into their daily workflow will see compounding returns – better targeting, better timing, and more conversations with the right people.
Ultimately, LinkedIn Sales Nav is one of the most effective B2B prospecting tools available in 2026. Set it up correctly, use it systematically, and pair it with strong messaging – and it will become one of the most reliable lead sources in your pipeline.
Frequently Asked Questions
Core is designed for individual sellers who need advanced search, InMail credits, and lead tracking. Advanced adds team-level features including AI-powered Account IQ, Buyer Intent Signals, Smart Links for content tracking, TeamLink for warm introductions through your company network, and CRM embedded profiles. If you’re a solo rep, Core is sufficient. If you’re managing a team or running account-based selling, Advanced pays for itself quickly.
Yes, but you’ll get significantly less value from it. Sales Navigator has a built-in lead management system, but without CRM integration, your outreach activity stays siloed from your deal data. Connecting to Salesforce or HubSpot lets you sync contacts, log InMail activity, and see LinkedIn data directly inside your CRM – which is where most sales teams actually work. If you don’t yet have a CRM, treat this as an opportunity to set one up before investing in Sales Navigator.
The Core plan includes 50 InMail credits per month. Advanced and Advanced Plus plans include additional credits, and credits from unused InMails can roll over up to a maximum limit. Importantly, if a prospect accepts or responds to your InMail, you get the credit back – so high-quality, personalized messages are both good practice and financially efficient.
Yes. The Core plan is priced and designed for individual users. Small business owners, freelancers, and solo SDRs use it to identify decision-makers, research accounts, and reach out via InMail without needing a large team or enterprise budget. The 30-day free trial gives you enough time to evaluate whether the prospecting volume and quality justify the monthly cost for your specific market.
Most users see initial results – meaning responses to InMails and new conversations started – within the first two to four weeks, provided they use the tool consistently. Meaningful pipeline impact typically shows up within 60 to 90 days, once you’ve refined your search filters, built quality lists, and established a weekly outreach rhythm. The teams that see the fastest ROI are those that integrate Sales Navigator into a structured daily workflow rather than using it sporadically.