LinkedIn Sales Navigator tutorial: the 2023 guide

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is today the essential tool for effective prospecting campaigns. Discover in this guide all its subtleties to boost your performance to the maximum!

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator used for?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the premium version of LinkedIn classic. It gives you access to advanced features to search for qualified leads. To do this, you use filters according to the criteria that interest you to build a relevant list for your prospecting campaigns.

This advanced version is considered an indispensable tool in your social selling strategy. In addition to finding prospects corresponding to your niche, you can easily communicate with them by sending InMails or by scraping their data via specific tools (we see that below).

Why use Linkedin Sales Navigator?

By using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you have access to millions of profiles to build your database. With the filters, you can search for specific profiles or accounts that match your customer typology. The tool also provides recommendations of profiles that match your persona. It’s impossible to miss a potential prospect!

Tuto: Configuring your Sales Navigator account

Let’s see how to create a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account.

Setting up your account

➡️ Go to Sales Navigator and click on “Start your free trial”. This offer allows you to enjoy the app for free for 30 days.

☝️During the registration process, you need to fill in your credit card. If you don’t want to continue your subscription at the end of the offered month, you can cancel without any fees.

➡️ Once on the interface, you can fill in different data and search preferences for the prospects you want to target.

How much does Linkedin Sales Navigator cost?

The basic “Sales Navigator Core” subscription starts at 99.99€/month per access. For the annual subscription, it is 959,88€/year and per access.

[HACK] How to get Linkedin Sales Navigator for free

As mentioned above, you can take advantage of Sales Navigator with the free trial offer. This tool is very powerful and almost indispensable once you have tested it, however, it has a certain cost. There are some tricks to take advantage of it for free:

💡 Tip 1: Follow the step in the previous paragraph “Set upyour account” and enjoy Sales Navigator for 30 days.

💡 Tip 2: Create a few email addresses (on Google for example) and sign up with on Sales Navigator to enjoy the trial offer. Don’t forget to cancel your subscription to avoid being charged. Once the trial is over, use a new email address to use Sales Navigator again. This tip can be used as many times as you like.

💥Get on with lead extraction with Derrick to build your customer file. With our app, you can export over 2000 leads per week.

Use Linkedin Sales Navigator to find leads in 2022

LinkedIn is perfect for optimizing your sales prospecting, developing your business and gaining awareness. Let’s see how to find leads.

Tuto: Finding leads on Sales Navigator

There is a very simple way to find leads on Sales Navigator. To do this, you have to use the advanced filters (there are about thirty of them!). There are the filters Company, Role, Staff..

➡️ Click on Prospect Filter

➡️ Fill in each filter with the data corresponding to the prospects you are looking for:

➡️ Once the search is complete, your prospect list appears.

Tuto: Searching for accounts on LinkedIn Sales Navigator

When searching for accounts, there are other types of filters that are more targeted to the details of the companies themselves: company size, annual revenue, location, employee growth..

➡️ Click on Account Filter

➡️ Fill in the data in each filter that corresponds to the prospects you are looking for:

➡️ Once complete, your list of accounts will appear.

How do I target leads in companies on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

When a LinkedIn member adds or changes their position within a company, they can be found with Sales Navigator. To search for employees of a company, you need to fill in some data in the following filters:

Method 1

➡️ Click on Prospect Filter

➡️ Fill in the data in the following filters: Current Company or Former Company, in the Role section, fill in the job function, job title or even the seniority level.

➡️ Once complete, your prospect list will be displayed.

Method 2

Here, we’ll show you how to create a lead list from a business account search. This method allows you to workAccount Based Marketing, to find profiles that match your customer type as closely as possible through precise segmentation.

➡️ Click on Account List and fill in all the criteria you want. A list of company accounts will be displayed.

➡️ Select and save the companies in an existing list, or create a new one.

➡️ Return to the lead list and view your lists.

➡️ To find more leads, there is an Account List filter where you add your new list. Do your search in Lead Filter and import your list into Workflow and Account Lists.

➡️ A new list of leads appears. You can save it to a new list.

Tuto: use Sales Navigator filters like a pro!

We’re going to show you how to get to grips with Sales Navigator to build yourself a very qualitative database.

Order of use of Linkedin Sales Nav filters

LinkedIn Sales Navigator consists of several filters, more or less relevant to your search. There are :

• The popular filters;
• The job and seniority filters;
• Company filters;
• Other filters.

The goal is to refine your search to target the right prospects. The more data you enter, the more precise your results will be.

Which filter to trust, and which not to trust?

• Rigid filters: These are used primarily to display the most reliable and relevant results.
• Soft filters: They provide additional information to the previous filters. On their own, they are less accurate.
• Liquid filters: These are the least important. It is not necessary to use them.

Rigid filters

These filters are among the most important and offer very good results for a first search. They include the following filters:

• Title: the position that a person holds in a company.
• Geographical area: country, city, company headquarters.
• Relationship level: this filter allows you to target 1st, 2nd and 3rd level people with whom you have connections in common.
• Company name: This filter allows you to target decision-makers and employees of a specific company.

Flexible filters

These allow you to complete and refine your search. They include :

• Industrysector: targets specific sectors.
• Hierarchical levels: owners, CEO, senior management, training..
• The number of employees in the company : this allows you to target small or large companies.
• Keywords: by indicating a specific keyword, Sales Navigator will find the profiles that have mentioned it. Useful for finding profiles interested in a subject.
• Years of experience and seniority: provides more precise data on the profiles of members within companies.

Liquid filters

These filters allow you to complete your search, so you can search for the position a member holds, the school where he studied and many others… They are the least used when searching for qualified prospects.

Boolean search on Linkedin Sales Navigator

How can you further refine your lead searches? By usingBoolean search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Boolean operators (OR, AND, NOT…) are queries that you enter in the internal search field of Sales Navigator. They accompany your keywords to give you very specific search results.

For example, you are looking for web developers, but they don’t have to be freelancers. In this case, we will use the Boolean operator NOT to exclude this type of profile.

The advanced search

There are two categories of advanced searches on LinkedIn Sales Navigator: the search to find companies and the search to find people.
Simply enter the information you are looking for into the filters. This way, you can precisely target people and contact them afterwards by sending them a private message for example, or by adding them to your network.

Sales Navigator tutorial: Some use cases

[EASY] Targeting executives of growing companies

You want to get in touch with executives whose company is growing? Here’s how to do it:

➡️ Go to the account filter search and indicate in the filters the number of employees, the percentage of growth, the location of the company … A list appears. You just have to look at the employees in the company, and find the leaders.

Now export your list of business leaders for free to Google Sheet with Derrick.

[MEANS] Find the leaders of e-commerce

Here are the steps to find e-commerce executives:

➡️ On Sales Navigator, do a lead search and include the keyword “e-commerce” in the search. You can refine your search by selecting the hierarchical level “Director”, “PGD”, geographical area and many more.

Is your list complete? Use Derrick to build your database by exporting thousands of contacts every week.

[MEANS] Find former employees of a company

Just as it’s possible to find company executives, you can also target former employees of a company to contact them later. To do this:

➡️ In the prospect search, there is a specific Former Company filter. Simply fill in the name of the company you are looking for, and fill in other data in the Roles to refine the search: Function, Job title, Years in the company..

Now start your prospecting campaigns by contacting former employees of a company. Simplyexport your list with Derrick to a Google Sheet forfree .

Tools to leverage Sales Navigator in 2022

To leverage the full potential of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can use apps to create effective lead lists, enrich them and even find your prospects’ emails.

Derrick App (free)

Derrick is a free extension that installs directly on your Google Chrome search engine. It allows you to import and enrich your database to a Google Sheets. Easily retrieve names, first names, email addresses, companies to build a solid base before your prospecting campaigns.

The Growth Machine

The Growth Machine is a tool that allows you to create automated multi-channel prospecting campaigns. This application is complementary to Derrick because it is on it that you can build your personalized prospecting campaigns thanks to the import of your database. Its use is simple and intuitive thanks to the drag & drop system to create email sequences.

Tuto: How to build a database of your Linkedin Sales Navigator search

Are you convinced by all the potential LinkedIn Sales Navigator can offer your business? Install Derrick App and discover how you build a database with Derrick App.

Importing leads with Derrick App

After you’ve done your research on Sales Navigator, here’s the process for importing leads to a Google Sheet.

Lead enrichment with Derrick App

Do you have multiple LinkedIn profile URLs? Here’s how to enrich your leads easily.

Enriching companies with Derrick App

To build a company-centric database, here’s the easy way to do it:

Step 1: Extract companies on LinkedIn with Derrick

Step 2: Then enrich the company data easily.

Enriching your leads’ email with Derrick App

Do you have a list with the first and last names and domains of your leads, but you don’t have their email addresses? Derrick helps you find this information in a few minutes:

Other useful features of Linkedin Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is a goldmine and its features go far beyond that! By learning how to use them for your business and prospecting campaigns, you can significantly increase your customer base.

The smart links

This feature available on premium accounts allows you to share files and content with your contacts without them having to download them. In addition to sharing documents, the smart links collect information about your prospects.

Spotlight search

Often overlooked, spotlight search is based on your profile data and finds leads that have something in common with you. This tool is perfect for finding new profiles and potential customers.

Search via company import

You may not have known it, but it is possible to import lead lists directly into Sales Navigator. To do so, you need to import a CSV document and match the data together so that LinkedIn can find the profiles.

Take it to the next level with Linkedin Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is a powerful social network when it comes to B2B prospecting. By learning how to use all of its features for lead generation, you build a solid database for your prospecting campaigns. By gathering a maximum of information through data enrichment, you will be able to contact your prospects in an ultra-personalized way, which will maximize your chances of conversions.

To go even further, discover without further delay our expert tutorial for an even more advanced mastery of Sales Navigator.