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LinkedIn Paid Vs. Free -- A Review Of Sales Navigator

This article is more than 8 years old.

If you connect to friends, you might use Facebook, Instagram, or a variety of other tools that emerge almost daily. If you want to build your business and professional network, LinkedIn is the best option in town. Most of the more than 380 million subscribers globally simply use the free version of LinkedIn. I have received many questions about LinkedIn from business professionals about whether to pay for the premium versions. With the recent release of Sales Navigator, let me share why you may or may not want to consider the LinkedIn Sales Navigator offering.

The LinkedIn Choices

You have several options to choose from on LinkedIn. It helps to understand the breadth of their offerings. LinkedIn offers some specific solutions based on your specific situation:

Recruiters: The LinkedIn Recruiter Lite and Recruiter Corporate are essential tools for recruiters. I’ve not met a true recruiter who does not subscribe to the LinkedIn Recruiter offering.

Job Seekers: If recruiters find the tools valuable, similarly so do job seekers. The Job Seeker license allows you to be seen as a Featured Applicant, compare yourself to other candidates, and send messages directly to recruiters. You’ll also see who has viewed your profile.

Professionals: The three premium levels for general use are (1) Professional, (2) Executive, and (3) Pro. The major difference here is how deeply and with how much detail you can see your extended network. I’ve never seen tremendous value in seeing beyond my second level connections. The premium search functions also allow you to search with greater granularity than the free version. I’ll comment on the ability to send messages later in the article.

Sales Navigator

“Sales Navigator allows sales professionals to tap into the power of LinkedIn efficiently. It improves social selling in support of powerful daily habits,” said Diana Kucer, LinkedIn’s Director of Global Product Marketing. When you first launch the tool, a wizard guides you through setup. Based on your existing network, you can pick which organizations are current opportunities. You can import from SalesForce into Sales Navigator to see LinkedIn activity for your accounts.

Sales Navigator goes beyond a passive system. Based on the contacts you have selected, Sales Navigator suggests potential organizations that fit a similar profile. You can also define your territory so that suggestions are limited to your area. When I test-drove the system, Sales Navigator suggested several opportunities that I had not previously thought about. Surprisingly, some were great suggestions and worth my time to consider.

Sales Navigator – How To Ensure A Return On Investment

Sales Navigator might be the first social selling offering from LinkedIn that I feel could have an immediate, and dramatic impact on results for most businesses.

Like most powerful tools in the universe, Sales Navigator can be used for good or evil. The value of lead suggestions, enhanced searching, and monitoring activity at the individual and organization levels all make the investment well worthwhile if you are selling anything priced higher than a tin of Altoids.

According to Mike O’Neil, founder of Integrated Alliances and a two-time Forbes Social 50 Top Influencer, “Sales Navigator allows you to find hidden decision makers at large accounts and engage with them based on their activity.” O’Neil has been helping companies get the most from LinkedIn since 2004.

Consider how you would treat a connection if you met at a physical networking event. Would you immediately pitch them something to buy? Let’s hope not. If you identify a potential good customer, do you storm their office hoping to circumvent their security? (Please say ‘No.’) If you identified a great potential business pursuit what would you do to maximize the potential for success? Use the same strategies digitally as you would in person.

The Right Way To Connect

You’d probably see where they hang out (LinkedIn Groups), monitor their activities (Sales Navigator will show you what’s new), and see who else you know who might already be connected with them (LinkedIn’s sweet spot). Sales Navigator will make it easy to ‘like’ or comment on their activity. Sales Navigator gives you great tools to facilitate this process from end to end. If, instead, you simply want to get contact names and then send a generic email message, save your money. You don’t like receiving unsolicited emails from strangers, and neither do your clients. Oh – and if you DO enjoy receiving unsolicited emails from strangers, then that’s just odd.

When it comes to the LinkedIn premium (paid) offerings, I think that the Recruiter Tool, Candidate Tool, and Sales Navigator can easily be worth the investment, if used for good, not evil. Once you make the investment, be sure to expand your network, and above all, add value to your network.

How To Know If It Is Worth It

LinkedIn has done something very smart with Sales Navigator. You can get a free trial for one-month to test it out for yourself. This demonstrates how confident the company is that Sales Navigator can have a tangible impact on your business. Be sure to discover your own Social Selling Index which measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships on LinkedIn. “We’re continuing to invest in Sales Navigator, and you’ll see more in the way of enterprise roll-out and measurement going forward,” added Kucer. SSI is one such measurement tool.

It’s Your Turn

Once you’ve tested it out, share your comments here or via Twitter. I’d love to learn how you are using the tool, and what results you see.

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