LinkedIn Sales Navigator: What It Is, How It Works and How to Use It

This article answers the question of what LinkedIn Sales Navigator is: what it does, how it differs from LinkedIn Premium, what the Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus licenses give you, how to start working with it in the first week and how to check after a quarter whether it pays off. I wrote about the 2026 prices and new features separately, and I link to those posts where needed.

I have worked in Sales Navigator since 2016. I was a beta tester of the first version, and shortly after Microsoft bought LinkedIn I got a commission from Microsoft for the first corporate Navigator rollout: 700 accounts in 17 countries. Since 2018 I have run several accounts of my own and trained sales teams on it. I am a fanboy of the tool, but not an uncritical one.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s paid tool for lead generation, prospecting and relationship building in B2B sales. You buy it separately from a regular account and separately from Premium, and you work in it in a separate interface that runs alongside LinkedIn. Your profile, your network and your messages stay the same. Navigator adds a salesperson’s tools on top of them.

What does it look like day to day? On regular LinkedIn you search for people the way you search in Google: you type a word and scroll through results. In Navigator you describe who you are looking for (industry, company size, function, seniority level, region, job change, activity), save those people and companies to lists, and then Navigator tells you when something happens to them.

What Sales Navigator is for

In short: so a salesperson knows whom to write to, when and with what reason. Several tools add up to that.

• a lead and account search with more than 50 filters. Since September 2026 it also understands a description of the buyer, not just keywords. In training I recommend choosing function and seniority level instead of typing exact job titles. More in the description of the new Sales Navigator search.
• lead lists and account lists, which are your private CRM inside LinkedIn. In training I recommend starting with four lists: current pipeline, current customers, competitors, and VIPs, journalists and opinion leaders.
• alerts: a promotion or job change of a saved lead, a new executive at a saved company, new results of a saved search. Since September 2026 some of them also arrive in regular LinkedIn notifications, on every license. How to set them up, I described in the post on Sales Navigator alerts.
• InMail: 50 messages a month to people outside your network. Unused credits expire after 90 days.
• relationships: shared connections, Relationship Explorer and org relationship maps, and on higher licenses TeamLink, meaning the connections of your whole team. Warm introductions are built on this.
• AI: Lead IQ and Account IQ summarize what is known about a person and a company. Lead IQ has worked inside Navigator itself since 2025 and I use it very often. Since September 2026 it is also visible in the CRM on the highest license; I covered it in the post on Lead IQ in the CRM.

What does Navigator not do? It won’t send messages to a thousand people for you and it won’t turn you into a salesperson. Conversion from automated invitations dropped from 60% to 30%, and LinkedIn can block accounts connected to automation tools while still charging for the license.

Sales Navigator vs LinkedIn Premium

This is the question I hear most often, and the most common mistake when buying. LinkedIn sells four separate products: Premium Career, Premium Business, Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite. “Premium Sales Navigator” does not exist, even though half the internet calls it that.

	Premium Business	Sales Navigator Core
Who it is for	one person, profile visibility and contacts	a salesperson, finding customers
Search with lead and account filters	❌	✅ more than 50 filters
Lead and account lists, alerts	❌	✅
Who viewed your profile	✅	✅ from the last 365 days

If you are looking for a job, or you only want to see who viewed your profile, Premium is enough. If you want to find customers, Premium gives you neither the search nor the lists. The full comparison with prices is in the post on Sales Navigator pricing.

Sales Navigator licenses: Core, Advanced, Advanced Plus

The licenses differ in whether you work alone, in a team or with a CRM.

• Core is a license for one person: search, lists, alerts, InMails, Relationship Explorer and the relationship map, visibility into the 2nd and 3rd degree network. On my account on September 8, 2026, it cost PLN 440.00 net per month.
• Advanced is a license for a team: shared lists and shared searches, TeamLink, Buyer Intent, Account IQ and Lead IQ, Smart Links, reports and one invoice for the company. PLN 754.99 net per month on the same day. Advanced is the former Team.
• Advanced Plus is a license for companies with a CRM: sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle, Navigator embedded in the CRM, and since September 2026 also alerts in Microsoft Teams and Lead IQ in the CRM. The price is individual. Advanced Plus is the former Enterprise.

Which to choose? If each salesperson has their own customer portfolio and does not share lists, Core is enough. I see companies giving salespeople several Core licenses instead of Advanced because it comes out cheaper. Advanced starts to make sense when the team works on shared lists and you want to use colleagues’ connections (TeamLink). For recruiters who don’t need the full Recruiter, I recommend Core, because for similar money it gives more than Recruiter Lite.

Who Sales Navigator is for

Navigator makes sense wherever the customer is a company and several people make the decision. LinkedIn cites Gartner, according to whom a buying committee averages 11 people, and Navigator is built precisely for finding those people.

It works for:

• B2B salespeople who find customers themselves (SDRs, BDRs, account managers);
• sales teams that want to work on shared lists of target accounts (ABM);
• owners of small B2B companies who sell on their own;
• recruiters for whom Recruiter is too expensive.

When is it a waste of money? When you sell to consumers, when you don’t have time to check alerts every day, or when you can’t describe who your customer is. Navigator strengthens a good customer definition. It won’t fix a bad one.

How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: the first week

The free trial lasts 30 days. If you waste it clicking around without a plan, after a month you won’t know more than before. Here is how I do it:

1. Before you turn on the trial, write down 20 companies that are your ideal customers. Without that list you can’t check whether the search finds them at all.
2. Go through the onboarding. Navigator asks about four things: your goal, your product, your ideal buyer and target accounts (at least three). You can change the answers later in settings; I described it in the post on personalized onboarding.
3. Build one search and check how many of your 20 companies fall into it. If fewer than half, fix the filters before you save anything to lists.
4. Create four lead lists: pipeline, customers, competitors, VIPs.
5. Save the search and turn on alerts. From that moment Navigator works for you even when you don’t open it.
6. Write your first InMails to people for whom an alert showed a reason: a job change, a promotion, a new post.

For teams in training I have one more trick: a person with an active license can invite 15 people to a 60-day Core trial instead of 30.

On the phone? Navigator has a mobile app, but from my observations about 90% of the people I train don’t install it. I work on a laptop too, and I catch alerts in LinkedIn notifications.

How to check whether Sales Navigator pays off

LinkedIn cites a Forrester study according to which Navigator pays for itself in 6 months. I prefer to calculate it on the client’s data. Why? Because the average from a study won’t tell you whether Navigator pays off for you.

• Give licenses to a small group of salespeople and leave a second group as a control, working the old way.
• After a quarter, compare both groups on the number of sales opportunities in the CRM and on deal closing time.
• Don’t measure SSI. It is a vanity metric, and since September 8, 2026, only people with a Navigator license see it in full. Better KPIs are the number of conversations started from Navigator, the InMail response rate and the invitation conversion.

With my clients the group with a license usually has from a dozen to over 20% more sales opportunities than the control group. That is a different measure than leads: after Sales Navigator training, clients report on average 47% more qualified leads within three months.

What’s new in Sales Navigator in 2026

Navigator changes several times a year. I described the most important 2026 changes separately, each with the license it works on and what it means for teams:

• the new search, which understands a description of the buyer;
• better alerts and the weekly email with 22 alert types instead of 13;
• alerts in LinkedIn notifications and in Microsoft Teams (Teams only in Advanced Plus and without people from the EEA, Switzerland and the UK);
• warm introductions in search results;
• Lead IQ in the CRM and control over logging notes and calls to the CRM;
• personalized onboarding;
• sharing account searches in Advanced and Advanced Plus.

Everything in one place, with the license table, is in the overview Sales Navigator 2026: new features.

Sources

• LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Sales Navigator
• Sales Navigator: release notes, July to September 2026
• Sales Navigator: searching for leads and accounts
• Sales Navigator: filter definitions
• Sales Navigator: advanced search filters (50+)
• Sales Navigator: alerts
• Sales Navigator: Buyer Intent