The Best Sales Navigator Feature Is... 10 Sellers Share Their Favorites.

Paul Petrone

Marketing @ LinkedIn

October 10, 2023

The Best Sales Navigator Feature Is... 10 Sellers Share Their Favorites.

Sales Navigator is an incredibly powerful platform. There are thousands of potential ways to use it, with no shortage of features, filters, and spotlights to play with.

But what are the absolute best features? The ones sellers get the absolute most out of?

Well, rather than assume, we asked some of the most influential sellers out there in our How I Sell series a simple question: “What Sales Navigator feature do you find the most useful?”

Here’s what ten of them said, along with their rationale on why:

1. The Lead Filter “Past Customer”

Who said it: Gong Account Executive Sarah Brazier

Sarah’s Rationale: I like the feature within Sales Navigator that shows people who were customers of Gong, who have since moved to a new company. There’s a ton of jewels there, because they already understand the value of the product and, often, they are already a champion of Gong. It’s a great way in.

Read Sarah’s full How I Sell interview here.

2. The Lead Filters “Posted on LinkedIn” and “Changed Jobs”

Who said it: The Sales Evangelist CEO Donald Kelly

Donald’s Rationale: The reason why is it helps me refine. I’ll search my ICP (ideal customer profile) in Sales Navigator and I’ll get a long list. But there are two spotlight searches I like to run to narrow that group down.

The first is people that are engaging with the platform. If someone has posted on LinkedIn in the past 90 days, I know it’s much more likely I’ll be able to start a conversation with them.

The second spotlight I like is people who switched jobs recently. Leaders who switched jobs within the last 90 days are much more likely to be open to a conversation, and so I’ve found that they are great people to reach out to.

Read Donald’s full How I Sell interview here.

3. Three: Viewed your profile recently, Smart Links, and InMail

Who said it: The Daily Sales Founder Daniel Disney

Daniel’s Rationale: The first one is profile views. I can’t tell you how many deals I’ve sourced by looking through my profile views for people who meet my ICP (ideal customer profile). If I see someone who looks like a fit, I’ll proactively reach out to them, and it usually leads to a good conversation.

As you build out your brand on LinkedIn, you get more views, which leads to more conversations. So, profile views alone have created so many opportunities for me.

The second is Smart Links. It’s a really clever feature that lets you see who is opening what you send them. And what’s great is it’s real-time, so I know when people are looking at them too.

I will proactively reach out to people after I see them click a link, versus waiting for them to get back to me. This gives me a speed advantage over any competition that doesn’t have that.

And the final one is InMail. What’s funny is I’d say 90% of sellers use InMail incorrectly in that they don’t hyper-personalize it, like I discussed earlier.

For me, I always try to personalize my InMails as much as possible and it’s worked amazingly well. So that’s a feature that’s always provided a lot of value.

Read Daniel’s full How I Sell interview here.

4. Relationship Explorer

Who said it: LinkedIn Global Client Director Rob Humphrey

Rob’s Rationale: For Sales Navigator, it’s really the new features around relationship intelligence. I love the new Relationship Explorer feature, I’ve been geeking out on that. It’s a sweet tool that maps relationships and shows the interconnectivity of people.

Read Rob’s Full How I Sell interview here.

5. TeamLink and TeamLink Extend

Who said it: DCM Insights UK Managing Director Alexander Low

Alex’s Rationale: With TeamLink and TeamLink Extend, you can conceivably get warm introductions to nearly anybody on the planet. Bigger picture, it’s not necessarily about cold calling, cold emailing, but going in warm where you can – especially across large enterprise organizations.

Read Alex’s full How I Sell interview here.

6. The “Lead Share” Alert

Who said it: SAS Global Social Selling Lead David J.P. Fisher

David’s Rationale: My favorite feature is a relatively new feature where you can save leads, so you get notified when one of your prospects posts on LinkedIn.

As our networks grow, I think that allows you to have this up-to-date information about the people who are most important. For me, sharing content on LinkedIn is important. But engaging with my prospects’ content is probably more important, so I can build those relationships.

Those notifications help me do that and stay top-of-mind to the most important people.

Read David’s full How I Sell here.

7. Personas

Who said it: AntNat Coaching CEO Anthony Natoli

Anthony’s Rationale: With literally a click of a button, you can identify who matches that Persona at any organization.

In Sales Navigator, I've built my Personas out. And so I’ll see who those people know, what sales engagement tools they use, how many SDRs they have, who their VPs are, and where they’re located. It maps out the organization without me having to do anything except the initial setup.

It’s been an absolute game-changer for me in my role because we are very persona-specific; it's one of our qualifiers of how we select accounts. It's literally saved us hours per week not having to manually dig through who's who at the organization.

Read Anthony’s full How I Sell interview here.

8, 9. Saved Lists (said by two people)

Who said it: Two people — CGI Managing Partner Cherilynn Castleman and SaaS Shift CEO Alex Alleyne

Cherilynn’s Rationale: For example, I have the top 100 DEI leaders saved in an account list because those are my clients. With that, I gain insights into them and understand their changing jobs, what they’re focused on, whom they know, and on and on. It’s an excellent tool for getting that deep insight into your buyers.

Read Cherilynn’s full How I Sell interview here.

Alex’s Rationale: It’s being able to build lead lists and categorize those lead lists.

I know it sounds straightforward, but it's important, the right categorization. It's a huge part of territory planning.

The lead builder is very advanced in the way that you can segment and categorize. If we’re thoughtful with it, we can help the team break out who the A targets are versus the B targets versus the C targets, which is at the crux of any successful prospecting effort.

Read Alex’s full How I Sell interview here.

10. The Lead Filters “Past Colleague,” “Past Customer,” “Shared Experiences”

Who said it: LinkedIn Enterprise Sales Leader Douglas Cole

Douglas’ Rationale: I think alumni connections. By alumni connections, I mean alumni understood in various ways. Not just who graduated from your college, but people who previously worked at the same company you did, your previous colleagues, or past customers who have moved into new companies.

When you look at all the different kinds of relationship intelligence at your fingertips in Sales Navigator, I find alumni paths are most reliable in getting people to respond to you and help with your sales process.

For example, someone on my team was recently stuck on an account, not really sure what to do next. The account had fully churned and we had lost a lot of revenue.

I went through Sales Navigator and found someone who used to work for the client but was now at LinkedIn. He got me in touch with someone else, and that person gave me a very detailed overview of the entire buying committee.

That allowed us to get back in and re-sell the program.

So, for me, the alumni angle has always been the most actionable and direct path.

Douglas’s How I Sell is going live on Oct. 17 – see it here.

To learn more about Sales Navigator and how to get the most out of it, check out these posts: