Does anyone have experience using LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

April 23, 2018

by a searcher from Indiana University at Bloomington in Chicago, IL, USA

Does anyone have experience and an opinion on the effectiveness of LinkedIn's Sales Navigator as a search fund deal sourcing resource? Trying to determine whether this resource is worth the ~$800 annual fee (can be canceled anytime) and the opportunity time spent to test this product.

Thanks in advance.

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Reply by a searcher
from The University of Chicago in Chicago, IL, United States

I think it depends on the industry you are focused on. Blue collar businesses are less likely to use LinkedIn and it is highly likely that many employees (including the CEO) wont be on LinkedIn, throwing off the employee counts. White collar businesses like tech generally will have all of their employees on the site. The search function itself has its positives and negatives. On the plus side, the geographic searching is very solid. Throw in a list of zip codes and you know you are only getting businesses in that area. Search also has the ability to exclude viewed or saved leads so that you aren't looking at the same things over and over again. On the negative side, if you search for a lead by title like "Chief Executive Officer" the search will return all results with Chief, Executive, or Officer in the title. This is highly annoying and results in far too many bad results. The industry field is useless as well as businesses rarely seem to be categorized properly. I've also had a bunch of owners contact me after just viewing their profile that I found through the navigator search. In short, if you are looking at white collar businesses I think it is a valuable tool though it certainly has limitations. It is great for finding all businesses in a specific geography. If you are doing that you can probably rip through all of the businesses in a 2 month period and you are only out $130 or so.

Reply by a searcher
from The University of Michigan in 1075 Gills Dr, Orlando, FL 32824, USA

I did the same as Tim and used http://webscraper.io/ along with the free trial of sales navigator. I found the same limitation as Ryan mentioned in that the data is noisy which requires a lot of time to manually review. It would be a great task for interns to have them do the first pass at cleaning the data. One thing to mention is that if you scrape too much data or too quickly between page loads then LinkedIn will lock your account. I've also had good results getting lists of targets from Capital IQ if you have access to it. The exception there is that the data is a bit outdated and doesn't reflect when a company has shut down or been acquired. It's much easier to use than LinkedIn and webscraper.

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