LinkedIn Sales Navigator 2026: Features, Plans and Is It Worth It?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's paid sales subscription. It adds more than 50 search filters, lead and account lists, saved searches with weekly alerts, 50 InMails per month and, in the team plans, reporting and CRM integration on top of your normal account. It is worth the money if you use LinkedIn every week to win customers, hire people or land your next job in a systematic way. If you only post now and then, or have no defined target group, you pay for features that sit idle.

This article is the starting point for everything Sales Navigator on the CompLeadly blog: the three plans side by side, the filters that matter, lead lists and saved searches, InMail credits, the free trial, the question of whether Premium Business is enough, and what you can automate. Prices appear here only as a range; every monthly and annual price lives in How much does LinkedIn Premium cost? All prices and plans. Last updated: 29 September 2026.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn describes Sales Navigator as a B2B sales tool for sellers and sales teams, and on its German plan page it draws the line to Premium Business, which is aimed at professionals who want to grow their personal brand and their network. Sources: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Compare Sales Navigator plans and LinkedIn Sales Solutions (German plan comparison), retrieved 29 September 2026.

In practice you keep your normal LinkedIn profile and get a second interface at linkedin.com/sales. There you search for people (leads) and companies (accounts) with far finer filters, save them to lists and keep an eye on them. Job changes and new posts from saved leads and accounts reach you as alerts. On top come InMails, the messages you send to people outside your network.

There are three plans. According to LinkedIn, Core is best for individual sellers, Advanced for sales teams and Advanced Plus for teams that want to connect their CRM. LinkedIn says the tool is trusted by more than 1.5 million sellers. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Compare Sales Navigator plans, retrieved 29 September 2026.

Core vs. Advanced vs. Advanced Plus: the plans compared

The table summarizes what LinkedIn lists for the three plans on its comparison page. Every check mark comes from there; prices are shown only as a range.

Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Compare Sales Navigator plans, retrieved 29 September 2026. LinkedIn lists its prices as estimates that may exclude VAT. Advanced Plus has no list price; according to LinkedIn it depends on team size, CRM integration and onboarding needs.

What stands out: most of what you touch in daily prospecting is in all three plans: 50+ filters, alerts, InMail credits and Account IQ and Lead IQ with AI-powered insights. The exception is the buyer intent filters, which start at Advanced. The extra money for Advanced buys collaboration in a team, the extra money for Advanced Plus buys the CRM connection.

For an individual, Core is the right choice in almost every case. Advanced only pays off when several people work the same territory and actually use TeamLink, Smart Links or Buyer Intent. LinkedIn lets you buy up to five Advanced licenses online; beyond that, the plan page offers a contact to LinkedIn sales. You only need Advanced Plus if leads and activities have to flow into your CRM automatically.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator lead filters that matter

The real difference to the regular LinkedIn search is the filter set. LinkedIn groups the lead filters into seven categories. The names below are the ones LinkedIn uses in its help center. Source: LinkedIn Help: Search filters in Sales Navigator, retrieved 29 September 2026.

• Company: Current company, Past company, Company headcount, Company type, Company headquarters location. This is how you narrow down to company size and type, say privately held companies with 51 to 200 employees.
• Role: Function, Current job title, Seniority level, Past job title, Years in current company, Years in current position. Seniority level separates owners from staff, Years in current position finds people who are new in the role.
• Personal: Geography (region or postal code), Industry, First name, Last name, Profile language, Years of experience, Groups, School. Profile language is an underrated filter when your messages are written in one language.
• Buyer intent: Account has buyer intent, Category interest, Following your company, Viewed your profile recently, Viewed your Company Page recently. LinkedIn says the intent filters are only available to Advanced and Advanced Plus users.
• Best path in: Connection (1st, 2nd, Group, 3rd+, TeamLink), Connections of, TeamLink connections of, Past customer, Past colleague, Shared experiences. This is where you find the warm route through mutual connections.
• Recent updates: Changed jobs (in the last 90 days), Posted on LinkedIn (in the 30 days). Both are good reasons to reach out.
• Workflow: Persona, Account lists, Lead lists, People in CRM, People you interacted with, Saved leads and accounts. These filters give you access to your own lists and personas.

Inside the Company, title and keyword fields you can search with Boolean logic. LinkedIn names the operators AND, OR and NOT, which must be typed in uppercase, does not support wildcard searches with an asterisk and limits a search to about 15 operators. Source: LinkedIn Help: Boolean search in Sales Navigator, retrieved 29 September 2026. If you would rather not build the brackets and quotation marks by hand, use the LinkedIn Boolean Search Generator.

Account filters for company search

Account search works at company level and has its own filters: Annual revenue (Min-Max), Company headcount, Company headcount growth (Min-Max) over the last twelve months, Headquarters location, Industry, Number of followers, Department headcount, Department headcount growth, Fortune, Job opportunities, Recent activities, Connection, Buyer intent, Companies in CRM, Saved accounts and Account lists. Source: LinkedIn Help: Search filters in Sales Navigator, retrieved 29 September 2026.

Job opportunities shows companies with open roles posted on LinkedIn, Department headcount growth shows companies whose sales or IT departments are growing. How to build a clean target group from these filters instead of just searching job titles is covered in Sales Navigator: find targeted leads by interests. If you still need to define your ideal customer first, start with the ICP Generator.

Lead lists and saved searches

Saved searches are the reason Sales Navigator is a tool for every week and not for one afternoon. LinkedIn lets you save a total of 50 lead searches and 50 account searches. For each of them you receive weekly emails and alerts on the Sales Navigator homepage as soon as new people or companies match your criteria, and you can share saved searches with colleagues. Source: LinkedIn Help: Save searches in Sales Navigator, retrieved 29 September 2026.

The routine looks like this: you build one clean search, for example founders of IT services companies with 11 to 200 employees in Texas who posted in the last 30 days, and save it. From then on the Navigator only shows you the new matches that arrived since your last visit. You check the list, put the right people into a lead list and reach out. Ten minutes per search and week is enough for that part; the real work is the outreach.

Lead lists and account lists are the counterpart: this is where you store the individual people and companies you want to watch and contact. Through the workflow filters Lead lists and Account lists you can turn a list back into a search base. LinkedIn does not state an upper limit for lists or entries per list in the help articles we checked.

One limit LinkedIn does not document but you will hit right away: Sales Navigator shows at most 100 pages of 25 results per search, so 2,500 hits, even when the counter at the top says more. Why you should deliberately keep your searches below 2,500 results is explained in Why you only see 2,500 results in Sales Navigator. If your target group is bigger, split it by region or state into several searches and work through them one after the other; the steps are in How to use more than 2,500 Sales Navigator results with CompLeadly.

Two things to know before you invest months in lists. First: if you cancel Sales Navigator, lists and saved searches are gone with the subscription. Second: you can back them up beforehand. CompLeadly reads a lead list through its URL as a target audience and exports the contacts as an Excel file with the profile export function; the steps are in Saving lead lists from Sales Navigator to CompLeadly. Saved searches work the same way: remove one filter and set it again so the URL carries all filter parameters, then save it as a target audience, as described in Saving saved lead searches from Sales Navigator in CompLeadly.

InMail credits in Sales Navigator

Every Sales Navigator plan includes 50 InMails per month, and LinkedIn states explicitly that all subscription types get the same number. Unused credits roll over to the following month, you can accumulate up to 150, and each credit must be used within 90 days. The new allocation arrives on the first day of each month (UTC). Source: LinkedIn Help: InMail credits in Sales Navigator, retrieved 29 September 2026.

For every InMail that receives a response within 90 days you get the credit back. According to LinkedIn this includes the automatic replies “Interested”, “Maybe later” and “Not interested”. InMails that get no response are not credited back. If you send the same person a second InMail before they reply, another credit is used. You cannot buy additional InMail credits in Sales Navigator, and Premium InMail credits cannot be used in Sales Navigator. You can only edit or delete a sent InMail within 60 minutes. Sources: LinkedIn Help: InMail credits in Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Help: InMail messages, retrieved 29 September 2026.

Everything else about InMail, from the difference to a regular message to templates, is in What is LinkedIn InMail? Meaning, credits and InMail vs. message. How to lift your reply rate is covered in How to finally get replies to your LinkedIn InMails. And part of your target group costs no credits at all: Premium members with an Open Profile can be messaged without spending InMail credits, see LinkedIn Open Profile: free InMails and how to enable it.

Sales Navigator or Premium Business?

Premium Business is the networking plan, Sales Navigator is the sales plan. LinkedIn advertises Premium Business with unlimited people search, 15 InMails per month and profile viewers for the past 365 days, source: LinkedIn Premium Business, retrieved 29 September 2026. Sales Navigator gives you 50 InMails, the filters described above, lead and account lists and the alerts on saved searches. If you mostly research and message contacts one at a time, Premium Business can be enough; as soon as you keep target groups in lists and need fresh matches every week, Sales Navigator is the better fit. The full comparison with a decision tree is in LinkedIn Premium Business vs. Sales Navigator: which plan for sales?.

Sales Navigator and the Social Selling Index (SSI)

The Social Selling Index is a score from 0 to 100 that LinkedIn uses to measure how well you establish a professional brand, find the right prospects, engage with insights and build relationships. LinkedIn itself now writes that “the SSI score no longer accurately reflects the modern sales environment” and that a high score does not always correlate with measurable sales outcomes. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: From SSI to AI, retrieved 29 September 2026. Whether you need Sales Navigator to improve your SSI is something LinkedIn does not say. How the four pillars are built and what you can do about each of them is in LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI): check and improve your score.

Sales Navigator free trial

LinkedIn offers a free trial for Core and Advanced that you start with your existing LinkedIn account. The conditions: you are not currently on any paid LinkedIn subscription and have not used a LinkedIn free trial in the past 365 days. LinkedIn sends an email reminder seven days before the trial expires. How long the trial lasts is not stated on the plan page.. If you cancel a monthly plan it ends at the end of the current month, an annual plan at the end of the paid year. Source: LinkedIn Sales Solutions: Compare Sales Navigator plans, retrieved 29 September 2026.

What applies to LinkedIn Premium trials in general, and which cancellation traps to avoid, is covered in Try LinkedIn Premium for free: how it really works. More short how-tos are collected under Sales Navigator knowledge articles.

Sales Navigator and automation with CompLeadly

Sales Navigator finds and sorts. Reaching out, following up and documenting is still on you, and that is where CompLeadly comes in. The Sales Navigator integration uses the Navigator's advanced filters for more precise target audiences, with the same workflows as on LinkedIn.com and no export in between. You copy the link of a Sales Navigator search, a saved search or a lead list into CompLeadly and save it as a target audience. You need your own Sales Navigator license for this; CompLeadly does not replace it.

On that audience you then run a sequence: profile visit, follow, connection request, opener after acceptance and a follow-up after a number of days without a reply that you define. Every message is written from the actual profile, not a mail merge. You can plan a sequence in advance with the Outreach Sequence Planner.

Two functions work directly with the credits described above. The Auto InMail function sends InMails to a Sales Navigator audience with subject, text, placeholders and a daily limit you set yourself, see Tutorial: Auto InMail function. CompLeadly distinguishes between free InMails to Open Profiles and InMails that use your credits, and we recommend setting them up as two separate functions in your workflow. Because only part of LinkedIn's members have an Open Profile, it pays to keep audiences below 2,500 results here as well and to split larger searches.

What you do not need: Sales Navigator in order to use CompLeadly. Target audiences come just as well from the regular LinkedIn people search, with location, industry, profile language and Boolean title filters, as described in Targeting audiences on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator. The Navigator adds finer filters, saved searches and InMails, but the sequence behind it is the same. Every function is explained on LinkedIn automation with CompLeadly, the plans on Pricing. You can try CompLeadly free for ten days, no credit card required.

Recruiting and job search with Sales Navigator

The filters above sound like sales, but they work just as well for hiring. Current job title, Years in current position and Changed jobs help you find candidates who are new in a role or just moved, and you can contact them by InMail. For regular recruiting, though, LinkedIn has its own product: Recruiter Lite with 30 InMails per month, source: LinkedIn Help: InMail credits by subscription, retrieved 29 September 2026. The differences and prices are in LinkedIn Recruiter cost and plans. CompLeadly works with both: a Sales Navigator search becomes a target audience in the same way as a Recruiter Lite search, a pipeline or a saved Recruiter search, and then profile visit, connection request, opener and follow-up run exactly as they do in sales. More on this at CompLeadly for recruiters.

As a job seeker with a clear list of target companies you can also put Sales Navigator to good use for a month. Account lists keep your dream employers in view, lead lists hold the team leads and recruiters there, and alerts show you who just changed companies or posted something. The Job opportunities filter shows companies with open roles, Department headcount growth the departments that are growing. With CompLeadly you then approach these people in a sequence: profile visit and follow first, then a connection request, and after acceptance a short message with your ask.

Who should pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Whether Sales Navigator pays off depends less on the price than on whether you use it every week. Weigh the monthly fee against the value of a single won deal, a filled position or one interview invitation. The tool makes sense above all for:

• B2B service providers and consultants who target decision makers in clearly defined industries and company sizes
• Sales teams that keep target accounts in lists and want to react to job changes and posts
• Agencies and coaches who run social selling as a fixed channel
• Recruiters and hiring managers who fill individual roles through direct outreach
• Job seekers with a list of target employers

A simple test before you subscribe: write your target group down in one sentence, with industry, company size, region and role. If you cannot, the missing piece is not the tool but the target group, and the ICP Generator helps first. If you can, start the trial, save two or three searches and check after four weeks whether conversations came out of it.

It makes less sense if you only open LinkedIn now and then, have no defined target group or get your clients through referrals anyway. Then the subscription sits idle, a free account or Premium Business is enough, and you do not need the Navigator for the sequence behind it either. Why the tool stays useless without a process is the subject of Sales Navigator won't get you customers without this system.

Further reading: every article on Sales Navigator

• How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: ten steps from target group to follow-up
• Why LinkedIn Sales Navigator is your biggest lever for customer acquisition
• Sales Navigator won't get you customers without this system
• Sales Navigator: find targeted leads by interests
• LinkedIn Premium Business vs. Sales Navigator: which plan for sales?
• How much does LinkedIn Premium cost? All prices, plans and tips
• Try LinkedIn Premium for free: how it really works
• What is LinkedIn InMail? Meaning, credits and InMail vs. message
• How to finally get replies to your LinkedIn InMails
• LinkedIn Open Profile: free InMails and how to enable it
• LinkedIn search limit: what the commercial use limit means
• LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI): check and improve your score
• LinkedIn Recruiter cost and plans

For day-to-day work with the tool, our knowledge base holds around 60 short articles under Sales Navigator knowledge articles; the best place to start is Introduction to the use of Sales Navigator.