How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Lead Generation

LinkedIn Sales Navigator sits on top of regular LinkedIn with three paid tiers — Core, Advanced, and Advanced Plus — priced from roughly $99-$120/month for an individual seat up to custom enterprise pricing for Advanced Plus, which adds real-time CRM sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and others (pricing verified against LinkedIn's own plan comparison page and third-party trackers, August 2026 — confirm current pricing directly with LinkedIn before budgeting, as it changes periodically).

All tiers include over 50 advanced search filters (seniority, function, company headcount, years in role, geography, keywords), TeamLink (see who in your network can introduce you to a lead), and Lead IQ / Account IQ, LinkedIn's AI-generated summaries of a lead or account's recent activity. Core includes a monthly allotment of InMail credits for messaging people outside your network; Advanced adds team seat management and centralized billing; Advanced Plus adds the CRM sync.

Start from Sales Navigator's search bar, not the standard LinkedIn search bar — the filter set is materially larger. Layer filters in this order for the tightest results: function and seniority first (this cuts the pool the most), then company headcount or industry, then geography, then keyword filters for anything role-specific (a title alone often undersells or oversells seniority). Save the search once it returns a manageable, relevant list — a saved search can be set to alert you by email or in-app when new people match it, so your list grows on its own as people change jobs or new hires appear.

Saving an individual as a 'lead' surfaces their posting activity, job changes, and shared connections every time you check Sales Navigator, without re-running a search. Saving a company as an 'account' does the same at the org level — hiring trends, leadership changes, funding or expansion news. Alerts turn both into a push feed: a saved lead changing jobs, a saved account posting a job listing for a role you sell into, or a new person matching a saved search, all show up automatically. This is what most people mean when they say Sales Navigator is good for 'timing' outreach — reaching out right after a trigger event, not cold.

Sales Navigator's job ends at finding and tracking the person. It has no shared inbox — if you message a lead and a teammate needs to take over the conversation, there's no handoff mechanism. It has no lead scoring — every saved lead looks equally promising until a human reviews them individually. And unless you're on Advanced Plus with CRM sync configured, there's no automatic link between a Sales Navigator search or saved lead and what happens to that person in your pipeline — no way to say 'this search produced 3 closed deals' without manually tracking it yourself.

This is the point where teams either build a manual process (a shared spreadsheet, tagging conventions, someone remembering who owns which lead) or add a second tool that picks up once Sales Navigator has done the finding — routing replies to the right person, scoring inbound interest, and syncing to a CRM with attribution back to the source. SynQ is built for that second half specifically: it doesn't replace Sales Navigator's search and discovery, it takes over once a conversation starts, with a shared team inbox, AI lead scoring, and CRM sync (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, Close) that keeps the link between a message and the deal it becomes.