Sales Navigator on LinkedIn: Which Plan Is Your Team Actually Using?

Picture eight sales development reps holding licences for a prospecting platform, where two run saved lists and alerts daily and six use it as a nicer search box. Nothing about that purchase was irrational. It is simply a tier mismatch, and it is the most common one in this product.

What follows is a plain reading of the three tiers, the prices LinkedIn publishes, and a selection method that starts from what your reps already do rather than from what the demo showed.

Three Tiers, One Search Engine

LinkedIn's paid prospecting layer sits on the network you already use and adds filtered search, saved lead and account lists, alerts and seller-oriented account pages. The important thing to understand before you compare feature grids: the search itself barely changes between tiers. What changes is collaboration and plumbing.

Reading LinkedIn's own help documentation alongside the comparison page, the split works out roughly like this:

• Core. Built around one person. Filtered search, alerts, lead and account pages, custom lists, a relationship map and a monthly allowance of fifty InMail credits.
• Advanced. Everything above, plus the team layer: uploading an existing book of business by spreadsheet, sharing lists and searches with colleagues, TeamLink, Smart Links, Buyer Intent, and reporting on who is actually logging in.
• Advanced Plus. Everything above, plus the two-way connection with your CRM, embedded profiles inside that CRM, licence assignment by role and administrator-level return reporting.

Note what is absent from all three. This is not an enrichment database, not a sequencing engine and not a system of record. Teams that buy it expecting to retire three other tools end up unhappy with all four.

What LinkedIn Publishes, and What It Will Not

Two of the three prices are public. LinkedIn's comparison page lists Core from US$119.99 a month or US$1,079.88 a year, and Advanced from US$159.99 a month or US$1,799.88 a year, with annual billing described as saving 25% on Core and 6% on Advanced. The page notes that figures may exclude VAT or GST and are subject to change, so confirm before you build a budget line.

Advanced Plus carries no published figure at all. The same page says pricing is customised to team size, CRM integration and onboarding needs, which in practice means a negotiation. Treat any per-seat number you read on a comparison blog as somebody's quote, not a list price, and ask for yours in writing alongside the trial.

Four Symptoms of the Wrong Tier

Screenshots in the team chat. If reps are pasting lead lists into spreadsheets or messages so colleagues can see them, you are paying for single-seat software to do a team job. Shared lists and shared searches begin at Advanced.

Reps retyping notes into Salesforce or HubSpot. Manual re-entry is the symptom Advanced Plus is sold to cure. Before you buy the cure, time it honestly for a week. If it is ten minutes a day per rep, the integration may well pay. If it is ten minutes a week, it will not.

Nobody has opened the CRM view since onboarding. You are renting plumbing that your administrator never finished connecting or your reps do not trust. That is an adoption project, not a licensing one, and renewing at the same tier simply repeats the mistake.

You cannot name one saved search that produced a meeting. Then the tier is not the problem. The targeting is. Start with our piece on writing account criteria as questions rather than keyword strings, because a broader filter set applied to a vague definition just produces a longer wrong list.

Buyer Intent Is an Input, Not an Answer

The Advanced tier's intent scoring is the feature most often used to justify the upgrade, and it is worth understanding what it is made of. LinkedIn's Buyer Intent documentation describes more than 180 separate signals rolled into one aggregated score, drawn from activity on the platform, advertising interactions, InMail responses and website visits where the tracking tag is installed. Accounts then surface as high, moderate, neutral or negative.

What the documentation does not publish is the weighting or the thresholds between those labels. That matters. An aggregate score you cannot decompose tells you something shifted at an account, not why or who. Our explainer on separating a genuine buying signal from background noise is the right companion read before anyone builds a sequence that fires on an alert.

Buyer behaviour argues for care here too. BizTech Reports, summarising a Gartner survey of 646 B2B buyers run across August and September 2025, noted that 67% of buyers would prefer to get through a purchase without a seller involved. That number is second-hand, because the underlying release is not openly readable. The implication for tooling is the same either way: a longer, better-filtered list only helps if the message that follows is worth opening.

Does Anyone Here Genuinely Need Advanced Plus?

Our position: most teams under roughly twenty-five sellers should stay on Advanced and spend the difference on list quality and message testing. The upgrade is sold on time saved, and time saved is real, but it is dwarfed by the cost of seats nobody opens. Zylo's seventh SaaS Management Index, published in January 2025 and drawn from more than 40M licences under its management, reported that organisations waste an average of $21M a year on unused licences, up 14.2%. Zylo sells software that finds exactly this waste, so read the number with that interest in mind, but the pattern is visible in any seat report you care to run.

The sequence we would defend is boring and cheap. Run Advanced for a quarter. Pull the usage report the tier already gives you. Count weekly active seats, live saved searches, and replies per hundred InMails. Only when that report shows a tight, high-usage core team whose CRM discipline is slipping does the integration tier start to look like the binding constraint.

A different plan suits a team where sales operations owns the CRM properly, reporting is already attributed per source, and the sellers are senior enough that their admin time genuinely costs more than the licence delta. In that shape, the two-way sync pays back quickly and the argument above is wrong. The tell is whether anyone can already answer, without a project, where last quarter's pipeline came from.

A Four-Step Way to Pick

1. Count how many people will share anything. One prospector working alone is what Core is shaped for. The moment two people need the same list, you are in Advanced.
2. Audit the current CRM habit before you buy a fix for it. Reps who already log activity cleanly gain little from the sync. Reps who do not will often keep not doing it, because the obstacle was never the typing.
3. Run a thirty-day test with one variable. One saved search, one message, one metric. Replies per hundred messages, or meetings booked per seat. Everything else is noise at that sample size.
4. Cut quiet seats at renewal. Anyone who has not logged in within sixty days does not need a licence. Reassign it or drop it.

Before You Sign Anything

On a sizeable contract, ask for a trial of the tier above yours and a usage review of the tier you are on, in the same conversation. Your account contact can produce both. Anything touching data protection, data residency or procurement rules goes to your legal and IT colleagues before signature, not after.

Results will vary with your market, your list hygiene and the quality of what you write. The platform is a tool and not a plan, which is why it pays to keep a view of pipeline sources that do not depend on a single network, and to treat the tier decision as a small one made from real usage data rather than a big one made from a demo.