Sales Navigator : why it's completely useless
Everyone thinks Sales Navigator is a must-have... Reality is : it's an overpriced and useless sales software
4/9/20264 min read
Sales Navigator: Is It Actually Useless?
I'm about to share an exclusive revelation...
In Q2 2025, a Head of Sales booked a meeting with me to discuss an outsourced prospecting campaign. He showed up with his newly hired Growth Manager.
They worked at a fairly well-known French scaleup operating in the public sector, and they wanted to start prospecting smaller public-sector organizations they hadn't managed to reach so far.
After about five minutes of conversation, something rather strange came up: they were trying to build prospecting lists but thought Sales Navigator was too expensive.
Indeed, Sales Navigator costs around €100 per month, which isn't exactly cheap.
But something caught my attention: apparently, LinkedIn sales representatives had convinced them that they needed to purchase 10 licenses at once, otherwise it simply wasn't possible.
That's €1,000 per month, just to start building prospect lists.
Obviously, that's not true. In fact, you don't even need to book a meeting with a LinkedIn sales representative to subscribe to Sales Navigator. Anyone can purchase a subscription very easily.
And here's a fun fact: you don't even need Sales Navigator to build prospecting lists.
Just to be clear, we're talking about the Sales Director and Growth Manager of a French scaleup who had been stuck for months on something ridiculously simple.
I come across this kind of situation very frequently (although this particular example was particularly extreme).
The French sales ecosystem is still very immature when it comes to outbound prospecting, to the point where things can sometimes become genuinely absurd.
See here why full-time B2B salespeople don't prospect.
Most experienced B2B salespeople will still tell you that Sales Navigator is worth having.
So let me explain the actual differences between using Sales Navigator, regular LinkedIn, and other prospecting tools.
Sales Navigator: It's Extremely Expensive and Basically Useless
I honestly don't know how Sales Navigator became so popular in the B2B market.
Actually, I do. I've already explained it a little further up.
Contrary to what you might think, you can absolutely use regular LinkedIn to find qualified professional contacts.
All you need to do is type the profiles you're looking for into the search bar.
Use quotation marks for exact searches, and separate different job titles with OR if you're looking for several types of profiles, or AND if you want someone to match both criteria.
You can then filter your results by location, industry, and other criteria.
The main advantage of Sales Navigator is that it also allows you to filter by company size.
For example, you might want to exclude companies with 2 to 25 employees or target only large corporations.
However, this is pretty much the only genuinely interesting feature Sales Navigator offers compared with the free version of LinkedIn.
And even that feature isn't necessarily very reliable.
Just because you search for companies with between 11 and 50 employees in Sales Navigator doesn't mean that's exactly what you'll get in your final list.
You'll still need to clean your data afterwards.
So, regardless of whether you use Sales Navigator or regular LinkedIn, you'll have to clean your prospecting list anyway.
In fact, the only Sales Navigator feature I find genuinely interesting is the ability to view people who have visited your LinkedIn profile over the past 90 days and filter them by job title.
If you're doing LinkedIn setting to generate meetings by leveraging your LinkedIn content strategy, this is a must-have.
I don't know of any other tool that offers this exact functionality.
Exporting Data With Waalaxy
Sales Navigator costs over €100 per month, yet it doesn't even allow you to export your search results into an Excel file.
The free version of LinkedIn doesn't allow it either.
In both cases, you'll need to use Waalaxy to export your prospect list for free.
The only real advantage of Sales Navigator here is that Totleads was developed specifically around it and is much faster than Waalaxy when it comes to exporting leads.
It's genuinely very fast!
Incidentally, the Totleads team recently developed Novleads, which I haven't tested yet.
What's the Best Tool for Finding Leads?
Personally, I have to admit that I'm a big fan of Apollo.io, which has also been banned from the LinkedIn platform for reasons that remain unclear.
I've written an entire article about Apollo's features. They're quite impressive, and the tool is surprisingly underused in France.
You can find more information here about how to score your Total Addressable Market.
Here are the main advantages of Apollo.io:
More precise company size filters: Much more detailed and reliable than Sales Navigator.
Department size filters: You can also filter by the size of individual teams (for example, companies with fewer than 2 people in Sales).
Company revenue data: This isn't publicly available information, so Apollo only has it for some companies.
Full TAM scoring: You can score an entire addressable market to make your prospecting much more strategic and effective.
Lower cost: Around €50 per month, compared with more than twice that for Sales Navigator.
2,500 high-quality email credits: Compared with zero email credits with Sales Navigator.
And if you don't want to deal with all these tools yourself and are considering outsourcing your sales prospecting, feel free to send me an email at louis@outbound-machine.com
