Sales Navigator vs. Premium: which LinkedIn plan is worth it?

The short answer

Premium Career and Premium Business are meant for your own profile. Sales Navigator is a separate tool for targeted prospecting in B2B. According to LinkedIn, Sales Navigator Core costs from €120.99 a month or €1,088.88 a year per licence, Advanced from €148.21 or €1,693.88, plus VAT where applicable [1]. These are LinkedIn's prices for Germany. Advanced Plus is only available on request.

Sales Navigator is worth it if you look for new contacts in a targeted way every week and have a clear target group. Without those two things you're paying for a long list of names.

Important: LinkedIn changes prices, features and plans regularly. All information here comes from LinkedIn's own pages, retrieved in October 2026. Check the current terms before buying.

Which LinkedIn plans are there at all?

LinkedIn offers several paid plans aimed at very different goals [2]. Four of them are relevant for B2B sales:

• Premium Career helps you get hired and get ahead, according to LinkedIn. It's hardly relevant for sales. It includes 5 InMails a month [3].
• Premium Business provides company insights and profile features for the self-employed and managers. It includes 15 InMails a month [3].
• Sales Navigator is the actual tool for lead search, with its own interface, lead and account lists and alerts [2]. It includes 50 InMails a month [1].
• Recruiter Lite is built for recruiting. It's the wrong choice for finding customers.

There are also Premium All-in-One and Premium for company pages [2]. Both aim more at the visibility of company and profile than at targeted prospecting.

What can Sales Navigator do that the normal search can't?

• Advanced search. According to LinkedIn more than 50 filters [1], for example by position, company size, industry, region or time in current role.
• Lead and account lists. You save people and companies and see changes at a glance.
• Alerts. Notifications on job changes or new posts by your saved leads [1]. A job change is often a good occasion for a conversation.
• Relationship Explorer and account planning. Show who is relevant in the target company and where you lack contacts [1].
• InMails. 50 a month to people outside your network [1]. Details on credits and limits are in the article LinkedIn limits.

Core, Advanced or Advanced Plus: what's the difference?

Sales Navigator comes in three tiers. The table shows what LinkedIn states per tier on its comparison page [1]. Prices are per licence, as starting prices and excluding VAT where applicable.

According to LinkedIn, the AI features are only available in selected languages [1]. Paying annually saves you 25 % on Core and 6 % on Advanced, according to LinkedIn [1]. Converted, Core on an annual plan costs around €91 a month, Advanced around €141.

What does that mean for the choice?

• Core is enough if one person searches alone and keeps leads in their own list or a simple CRM.
• Advanced pays off as soon as several people in sales work on the same companies. TeamLink then shows who on the team already knows someone at the target company.
• Advanced Plus is for teams that want to write leads straight from Sales Navigator into the CRM. That saves retyping, but costs more setup.

What does it cost for a small team?

Sample calculation (fictional, using LinkedIn's list prices [1], excluding VAT and discounts): a sales team of three people wants to work on 200 target companies together.

The extra cost of Advanced here is around €1,800 a year. So the question is: does TeamLink bring more than one or two extra meetings a year? With three people approaching the same companies, the answer from our project experience is often yes. With three people in separate territories, often no.

Who is Sales Navigator worth it for?

Sales Navigator pays off if all three points apply:

• You know exactly which companies and which roles you want to approach.
• You actively look for new contacts every week, not just every few months.
• The free search hits its filter limits, or lists in spreadsheets become unmanageable.

Who isn't it worth it for (yet)?

If you don't have a clear target group yet, you're paying for features you won't use. The same applies if you only have an hour a week for outreach. And if your contacts mainly come from your own posts, a strong profile brings more than a search tool. How that works is in the article Social selling & personal brand.

A good test: use the free search consistently for a month. Note down every time you miss a filter. If the list is long after four weeks, Sales Navigator is a good investment. If it stays empty, you don't need it yet.

Can I test Sales Navigator for free?

Yes. According to LinkedIn there's a free trial for Core and Advanced [1]. It applies to members who don't currently have a paid LinkedIn subscription and haven't used a trial in the last 365 days [1]. You have to enter a credit card. LinkedIn reminds you by email seven days before it expires [1]. If you don't cancel, the subscription continues as a paid one.

So plan the test in advance. Define the target group before you start. Otherwise you'll spend the trial period trying things out instead of with real contacts.

How do you set up Sales Navigator in the first week?

This is how we approach it in projects. The quantities are practical values, not LinkedIn requirements:

1. Create an account list. 50 to 200 target companies that really fit your offer.
2. Lead lists per role. For example one list for management and one for heads of sales.
3. Saved searches. Two or three searches with fixed filters, so new matching people show up on their own.
4. Daily routine. 15 minutes going through alerts: job changes, new posts, company news.
5. Measure. After four weeks, count: how many requests were accepted, how many conversations came about?

Important: Sales Navigator is a tool for finding. You write the messages yourself. LinkedIn explicitly prohibits software that automates LinkedIn or scrapes data [4].

Which mistakes do we see most often?

• Searches that are too broad. Nobody works through a list with 5,000 hits. Better 150 companies that really fit.
• Only InMails, no connecting. InMails are limited. A good connection request with a note is often the better first step.
• Licences without a routine. A licence for everyone on the team achieves nothing if nobody looks in daily. Start with the people who really search.
• No connection to the CRM. If leads only live in Sales Navigator, they get lost when someone leaves. At least transfer the most important contacts regularly.

Why doesn't Sales Navigator replace a strategy?

The tool finds contacts faster. But it doesn't tell you whom to approach and with which message. Without a clear target customer profile, even the best filter list only delivers names.

What should be in place first: a short description of the ideal customer company, the two or three roles that buy, and a concrete occasion for the first message. A job change, a new position in sales or a post on your own topic are such occasions. With this basis, Sales Navigator becomes an accelerator. Without it, it remains an expensive contact list.

Exactly this interplay of target customers, signals and the right timing is the core of GTM engineering.