A Sales Navigator prospecting workflow is the repeatable loop between defining an audience, saving it as a search, working the results on a fixed cadence, and moving everything that matters into your CRM. The last step is the one most people skip, and it is the one that decides whether the workflow survives.

We run Sales Navigator seats for a living. The pattern we see most often is not that people pick the wrong filters. It is that they build their entire pipeline inside Sales Navigator, and Sales Navigator is not built to hold it.

Start with an audience you can actually describe

Before opening Sales Navigator, write down who you sell to in one sentence that a colleague could act on. Not "B2B SaaS companies" but "heads of sales at 20 to 200 person SaaS companies in France and the UK who have posted a sales hire in the last quarter".

That sentence maps directly onto filters: seniority, function, headcount, geography, and a recent-activity signal. If you cannot write the sentence, better filters will only help you build a precise list of the wrong people. This is the step worth spending an afternoon on, because every other step inherits its quality.

Save the search, not the leads

Sales Navigator lets you save both searches and individual leads. Saved searches are the more useful of the two, because they keep returning new people who match your definition as profiles change, while a saved lead list is a snapshot that ages from the moment you build it.

Run two or three saved searches rather than a dozen. A small number you actually open every week beats a large number you ignore. Name them after the motion they serve, not the filters they contain, so that "SaaS France hiring sellers" tells you what to do when you open it and "Search 4" does not.

Work it on a cadence, and write the outcome somewhere else

The workflow is a weekly loop: open the saved search, work the new results, record what happened, and move on. The discipline is in the third step. Every outcome, whether a reply, a no, or a note that someone changed jobs, belongs in your CRM rather than in Sales Navigator.

This feels like duplicated effort for the first fortnight and then stops feeling like anything at all. It is also what makes the workflow portable: if you pause your subscription, change tools, or hand the territory to someone else, the work survives.

The 30-day reset, and why it matters more than the filters

This is the part most guides leave out, and it is the reason we wrote this one.

Any Sales Navigator seat sourced through a reseller, including ours, is renewed on a 30-day cycle. Access is continuous, but at each renewal the saved searches, lead lists and InMail history inside the seat are cleared. You keep the licence. You do not keep the state you built inside it.

If your workflow lives in your CRM and Sales Navigator is the search layer on top, you will barely notice. You rebuild two or three saved searches, which takes a few minutes because you already wrote the audience sentence down. If you planned to run your whole pipeline from Sales Navigator lists, this will hurt every month.

The practical conclusion is the same one we would give somebody on a full-price seat bought directly from LinkedIn: treat Sales Navigator as a search and signal tool, and keep the record of work somewhere you control. It is simply that a 30-day cycle makes the cost of ignoring that advice visible sooner.

What usually goes wrong

Filters too broad. A search returning thousands of results is a search you will never finish. Narrow it until a week's worth of work fits in the list.
InMails used as a first touch. You get fifty a month on Core. Spending them before you have seen whether a connection request works is the most common waste we see.
No cadence. A saved search opened when you remember is not a workflow. Put it in the calendar.
Everything stored in the tool. Covered above, and it is the one that costs the most.

Where the cost of the seat fits

Sales Navigator Core is $119.99 a month at LinkedIn's list price. That is the number that makes teams hesitate, and it is worth being clear that the workflow above does not depend on how you bought the seat. It works the same on a full-price licence.

If the price is what is stopping you, an official Core licence through a verified reseller is $50 a month, or $40 a month paid yearly. It is the same product on your own account, with an invoice, and with the 30-day cycle described above. You can read what each tier costs or how a split licence works if that is the part you want to understand before anything else.

Frequently asked questions

What is a sales prospecting workflow?

A repeatable loop: define the audience, save it as a search, work the results on a fixed cadence, and record every outcome in your CRM. The point is repeatability, not sophistication.

What do I actually need to run one?

A Sales Navigator seat, a CRM of any kind, and a recurring slot in your calendar. Sequencing tools help once volume grows, but they are not required to start and they will not rescue a workflow with no audience definition.

Should I save searches or save leads?

Searches. They keep surfacing people who match your definition as profiles change. Saved lead lists age from the day you build them, and on a 30-day renewal cycle they are cleared anyway.

Does the 30-day renewal delete my data?

It clears what lives inside the seat: saved searches, lead lists and InMail history. Your LinkedIn account, your connections and anything you put in your CRM are untouched. This is the main reason to keep the record of work outside Sales Navigator.

Is Core enough, or do I need Advanced?

Core covers an individual seller: advanced filters, lead and account lists, alerts and fifty InMails a month. Advanced adds team features such as shared lists, TeamLink and CRM integration, and it is sold through LinkedIn's sales team. If you work alone or your team each runs their own patch, Core is enough.

A Sales Navigator prospecting workflow that survives contact with reality