How Financial Advisors Can Use Sales Navigator

Social media offers a variety of opportunities for financial advisors to connect with prospective clients. While LinkedIn might seem like a less obvious choice than Facebook or Instagram for advisor marketing, the platform’s Sales Navigator feature offers some unique possibilities. This premium service can be used to facilitate lead generation so you can grow your advisory business.

SmartAsset’s Advisor Marketing Platform (AMP) offers financial advisors services like client lead generation, automated marketing and more. Learn about SmartAsset AMP today.

What Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an AI-powered sales tool that’s designed for B2B sellers who are looking for buyers. While Sales Navigator wasn’t designed exclusively for use in financial services, its features and capabilities make it an attractive marketing tool for advisors.

Specifically, Sales Navigator can help advisors:

Generate more leads for the business by pinpointing the right buyers, like prospects who are ready to work with a financial professional
Foster engagement with prospects, using AI-generated scripts that can be personalized for different buyer personas
Cultivate relationships that lead to conversions with the help of AI tools
Minimize research time and contextualize data to better shape prospect conversations
Streamline the sales process through integrations with your preferred CRM

The range of features you have access to is determined by the pricing plan you choose. There are three plans financial advisors can choose from: Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus.

Plan	Description	Pricing*
Core	Geared toward individual sellers, making it a good fit for solo advisors or boutique firms.	$89.99 per month (billed annually)
Advanced	Designed for sales teams that want to leverage AI to find more leads and increase conversions.	$149.99 per month billed annually
Advanced Plus	Built for sales teams that use CRMs and need the most comprehensive range of features.	Not disclosed online (requires booking a demo for pricing details)

*Pricing as of October 2025

Both Core and Advanced plans include a one-month trial at $0.

Sales Navigator is different from LinkedIn Premium. Premium is designed to help you grow your business by building credibility, identifying and engaging with suitable prospects, and increasing your visibility across the platform. Premium Business is geared more toward helping you gain exposure through LinkedIn, while Sales Navigator is a dedicated sales tool.

Client Acquisition Simplified: For RIAs

Ideal for RIAs looking to scale.
Validated referrals to help build your pipeline efficiently.
Save time + optimize your close rate with high-touch, pre-built campaigns.

CFP®, CEO

Joe Anderson

Pure Financial Advisors

We have seen a remarkable return on investment and comparatively low client acquisition costs even as we’ve multiplied our spend over the years.

Pure Financial Advisors reports $1B in new AUM from SmartAsset investor referrals.

Benefits of Sales Navigator for Financial Advisors

Before investing in any marketing tool, it’s helpful to consider what you’ll get from it in return. Here are some of the ways that your firm may benefit from using Sales Navigator:

Filtering: Sales Navigator is designed to make it easier for you to identify prospective leads that best fit your ideal client profile. The advanced search tool allows you to filter results by industry, profession and other characteristics to find the leads you most want to work with.
Organization and tracking: Sales Navigator simplifies organization by cataloging saved leads. You can then establish custom rules for sorting them, making it easier to track leads by category or “freshness.”
Sharing: Ensuring that every member of your team has access to the same information is easier with Sales Navigator. Team members can view leads and prospect notes in a single place while allowing you to determine which information they have access to.
Messaging: All Sales Navigator plans include 50 monthly InMail credits you can use to send messages to prospective clients you’re not directly connected to. You’ll have a separate inbox you can use to track messages sent and received.
Statistics and integration: Data collection is central to lead generation, and Sales Navigator is designed to simplify analysis and tracking. You can view data for searches, saved leads and other metrics through the dashboard and easily integrate information with your CRM software or other data analysis tools.
AI capabilities: Both Advanced and Advanced Plus plans offer access to artificial intelligence tools, including Account IQ and Lead IQ. The Account IQ feature assists with research by offering AI-powered summaries, while Lead IQ uses AI to generate recommendations for how to engage with leads more effectively.

Using Sales Navigator can help advisors automate much of the work that goes into finding quality leads. You can use it, along with LinkedIn’s free features, to increase your brand’s visibility and scale your business at a pace that suits you.

Find & Close Ideal Clients

Get regular introductions to retirees, pre-retirees, and high network prospects to grow your business.

How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

A financial advisor onboarding new clients found through Sales Navigator.

If you’re ready to try Sales Navigator, it’s helpful to spend some time familiarizing yourself with what the platform can do. Again, this will largely depend on which plan you choose.

With that in mind, here are some helpful tips to remember:

Polish Your Profile

Before reaching out to leads, check your profile to gauge the type of impression you’re making. A good financial advisor LinkedIn profile highlights your expertise, skills and professional background. It also includes an up-to-date photo, contact information and links to your website/social media profiles.

Set Up a Persona

Sales Navigator allows you to create personas to more easily identify leads that fit your ideal client profile. When you set up a buyer persona, you can select individual criteria to fully define it. You can use the personas you create to search for leads, along with other search filters.

Choose Search Filters

Sales Navigator offers more than 50 filters to help you narrow your search for leads. For example, you may search by company size, geographic region or years of experience. You can see which prospects have viewed your firm’s profile, or check which leads are already in your CRM with the Advanced Plus plan. You’ll need to decide which filters are likely to produce the best results, based on the type of clients you’re hoping to connect with.

Use Spotlights

Spotlights allow you to leverage connections between prospects and members of your team or network. A spotlight will appear under leads that are connected to people you know. You can click the spotlight to request a warm introduction.

Save and Share Leads

Sales Navigator includes a built-in feature that allows you to save leads with the click of a button. You can save individual prospects and group them using metrics that make the most sense, based on your goals. Organizing leads is as simple as adding a tag or note, which you can make visible to everyone on your team.

Explore Shared Experiences

The Shared Experiences filter is included in Advanced Lead Search. This feature allows you to filter for prospects you have something in common with, such as sharing the same alma mater or a membership in a professional or social organization.

Leverage InMail

Your Sales Navigator plan includes InMail credits, so you don’t want to let them go to waste. To make the most of them, LinkedIn recommends identifying the candidates who are most likely to respond and highlighting mutual connections. You can select premade templates and then personalize your messages.

Sales Navigator Compliance for Financial Advisors

Ensuring compliance with your marketing strategy is important, particularly when it comes to how you document client information, maintain records and implement cybersecurity protections. LinkedIn Sales Navigator makes this easier by partnering with several compliance software providers.

Using this type of technology allows you to market your business to prospective leads through the platform without having to worry about running afoul of regulatory guidelines. For example, you can use compliance software to:

Capture and import data from the LinkedIn Sales Navigator application programming interface (API)
Document messages, including all images or attachments, and seamlessly organize message threads
Securely store and protect client information
Monitor communications on and off the LinkedIn platform, and flag content that may be non-compliant
Take remediation actions quickly when a compliance violation occurs

These types of tools can simplify the compliance workflow for you or your Chief Compliance Officer (CCO), if you employ one. You aren’t required to use one of LinkedIn’s software partners to use Sales Navigator, though doing so could eliminate some of the guesswork involved in staying compliant.

Other Sales Tools for Financial Advisors

While LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be a powerful tool for prospecting, financial advisors can enhance their sales efforts with additional platforms.

SmartAsset AMP (Advisor Marketing Platform) helps advisors connect with high-intent investors through lead generation and automated marketing. This subscription-based service can not only generate hundreds of client referrals per year, but also give fiduciary financial advisors the marketing tools to nurture those prospects. For example, AMP allows advisors to build custom, automated email and text campaigns for prospective clients who may require a longer sales process.

Advisors may also look to customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like SalesForce, HubSpot or Wealthbox, all of which integrate with SmartAsset AMP. By incorporating these tools alongside LinkedIn Sales Navigator, advisors can diversify their approach, strengthen client relationships and potentially improve conversion rates.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on Sales Navigator

Does Sales Navigator Work for Financial Advisors?

Sales Navigator can work for financial advisors who familiarize themselves with the platform’s features and clearly define their goals for using it. Investors are increasingly using online searches to find financial advice, and LinkedIn is just one of the many social media platforms they’re relying on to find an advisor to work with.

Who Should Use Sales Navigator?

Sales Navigator is intended for professionals who want to gain new leads and grow their businesses using the LinkedIn platform. Financial advisors might consider testing this tool if they’re already using LinkedIn to identify prospective clients and want access to a wider range of features.

Where Do Financial Advisors Get Their Leads?

Financial advisors can get leads in a variety of ways, including referral sources and word-of-mouth, social media, email marketing and lead-generation platforms. Cold calling, collaborations, networking and direct mail marketing can also produce leads for advisors.

Bottom Line

Financial advisors using Sales Navigator to grow their financial advisory business.

The benefits of Sales Navigator for financial advisors are numerous, and if you’re not using LinkedIn as part of your financial advisor business plan, you could be missing out. Requesting a demo or free trial is something you might consider if you’re ready to test the possibilities of scaling through the LinkedIn platform.

Tips for Growing Your Advisory Business

Social media is just one avenue you might pursue for lead generation. You might also invest more directly in your marketing and lead gen efforts. SmartAsset AMP (Advisor Marketing Platform) is a holistic marketing service financial advisors can use for client lead generation and automated marketing. Sign up for a free demo to explore how SmartAsset AMP can help you expand your practice’s marketing operation. Get started today.
If you’re not ready to take the plunge with Sales Navigator, you can still leverage LinkedIn as a professional networking tool. You can also use it to establish and build your brand’s credibility by creating a detailed profile that’s optimized for search so it’s easy for prospective clients to find you.