I think it depends on the industry you are focused on. Blue collar businesses are less likely to use LinkedIn and it is highly likely that many employees (including the CEO) wont be on LinkedIn, throwing off the employee counts. White collar businesses like tech generally will have all of their employees on the site. The search function itself has its positives and negatives. On the plus side, the geographic searching is very solid. Throw in a list of zip codes and you know you are only getting businesses in that area. Search also has the ability to exclude viewed or saved leads so that you aren't looking at the same things over and over again. On the negative side, if you search for a lead by title like "Chief Executive Officer" the search will return all results with Chief, Executive, or Officer in the title. This is highly annoying and results in far too many bad results. The industry field is useless as well as businesses rarely seem to be categorized properly. I've also had a bunch of owners contact me after just viewing their profile that I found through the navigator search. In short, if you are looking at white collar businesses I think it is a valuable tool though it certainly has limitations. It is great for finding all businesses in a specific geography. If you are doing that you can probably rip through all of the businesses in a 2 month period and you are only out $130 or so.

Agree with Ryan's comments above. We are geographically-focused and Sales Nav has been a great tool. Caveat: it takes a lot of time to build a solid list of businesses/owners -- there are certainly quicker ways to build lists. But (for geographic searchers especially) it's an effective, inexpensive tool if you're not paying the membership fee for more than a few months.

I used navigator in combination with a scraper tool to automatically build lists. Once you have a LinkedIn search that you like, you run the scraper and it clicks through all the results, gathers the data, and exports into a .csv.

I did the same as Tim and used http://webscraper.io/ along with the free trial of sales navigator. I found the same limitation as Ryan mentioned in that the data is noisy which requires a lot of time to manually review. It would be a great task for interns to have them do the first pass at cleaning the data. One thing to mention is that if you scrape too much data or too quickly between page loads then LinkedIn will lock your account. I've also had good results getting lists of targets from Capital IQ if you have access to it. The exception there is that the data is a bit outdated and doesn't reflect when a company has shut down or been acquired. It's much easier to use than LinkedIn and webscraper.

I had similar experiences as those described above: for white collar businesses its great for company list generation and company info, for blue collar businesses its close to worthless. In either case its hit or miss for finding the CEO/Owner. Its particularly helpful for niche industry (by keyword, not by preset industry filters) lists, and by geography too. It tended to be best in specific circumstances (industry) and in bursts, but not a tool for sustained use.

Can anyone who is currently using LinkedIn's Sales Navigator to source deals (I'm assuming features have been enhanced since this post) provide any feedback on the product?

Recommend Evergreen Results (company in Colorado). They use software to pull and clean all the data from LinkedIn. Saves so much time and effort.

I do a bunch of searches, use rocketreach with a google sheet getting the data for me. Then the whole sheebang goes into the CRM of your choice. It's a hack but Navigator was just not that great for the costs. Also, the SME, mostly small/micro businesses, aren't on LinkedIn. I've ended up chasing them via Facebook. I know, I was shocked as well.

Lori - are you using it to source companies and contact them directly? How has it been? Any luck? Trying to decide if going direct or going through a broker is a better route.

I think it honestly depends, what type of deals are you trying to go after? what type of companies? If you find they are on linkedin then I'd say its pr obably worth it, but you could also just pay the 25 bucks a month on a few accounts and get the inmails and get pretty far, there are also tools which can help you get the email without linkedin

I use it all day so it's worth it for us.