Evaluating UserGems vs LinkedIn Sales Navigator for tracking job changes or looking for a Sales Navigator alternative? Then you’re doing the right thing by looking at a tool that helps you automate pipeline generation.

As B2B prospecting becomes more complex and pipeline anxiety rears its ugly head, B2B revenue teams are using sales intelligence tools to monitor sales trigger events that signal a company is in a position to close a deal, such as hiring and firing executives, experiencing business growth, or shifting strategies.

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By using sales intelligence tools to track these events, B2B revenue teams can be more deliberate and targeted in their approach to prospecting, which can lead to more closed deals.

But with so many platforms to choose from, it can be hard to figure out which one’s right for your team. That’s why we’ve made this rundown comparing two of the most popular job tracking tools on the market: UserGems and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

Read on to find out what experts think about both tools to help you make the best decision for your organization.

What is UserGems?

UserGems is pipeline generation software that rids revenue teams of pipeline anxiety by identifying the prospects who are most likely to buy from you and surfacing them as warm leads in your CRM. For example, UserGems surfaces leads like champions, customers, and prospects who move to new companies, as well as contacts who are promoted within their current organization. 

By automatically tracking job changes, UserGems:

• Improves your sales team's productivity
• Reduces the need to spray and pray
• And enables your sales and marketing team to generate revenue on autopilot.

It’s no secret that customer job changes are a key trigger event in B2B sales. A study of over 5000 sales opportunities shows that deals with previous champions have 54% bigger deal sizes, 114% higher win rates, and 12% shorter sales cycles.

“Your customers are constantly or will eventually change jobs, and chances are they will end up at companies you’re prospecting into,” says Anthony Banayote of Gong. “Instead of spending time trying to connect with people who don’t know your product or service, leverage these wins.” 

The advantages of using UserGems

UserGems comes with a ton of pros that make it a great tool for any sales team. You can use it to: 

• Generate pipeline on autopilot 

UserGems automatically tracks your past customers, prospects, and champions as they change jobs. But we don’t stop there. We find their new contact information and surface them as warm leads in your CRM with enough personalized context for your sales reps to initiate a warm outreach. 

• Accelerate ABM execution 

UserGems help you track buyer movements in your target account and surfaces opportunities for you to initiate conversations with key decision-makers. This isn’t limited to past customers; we also track power users, influencers, champions, and more. This helps your sales and marketing teams align on prospects to target them at the same time.

• Automate workflows

Our automated workflows are a key difference when comparing UserGems vs Sales Navigator for tracking job changes. You get fresh hot leads delivered directly into your CRM — no manual search involved. You can integrate UserGems with SalesForce, Outreach, HubSpot, and more. We don’t just provide data, we make it easy to act on it and generate sales pipeline.

• Great customer support

Our team of customer success managers is committed to your success and growth. They work closely with your team to help you maximize the benefits of UserGems by offering valuable insights about how to automate your workflows and create customized playbooks for your specific audience.

Disadvantages of using UserGems

We’ll admit it, we aren't perfect. 

• One downside of UserGems is that it works best for organizations over single users. On the other hand, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can work for sole users, albeit with very limited features.
• We provide customized pricing for our users, since UserGems is used by teams. Want to learn more? Speak to someone on our team.
• If you are tracking only past customers and prospects, your UserGems leads will increase as your customer base grows. It's important to note that leads may not flood in right away, especially if you're just starting out, But you’ll still experience a high conversion rate.

UserGems pricing

We provide customized pricing for our users. Want to learn more? Speak to someone on our team.

What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a sales intelligence platform that helps sales reps find B2B leads and build relationships with them.

It's a useful prospecting tool for sales reps who want to connect with leads through social selling. Sales Navigator makes it easy to keep track of your leads and target accounts through their activities on LinkedIn.

The advantages of using LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Large database: With over 800 million members, LinkedIn is the largest networking platform for business professionals. Sales reps can easily find prospects and engage with them through Sales Navigator’s InMail feature.
• Advanced search features: LinkedIn provides advanced search functionality to find leads and qualify them based on your ideal customer profile (ICP).
• Easy adoption: Most sales professionals already use LinkedIn. There's a slight learning curve for new users, but existing LinkedIn users typically adapt to Sales Navigator quickly.
• Customized trigger alerts: Sales Navigator allows you to set trigger alerts based on your prospect and target each account’s activity.

Some disadvantages of using LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• It requires manual list building. LinkedIn Sales Navigator reviews from customers reveal that they can't pull data from LinkedIn into SalesForce CRM. Alternatively, you have to copy and paste data, leading to errors and wasted time.
• You have to manually search LinkedIn for prospects that fit your ICP. Though there’s a “recommended leads” feature based on your searches, LinkedIn reviews show that they are often irrelevant. 
• It doesn’t provide contact information for prospects, so you can only contact them through LinkedIn InMail.
• You can only integrate Sales Navigator with your CRM if you have an enterprise license.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator pricing

LinkedIn Sales Navigator's cost starts at $79.99 per user/month. They offer additional plans and specific pricing for teams and enterprises. But here are five things you should consider when evaluating any buyer job change tools:

5 reasons why experts choose UserGems over LinkedIn Sales Navigator for tracking buyer job changes

Instead of writing another side-by-side list of features (you can find that here if that's your thing 😁), we thought we’d keep things simple. 

We sent Slack messages to our SDRs, AEs, and demand generation folks asking:

“If you had to put a page up on our website breaking down the top reasons why people pick UserGems vs. LinkedIn Sales Navigator to automate the sales pipeline and track customers' job changes, what would you say?”

They had some swell answers and you’ll also find some quotes from customers on why UserGems is their best choice for pipeline generation.

1. Automation

When it comes to tracking job changes, Sales Navigator flags contacts in Salesforce as “No longer there.”

But what really matters is “then what?” You don’t want your team burning calories by manually tracking and updating these job changes in Salesforce instead of focusing on selling.

Every manual step slows down your sales rep’s efficiency and increases the likelihood of human errors. Manual steps also decrease the chance that your reps will act on these high-value sales opportunities. 

That’s why companies miss 85% of these job-change trigger opportunities (Source: Internal analysis of 50+ midsize and enterprise B2B SaaS companies). Gar Smyth, Revenue Operations Manager at Mimecast, discovered that automating their pipeline generation efforts with UserGems prevented them from losing leads due to sales reps not following up. This led to generating $18 million in new business pipeline. 

In a comparison of UserGem’s automation capabilities to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, here’s what Derek Kelliher, former Sales Manager at Drift, and now Director, Corporate & Enterprise Sales at Creatio says:

In today's highly competitive sales universe, it’s all about optimizing your sales rep’s efficiency. With UserGems, your team:

• Tracks every one of your users on a monthly basis — not only contacts associated with an opportunity (which is what LinkedIn Sales Navigator does).
• Doesn’t need to enter data manually. The new leads are automatically created directly in Salesforce with their professional emails and the old leads are flagged as outdated.
• Can automate prospecting emails with Outreach, SalesLoft, Marketo, etc.
• Doesn’t need to go through the hassle of integrations and onboarding a new tool. Everything happens in Salesforce.

This means that none of your hot leads slip through the cracks. And your team members have more high-quality leads to chase (and less pipeline anxiety!).

“My SDRs appreciate how easy it is to work with leads generated by the UserGems service,” a UserGems customer notes on G2 Review. “All leads are automatically populated in Salesforce view, under the right account owners, with the new work email addresses, LinkedIn profiles, and their previous information to ensure no history with the contact is lost.”

They continue, “This drastically reduces the time SDRs need to spend on research of leads that used our solution but have moved on to new companies (there is no need to go to other tools such as Sales Navigator or hunt for old Salesforce record, etc. to put all of this information together for a prospecting email.”

2. Actionable data

We’ve done a lot of benchmarking to compare our data accuracy against Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and others (See data quality and validation tests). But even accurate data is useless if it isn’t actionable.

UserGems enriches data and brings it into your existing workflows, so your team can act on them immediately. With LinkedIn, you get a database of former prospects and customers but no info on their past relationship with you. UserGems provides:

• Contact information, such as new work emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, and locations
• Historical information by linking the lead’s new record with their existing data in Salesforce so that your team always has full context when reaching out
• Human validation to make sure all leads are relevant to you so you feel confident about your outreach

All this means your sales reps won’t waste time on unqualified leads. As an added bonus the relationship data provided by UserGems helps you personalize your outreach, and the messaging templates make it easy to set up a sales sequence.

Cobalt is a cybersecurity company that used UserGems to shorten its sales process. 

UserGems' actionable data helped Cobalt identify when their champions changed jobs and provided insights into the champion's past relationship with Cobalt. This information allowed Cobalt to reach out to these champions at the right time and in the right way, which shortened the sales process.

The insight from UserGems is a necessary part of Cobalt’s pipeline generation efforts today because their target market — cybersecurity companies — are skeptics trained to keep people out.

“Our Enterprise deals are typically five to six months and with a $40,000 average deal size,” says Clare Corriveau, Sr. Director of Demand Generation at Cobalt. “We reached out to a churned customer — a UserGems lead — who had moved to a new company, and this closed three weeks from the day that the lead got sent to the BDR and closed at $95K.” 

3. A complete view of your customers

The use case for UserGems covers your sales, marketing, and customer success teams — everyone benefits and your account-based marketing strategies thrive. But with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the use case is primarily for sales teams.

Think about the growth you could fuel or how healthy your sales pipeline could be by reconnecting with previous end-users that changed jobs. Or, consider the risk of losing out on all that information when a champion or account owner changes jobs.

For example, LeaseQuery's Customer Success team added UserGems to their RevTech stack to prevent customer churn when their main contact leaves. 

According to Victoria Hohlstein, Manager, Field Marketing, “We use UserGems by notifying our CS team if someone leaves. It gives us an opportunity  to find another decision maker at the customer account to maintain the relationship.”

But LeaseQuery soon realized there was an even bigger use case for pipeline and revenue generation from these new job-change leads. This led to higher win rates from UserGems leads than other sources and a 4x increase in ROI.

UserGems tracks key contacts that can influence the buying decision at their companies. Today’s executives often look to their team for tool recommendations. These influencers might not have buying power, but their advocacy can kickstart conversations to get your team in the door. Think Slack, Asana, or Zoom.

So if you only focus on tracking contacts at ‘Closed Won Opportunities” (like what Sales Navigator does), you’re missing out on:

• Power users 🏋️
• Daily active users 🏃🏽
• Contacts at “Closed Lost Opportunities” ⛔
• Contacts at open (mid-funnel) opportunities 💰

Every job change you don’t track is a missed opportunity. UserGems tracks ALL your contacts and end-users — inside and outside your CRM —  for any job movements.

4. Customer support

You get a dedicated customer success manager as a UserGems customer who is committed to your growth and success. 

“Our experience with the UserGems CS team has been wonderful. Steven Farina, our former CSM, was incredible during our onboarding,” says Victoria Hohlstein, Field Marketing Manager at LeaseQuery. “He had tons of practical ideas and creative feedback for how to get the program off the ground,” Victoria says.

She continues, “He had a lot of suggestions around messaging and strategy. He made sure we were doing everything we could to make the program as successful as possible. The support and overall customer success experience have been good.”

And according to multiple reviews, you may not always get the same level of customer support from LinkedIn.

5. Ease of use

UserGems is the best pipeline generation tool for revenue teams looking to accelerate their sales pipeline without sacrificing their team’s efficiency. Although Sales Navigator is easy to adopt for users familiar with LinkedIn, ts downsides include manual prospecting and a lack of relationship data. This means it might take some time to feel the impact on your ROI. 

WeSpire chose UserGems for its ability to find and scale warm outbound and its ease of use. “We’re a small team. And UserGems was the most automated plug-and-play solution we evaluated. Plus, our UserGems Customer Success Manager was great,” says Adam Shaw, WeSpire’s Head of Demand Generation. WeSpire saw a 10x return on investment (ROI) in directly-influenced pipeline within two months of implementing UserGems.

Noah Bastien, Senior Account Development Representative at UserGems, puts it best:

"The process of adding UserGems to your sales tech stack couldn't be easier. You spend 1-2 hours deciding who to track in your CRM, a 45-minute implementation on our end, and an additional 20 minutes training your reps.

“You can be up and running in a week with a dedicated Customer Success Manager walking you through our best-automated playbooks. It's a hands-free, always-on campaign for your most likely buyers - past customers!"

Boost your revenue and pipeline by tracking job changes

At the end of the day, we aren't saying you should use UserGems over LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Instead, you may want to consider using them together.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for identifying potential users and current employees at your target companies. However, it can be time-consuming and labor-intensive to track job changes manually. 

UserGems automates this process, so you can scale your pipeline generation efforts without adding to your sales team's workload and keep your pipeline full of qualified leads who are 3x likely to buy from you. Get familiar with what UserGems can do for you with this self-guided demo.