LinkedIn Sales Navigator Salesforce Integration Guide

How the Sales Navigator Salesforce integration works

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator Salesforce integration has two parts. The embedded profile, installed through the LinkedIn Sales Navigator app for Salesforce, shows LinkedIn profile and company insights, including TeamLink, on Lead, Contact, Account and Opportunity pages. It works with Sales Navigator Advanced or Advanced Plus. CRM Sync imports your Salesforce records into Sales Navigator every 12 hours, auto-saves the accounts and contacts on open opportunities, and writes InMails, messages, calls and notes back to Salesforce as activities. CRM Sync needs Advanced Plus and is switched on by your LinkedIn account representative. It appends new activities and notes; it never overwrites or merges your existing Salesforce data.

Requirements: plan, Salesforce edition and admins

• Sales Navigator plan: Advanced or Advanced Plus for the embedded profile. Advanced Plus for everything else: CRM Sync, activity writeback, Data Validation and Contact Creation. Core does not include the CRM integration.
• Salesforce edition: Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance or Developer. Professional Edition works only with API access enabled, and the embedded profile also needs Chatter enabled; Salesforce may charge extra for API access on Professional. Salesforce Classic and Lightning are both supported.
• My Domain must be set up in Salesforce before you install the app.
• People: a Salesforce administrator to install the app, a Sales Navigator administrator to connect the org (LinkedIn recommends an admin who also holds a team member seat, for testing), and a dedicated integration user with the permissions LinkedIn lists.
• CRM Sync switched on by LinkedIn: your LinkedIn account representative enables it for your contract.

How to set up the integration, step by step

1. Check the plan and edition. Advanced Plus if you want sync and writeback, and a supported Salesforce edition with API access.
2. Set up My Domain in Salesforce if it is not already deployed.
3. Install the LinkedIn Sales Navigator app. In Salesforce Setup, search Quick Find for "LinkedIn Sales Navigator". You can install the AppExchange package or switch on the native integration; LinkedIn recommends the AppExchange package because it includes every feature, including Data Validation and Salesforce Classic support. Install for all users or for specific profiles.
4. Assign the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Standard User permission set to every non-admin who should see the embedded profile.
5. Add the embedded profile to your page layouts for Leads, Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities, using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator Assistant in the App Launcher.
6. Ask your LinkedIn rep to enable CRM Sync, then connect the org in Sales Navigator Admin Settings with your integration user. You can connect a Sandbox first to test.
7. Choose sync settings: which users get auto-save and writeback, when deals count as pipeline, and which field holds revenue. If you keep standard data in custom fields, set up custom field mapping.
8. Confirm activity writeback. LinkedIn now turns writeback on by default for every user once the admin enables it, and each user can switch it off. Pick which activities to log, then test by writing a note on a Sales Navigator lead and checking that it appears in Salesforce.
9. Optionally switch on Data Validation and Contact Creation (both Advanced Plus, covered below).
10. Check match rates in the Sales Navigator admin console, and fix bad matches from the embedded profile.

LinkedIn's own CRM Sync technical guide lists every object and field it reads and writes, which your security team will ask for.

What syncs and what does not

From Salesforce into Sales Navigator

• Imports Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity, Opportunity Contact Role, Task, Event, Note, User and Account Team data, and matches it to LinkedIn people and companies by name, contact details and location. The import runs at setup and then every 12 hours, mostly through Salesforce Bulk APIs to keep API usage down.
• Auto-save: accounts and contacts linked to open opportunities are saved in Sales Navigator for the opportunity owner, so they get alerts on them.
• CRM badges and filters: Sales Navigator shows which leads are in your CRM, not in it, or out of date, links straight to the record, and lets you filter lead searches to in-CRM or not-in-CRM.
• Shows CRM contact information on lead pages, and basic opportunity fields (name, owner, close date, status) in Account Lists.
• Lets admins assign Sales Navigator seats based on Salesforce users.

From Sales Navigator back into Salesforce

• Activity writeback: InMails and LinkedIn messages are logged as Task activities, notes go to Notes and Attachments, and calls made from the Sales Navigator mobile app and Smart Links views are logged too. Each user writes back their own activity, instantly, to the matched Lead or Contact. Writeback to Accounts supports notes only.
• Update leads and contacts: reps can push updates to a CRM lead or contact from Sales Navigator in a few clicks.
• Contact Creation (optional, Advanced Plus): reps can create a Salesforce contact from a Sales Navigator lead page or list, tied to an account and optionally an opportunity and role. It passes first name, last name, mailing country, title, company, phone, lead source, and email where the member's settings allow.
• Data Validation (optional, Advanced Plus): adds a "Not at Company Flag" custom field to contacts and sets it when LinkedIn shows the person is no longer at that account's company. It runs every 24 hours and comes with LinkedIn reports such as open opportunities with a contact who has left, and past champions who have moved to new companies.

Inside Salesforce (embedded profile)

• LinkedIn profile and company details on the record, TeamLink connections, and related leads, so reps do not switch tabs.
• Reps can manually match or re-match a record to the right LinkedIn profile, and that match is shared across your contract.

What does not sync

• Existing Salesforce data is never overwritten or merged. Sync only appends new activities and notes, plus new contacts or the Not at Company flag if you turn those features on.
• LinkedIn company data is not pushed into your Account fields, and titles on existing records are not rewritten automatically. Data Validation flags a job change; a person still updates the record.
• Each LinkedIn profile links to a single CRM record, so intentional duplicates only get one match.
• Auto-saves are not removed when ownership changes.
• CRM Sync itself is not distributed through AppExchange; it connects directly through Salesforce APIs. The AppExchange package is the embedded profile app.
• Everything is LinkedIn data. TeamLink cannot see who on your team has actually met, emailed or worked with a contact, or which investors, customers and partners know them.

Where TeamLink stops

TeamLink answers one question: is this person a first-degree LinkedIn connection of someone on my team? That is useful, but in most revenue teams the strongest warm paths are not LinkedIn connections. They are the CSM who runs a customer's quarterly reviews, the executive who worked with the buyer at a previous company, the investor who sits on the buyer's board, or the partner who already sells into the account. None of those show up in TeamLink, and TeamLink does not tell you how well the teammate knows the person or who should make the ask.

Where Boomerang fits

Boomerang does not replace Sales Navigator; it covers the warm-introduction step that Sales Navigator and CRM Sync leave out. Its AI agent, Rudy, maps who your executives and employees, investors and board, customer champions and partners know at your target accounts, using 80+ relationship signals from systems you already have and public sources. Mailbox and LinkedIn connections are optional.

• On a live deal, Rudy proposes who should ask whom, scores the path, and drafts the ask. The rep approves, the relationship owner approves, and the connector reviews and sends from their own account. Rudy never sends anything.
• In Salesforce, Boomerang connects natively. It reads your accounts and opportunities, and writes relationship fields and intro outcomes back: the warm path, its strength, the connector, the relationship owner and the ask status, so the intro is tracked like any other pipeline activity. It does not update, enrich or clean your contact records; that stays with Sales Navigator and your own data tools.
• On triggers, such as a champion changing jobs into a target account or a deal going single-threaded, Rudy surfaces the path in Slack or in the CRM.

Armis created 26,000 warm-intro paths with Boomerang and saw 10x ROI on revenue booked in one year.

How the pieces fit

• Sales Navigator: find the right people and accounts. New to it? Start with how LinkedIn Sales Navigator works.
• Sales Navigator for Salesforce: see LinkedIn context in the CRM and log LinkedIn activity back to it.
• Boomerang: find who already knows the buyer across your whole company and network, and turn that into an approved warm introduction tracked to a meeting.

Not on Salesforce? The same setup guide exists for Sales Navigator and HubSpot and for Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 Sales, including what each CRM sync writes back.

Related reading

• Sales Navigator for HubSpot: how to sync LinkedIn into your CRM
• Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 Sales: setup and sync
• How LinkedIn Sales Navigator works
• Warm intro platforms that integrate with Salesforce
• TeamLink in Sales Navigator: turning connections into warm intros
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator alternatives (2026)
• Boomerang vs Sales Navigator

Want to see it on your own accounts? Book a walkthrough.

Related reading: The Anatomy of a Buying Committee: Buyers Missing from CRM