LinkedIn Sales Navigator CRM Sync: How It Actually Works

What CRM Sync actually does

I build LinkedIn and cold email sequences for B2B clients, and the CRM question almost always comes right after the "which plan do we buy" question: does Sales Navigator actually talk to what the team already runs in, or does a rep end up copying names between two tabs all day. CRM Sync is LinkedIn's answer to that. According to LinkedIn's own help page, it automatically imports the accounts and contacts tied to open opportunities in your CRM into Sales Navigator, so a rep sees the right leads without rebuilding a list by hand. It can also write back, saving InMails, messages, calls and notes created inside Sales Navigator onto the matching CRM record, and a team can turn that write-back off and keep the import one-directional if they'd rather not log that activity automatically.

That write-back is the part worth pausing on if your team is already running email and LinkedIn as one sequence, which is how I run outbound for clients: the value isn't which CRM holds the data, it's that activity from both channels lands on the same contact record instead of living in two systems a rep has to reconcile by hand.

Which plan you need

LinkedIn's own CRM Sync overview states plainly: "Integration between Sales Navigator and your CRM is only available for Sales Navigator Advanced Plus users." Core and Advanced, the two lower tiers, don't include it at all. Advanced Plus has no published list price; LinkedIn quotes it by team size, CRM and training needs, sold through its sales team rather than self-serve checkout, the same thing I cover in more depth in Sales Navigator Team vs Professional: what changed, which walks through all three current tiers and what each actually costs.

Which CRMs it supports

Per LinkedIn's own help page, CRM Sync supports four CRMs today: Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Oracle Sales. Independent documentation depth varies a lot between them. Salesforce and HubSpot both publish their own detailed setup guides; Dynamics 365's integration is documented by Microsoft directly; Oracle Sales gets the shortest mention and the least independent coverage of the four.

Two different things both called "Salesforce integration"

This is the part that actually trips people up, and it's worth naming directly rather than letting it stay fuzzy. Salesforce's own setup article describes a native widget integration: it adds Sales Navigator panels to lead, contact, opportunity and account page layouts, and lets a rep send an InMail or a connection request straight from a Salesforce record. Salesforce's page says this needs "a Sales Navigator Team or Enterprise license," using LinkedIn's pre-2023 plan names, and separately offers an optional toggle for "CRM Sync to synchronize lead and contact data between platforms" within that same setup flow.

LinkedIn's own CRM Sync overview, by contrast, is unambiguous that the full two-way data sync, the feature this article is about, is Advanced Plus only. The honest read: the lightweight widget and the InMail actions on a Salesforce record may work on a lower tier, but the account-and-contact import plus activity write-back that most teams mean when they say "Sales Navigator syncs to our CRM" is gated to Advanced Plus. If a vendor rep or an old setup guide tells you Advanced alone gets you full CRM Sync, that claim is worth checking against LinkedIn's current page before you buy on it, the same stale-terminology trap I flag in the Team vs Professional piece linked above.

Setting it up with Salesforce

Per Salesforce's own article, the setup has two parts, both done by a Salesforce admin:

1. In Salesforce Setup, search Quick Find for "LinkedIn Sales Navigator," open the integration's settings, and turn on Sales Navigator Integration. This is also where the optional CRM Sync toggle lives, to turn on the account and contact import.
2. Add the LinkedIn Sales Navigator components to the Lightning page layouts for leads, contacts, opportunities and accounts, so the panel and the InMail and connection-request actions actually show up for reps using the default layouts. Customized layouts need those actions added manually.

Salesforce's page notes this is the native integration, distinct from a separate AppExchange package LinkedIn also publishes; which route an org ends up on usually comes down to whichever one an admin found first.

Setting it up with HubSpot

Per HubSpot's own knowledge base, the HubSpot side needs Sales Hub Professional or Enterprise with assigned seats, a Sales Navigator Advanced Plus plan, and Super Admin or App Marketplace access to install it. The steps:

1. Open the HubSpot Marketplace and search for "LinkedIn CRM Sync."
2. Install the app and authorize the connection to your Sales Navigator account.
3. Choose which environment to sync, since HubSpot only supports one HubSpot account per sync.
4. Accept the requirements and start the sync.

HubSpot's documentation maps its own objects to LinkedIn's terms on the way in: Contacts become Leads, Companies become Accounts, and Deals become Opportunities. One behavior worth knowing before you flip it on: only new and updated records sync going forward, not your full historical HubSpot database, and HubSpot states that reaching back further than that requires uninstalling and reinstalling the integration rather than adjusting a setting.

Dynamics 365 and Oracle Sales

Dynamics 365's side is documented directly by Microsoft rather than by a third party, through its own Sales Navigator install guide in Microsoft Learn, and follows the same shape as Salesforce and HubSpot: an admin installs the integration from Microsoft AppSource, then turns on CRM Sync inside Sales Navigator's own Admin Settings under the CRM menu, pointed at the Dynamics 365 org. Oracle Sales is the thinnest of the four on documentation. LinkedIn's own help page confirms it as a supported CRM, but neither LinkedIn nor Oracle publishes the same level of step-by-step setup detail available for the other three, so an Oracle Sales admin is more likely to be working directly with LinkedIn support to get it configured.

What data moves, and which direction

The direction is configurable, not fixed. LinkedIn's own overview describes CRM Sync as importing accounts and contacts from the CRM into Sales Navigator automatically, with write-back as a separate, optional layer: a team can run the import without turning on activity write-back if they'd rather keep Sales Navigator activity out of the CRM timeline for now. Where write-back is on, InMails, messages, calls and notes created in Sales Navigator get logged as CRM activities on the matching record.

Neither LinkedIn's nor HubSpot's own documentation states a specific refresh interval beyond calling the import "automatic," so if you need a hard number on sync lag for a workflow you're designing, confirm it directly with your Sales Navigator admin or LinkedIn support rather than trusting a third-party estimate.

What CRM Sync doesn't do

A few limits worth knowing before a team builds a process around this. HubSpot's own documentation states that field mappings aren't customizable in its version: you get Contacts to Leads, Companies to Accounts and Deals to Opportunities as fixed mappings, not a configurable field editor. Turning the sync off entirely on the HubSpot side means uninstalling the app, not flipping a single setting. And per third-party implementation guides describing the HubSpot flow, each individual rep has to authenticate their own Sales Navigator account inside HubSpot separately after an admin turns the integration on; one admin connecting the org doesn't automatically connect every seat.

Is Advanced Plus worth it just for this

Advanced Plus has no list price, so there's no number to run a simple payback on the way there is with Core or Advanced. The decision in practice comes down to how much manual list-copying your team is actually doing today. If one or two people prospect and your CRM hygiene is already decent, the import side of CRM Sync saves relatively little, and the write-back mostly logs activity you could log by hand in a few minutes a day. If several reps are working the same CRM and someone is manually re-exporting Sales Navigator lists into it every week, the time that disappears is real, and worth weighing against whatever premium Advanced Plus carries over Advanced for your team size. I walk through the broader Core-vs-Advanced buying decision, including when a team doesn't need either upgrade yet, in is Sales Navigator worth it for a small business.

If you don't have Advanced Plus

Most teams asking this question are on Core or Advanced, not quoting Advanced Plus yet, which means no native CRM Sync at all. The honest fallback is manual: export leads and accounts from Sales Navigator and import the file into your CRM on whatever cadence the team can actually keep up with, logging InMails and connection activity by hand or through whatever lightweight tagging convention your team already uses. I cover the mechanics of that export step, including what Sales Navigator will and won't let you pull out in a CSV, in how to export Sales Navigator leads to CSV. Several third-party connectors also claim to bridge Sales Navigator and a CRM without Advanced Plus; I haven't tested any of them for this piece, so I'm not naming one here rather than vouching for a workflow I haven't verified myself.

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