How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Lead Generation

Introduction

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a really helpful tool when you’re trying to find potential customers on LinkedIn.

It’s packed with many cool features and tools that make finding, organizing, and reaching out to leads much more efficient.

The app is essentially divided into four main areas: Advanced Search, Lead Lists, Account Lists, and Messaging.

Sales Navigator’s powerful advanced search filters allow you to find people and companies with pinpoint accuracy.

Once you have found some potential leads, you can save and organize them into lists for easy access later.

When you are ready to move, you can reach out to leads directly through messages and InMails.

You can set up alerts to notify you whenever something unexpected or interesting happens with one of your leads. It’s like having your own personal assistant keeping an eye on things for you.

In this article, I will walk you through all the key features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and explain how they all work together.

At the end of it, you will see how this tool can help you attract thousands of ideal customers for your business.

Lead Recommendations for Locating New Leads

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Lead Recommendations is a useful feature to help you find new leads.

It analyzes your LinkedIn activity, including the profiles you visit, the leads you save, and your search history.

Based on this information, it provides you with personalized suggestions for new leads.

Anyone with a Sales Navigator account can use this feature, regardless of whether they are on the Core, Advanced, or Advanced Plus plan.

If you’ve saved a specific company to your account, you can receive lead recommendations for that company.

Lead recommendations can also be found on individual profiles, making it easier to identify potential leads. If you run out of leads, you can adjust your sales preferences to receive a new list of suggestions.

Another useful feature is the Recommended Leads list, which is updated weekly and can include up to 100 potential leads.

This provides an excellent way to discover new leads based on your past activities and the signals from potential buyers.

Advanced Lead and Company Search to Boost Lead Search Efforts

LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers a variety of advanced search filters to enhance your lead generation efforts.

These filters allow you to refine your search and find prospects who match your specific criteria, increasing the effectiveness of your outreach.

Using these powerful filters, you can narrow your search based on crucial factors such as company headcount, company type, headquarters location, job function, seniority level, and geographic region.

This level of customization enables you to identify and connect with individuals who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

For example, if you are targeting senior sales leaders in start-up companies located in North America, you can apply filters to find these prospects accurately.

This targeted approach helps you focus your efforts on the most relevant leads, saving you time and increasing your chances of success.

Moreover, the ability to exclude specific job titles or regions from your search further refines your results, ensuring that you obtain highly qualified leads tailored to your particular requirements.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides advanced search filters that can enhance your lead generation strategy with a powerful tool at your disposal.

You can effectively leverage filters to streamline your prospecting process and connect with the right people. This ultimately increases your chances of building valuable business relationships.

Here are two lists of all the search filters available for people and companies.

Lead Filters for an Efficient & Effective Hot Lead Search

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Lead Filters can help you make your search for potential leads more efficient and effective.

Using lead filters, you can narrow your search to find hyper-qualified individuals based on specific criteria.

Instead of scrolling through a mix of tens of thousands of qualified and unqualified leads, you can focus your search and obtain a list of just a few hundred people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Lead filters provide different options to fine-tune your search and easily reach the right people, from company size and job function to past roles and group memberships.

Below is a list of lead filters and some tips for finding your ideal customers on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Company size: This filter allows you to target leads based on the size of their company. For instance, if you’re selling a solution that caters to small businesses, you can utilize this filter to target companies with less than 50 employees.
Company type: This filter enables you to target leads based on the kind of company they work for. For instance, if you offer non-profit consulting services, you can set this filter to only display leads from non-profit organizations.
Company (Past / Current): You can use this filter to find leads who have worked at a specific company. For example, you could use it to find people who used to work for your competitor’s company.
Exclude contacted, saved, or viewed leads: Use these filters to avoid redundancy in your prospecting. For instance, if you’re looking for new leads, apply these filters to exclude those you’ve already contacted, saved, or viewed.
First name, Last name: Use these instructions to locate a specific individual.
Function: This filter helps find leads based on their job function. For example, if you are selling HR software, you may target leads who work in HR.
Group membership: This filter can help you find leads who are members of specific LinkedIn groups. For example, you can use it to find members of groups related to your industry.
Industry: This feature enables you to discover leads within a specific industry. For example, if you sell construction equipment, you can use it to identify leads in the construction industry.
Leads following your company: Use this filter to find leads already interested in your company. These individuals have indicated their interest by following your company’s LinkedIn page.
Leads mentioned in the news, with recent job changes, recent LinkedIn activity, and shared experiences/commonalities: These filters can help you find active or high-profile leads. For example, you could use these filters to find leads who have recently been promoted or who have been mentioned in news articles.
Location by region/state, postal code radius: These filters enable you to target leads in specific geographical areas. This could be helpful if you offer a product or service that is only available in certain regions.
Posted content keyword: This feature allows you to find leads based on their posted content on LinkedIn. For example, if you sell cybersecurity software, you can use this to find leads who have posted about cybersecurity issues.
Profile language: This feature helps you find leads who speak a specific language. For example, if your business operates primarily in French, you can use this to find French-speaking leads.
Relationship: Use this filter to identify leads according to their degree of connection to you. This can help you take advantage of your existing network.
School: This filter can be useful for finding alumni from a particular school, creating an immediate connection.
Search within my accounts: This allows you to find leads within companies that you already have in your accounts.
Seniority level: Use this filter to find leads at a specific level within their organization. If you’re selling a product that C-level executives typically purchase, you might use this to find CEOs, CFOs, and other high-level decision-makers.
TeamLink connections: This filter can help you find leads connected to your team members.
Title: Use this to find leads with a specific current or past job title. For example, if you’re selling a product for project managers, you might use this to find leads with ‘project manager’ in their job titles.
Years at current company, in current position, of experience: These filters allow you to identify leads based on their tenure or experience. For example, if your product is most useful for experienced professionals, you can use these filters to find leads with more than 10 years of experience.

Account Filters to Discover the Right Company Types and Sizes

Just as LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Lead Filters help you find the right individuals, the Account Filters help you find the right companies.

Here’s a rundown of the Account Filters and how to use them to find your ideal customers on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Company headcount growth, Department headcount growth: These filters can help you find companies or departments that have experienced rapid growth. For instance, you can use them to identify companies that have increased their headcount by over 20% in the past year.
Company revenue, Company size, and Department size: Use these filters to target companies or departments of a specific size. For instance, if your product is aimed at large enterprises, you might use these filters to find companies with over $1 billion in revenue.
Fortune (listed on Fortune 50/100/500): Use this filter to find companies in the Fortune rankings.
Headquarters location (by region/state, postal code): These filters enable you to locate companies based on their location. This could be useful if you offer a product or service that is only available in certain areas.
Hiring on LinkedIn: This filter can help you find companies that are currently hiring on LinkedIn. This could indicate that they are growing and might need your product or service.
Industry: Use this to target companies in a specific sector.
Job opportunities: This filter helps you identify companies with open positions. This can indicate that they are expanding and potentially need more of your products or services.
Number of followers: Use this filter to find companies with a large LinkedIn following. This may indicate their influence and reputation in the market.
Recent senior leadership changes: This filter can be used to find companies that have recently changed their senior leadership. Such companies may be more receptive to new ideas or services.

Boolean Searches in LinkedIn Sales Navigator - How They Work

You can make your already super powerful advanced leads and account filters even more powerful by combining keywords with operators like AND, NOT, and OR during your search.

Here is a summary of how each Boolean filter works in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, along with specific examples:

Quoted Searches: To search for an exact phrase, you should include the phrase in quotation marks. For example, if you type “sales manager” the search will return profiles matching this phrase in that specific order. If you search for sales manager without quotes, the search engine might interpret it as looking for any profiles that contain both “sales” and “manager” anywhere in the profile, not necessarily as a single phrase. For example, it might return profiles with job titles like “Sales Analyst and Team Manager” or “Manager with Sales Experience.” Note that Sales Navigator only supports standard, straight quotation marks (“).
NOT Searches: Use the NOT operator to exclude a specific term from your search results. For example, if you search for “sales NOT manager”, the results will include profiles that mention “sales” but not “manager”.
OR Searches: The OR operator allows you to broaden your search results by including any of a list of terms. For example, the search query “sales OR marketing OR advertising” will return profiles that mention any of these three terms.
AND Searches: The AND operator narrows your search results to only include profiles that mention all the listed terms. For example, “accountant AND finance AND CPA” will return profiles mentioning all three words. Sales Navigator will automatically use AND if your search has two or more terms without an operator.
Parenthetical Searches: You can combine terms using parentheses to perform complex searches. For example, “(VP NOT (assistant OR SVP))” will return profiles that mention “VP” but not “assistant to VP” or “SVP”.

Searches will be processed first according to what is inside the quotation marks, then according to what is inside parentheses, then NOT, AND, and finally OR.

A few important things to note:

The + and - operators are not supported. Use AND in place of + and NOT in place of -.
When using NOT, AND, or OR operators, you must type them in uppercase letters.
Wildcard * searches are not supported.

Saving Searches to Surface Future New Prospects

After applying filters and obtaining the desired results, you can save the search for future reference.

This feature is incredibly useful as it saves you time and effort by eliminating the need to apply the same filters each time you want to perform the same search.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator will even notify you if new prospects that fit your criteria appear in the future.

This way, you can stay updated on potential leads without constantly performing manual searches.

In addition to saving specific searches, you can share these lead searches directly with your colleagues in Sales Navigator.

This feature is particularly useful for those who search for leads independently or collaborate with a team.

Sales leaders can create precise search filters to identify the companies and individual roles they are looking for.

Sharing saved searches helps sales reps save time and makes it easier to connect with new leads without worrying about who to target.

Team leaders can constantly fine-tune, adjust, and create new search criteria and sync them with their entire team.

Organizing Leads into Lists to support your sales workflow

LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to create a list of leads by saving individual leads and accounts to specific lists, either manually or by selecting multiple leads simultaneously.

This feature helps you organize your leads into different categories or groups and refine your list by removing leads that do not meet your criteria using the exclude feature.

Lists are a great way to keep track of leads and accounts, organize your workflow, and interact with new and existing clients.

Saved Lists

Here are a few examples of lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

Saved Leads – All saved leads from all of your custom lead lists combined.
Saved Accounts – All saved accounts from all of your custom account lists combined.
Custom Lists – Here, you can view individual lists of leads and accounts that you created.
Shared Lists – Custom lists shared with you, which you can copy and save to track your lead and account lists and collaborate with other users.
My CRM Leads and Contacts – Contacts will be imported from your CRM to Sales Navigator if there is a match between the two.
My CRM Accounts - Accounts are imported from your CRM to Sales Navigator if there’s a match between them.

Generated Lists

Sales Navigator will automatically generate several lists based on your company profile and search criteria.

Recommended Leads – LinkedIn generates up to 100 recommended leads based on your past activity and buyer intent signals that you may not have found otherwise.
New Executives in Saved Accounts – Executives in your saved accounts who have joined a new company in the past 3 months. This list is refreshed every week.
Recently Accepted Connections and InMails – Warm leads to follow up with who accepted your connection request or responded to your message in the last 30 days. This list is refreshed daily.

Account Hub to prioritize and manage your accounts

The Account Hub is the ultimate resource for prioritizing and managing your accounts.

It hosts all your account lists and provides easy access to all the necessary information, streamlining and improving the account management process.

Understanding Economic Changes: The Account Hub informs sellers of important changes and updates in their target accounts. This helps sellers stay up-to-date with current economic trends and make quick decisions.
Discovering New Connections: Intelligent recommendations based on buyer intent and relationship intelligence indicators (such as InMail acceptance and decision-maker hires), help sellers identify new potential paths to reach out. The Connection Paths feature also provides insight into first-degree, second-degree, and TeamLink connections at an account, helping sellers broaden their network.
Prioritizing High Buyer Intent Accounts: Buyer intent is measured by looking at how often employees interact with the seller’s company, if they accept InMail, how much they engage with ads, and how much they interact with the company’s page.
Managing Account Lists Efficiently: The Account Hub simplifies switching between different account lists and personalizes the experience by focusing on the most relevant accounts. Sellers can manage their account lists by uploading them or using the search function to find relevant accounts.

Account Page Overview

Account maps

Understanding the hierarchy and key players within a company is crucial for successful sales.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s account map feature provides a visual structure of this hierarchy, identifying decision-makers, champions, and influencers crucial to potential deals.

Users can add people to this digital board, assigning them to different levels (1-3) according to their roles and influence.

Account maps also provide relevant recommendations for leads within the same company.

This tool is extremely valuable for strategic outreach and engagement, as it helps maximize sales efforts.

Relationship Explorer

Relationship Explorer analyzes data from LinkedIn’s professional network to suggest potential prospects for a target account, including interactions, trends, and other information.

The goal is to help sellers connect with their ideal customers on their target accounts.

Sales Navigator displays up to eight of the most relevant leads for a chosen target persona.

This makes it easy to find the right buyer based on target personas, gain insight into why these leads are the right contacts, determine the next steps with each lead, and filter the results to focus on the best lead at the account.

Insights

This feature provides insights such as employee count, distribution, and headcount, new hires, and job openings to help identify growth opportunities and account risks.

Alerts

In this section, you can view alerts and account information in one place.

Users can filter alerts by Account growth, New decision-makers, or Account News, and suggested action buttons provide the next steps.

These alerts are visible to all users, even if they haven’t saved an account.

Lead Page Overview

This is the Sales Navigator version of the LinkedIn Profile View. While both platforms retrieve their information from the same database, they display it in a slightly different layout.

In addition to the features available on vanilla LinkedIn, Sales Navigator offers a couple of additional features on this page.

Summary

Person Summary: Quickly scan the headline, current and previous roles, locations, connections, and your activity with them.

**Person Summary:**Quickly scan the headline, current and previous roles, locations, connections, and your activity with them.
**Save:**Save a person as a lead to receive updates on your Sales Navigator homepage as they change roles, post on LinkedIn, or appear in the news.
**Contact information:**This includes contact details from the lead’s profile, any available information from your CRM, and any manually added contact details. These contact details are visible to all teammates within a Sales Navigator contract.
**Activity:**Activities, including messages and notes.
**Notes:**Take notes during meetings and calls and track action items, progress, takeaways, and next steps. You can easily copy your notes to your CRM by clicking on the “Copy to CRM” link.
**Tags:**Apply tags to group leads in a way that works for you. You can group them by priority, role in the buying committee, flags for follow-up, or any other method that suits your needs.

Highlights

Quickly learn what you have in common, such as mutual connections and lead activity on LinkedIn.

Commonalities: Personalize conversations by scanning for shared groups, companies, schools, and connections.
Shared Connections: Use TeamLink or personal/professional contacts to find a shared connection.
Recent Activity: View a lead’s activity and interests on LinkedIn, including posts, likes, and comments.

Relationships

This section displays information on the lead’s recent activity and common interests.

When contacting the lead, you can use this information as an effective conversation starter.

It provides enough information to make cold outreach more personal.

Get introduced

This section displays all mutual connections between you and the lead, such as TeamLink, shared, or shared education connections.

You can filter the information in this section by Teamlink connections, shared connections, and groups.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

If you have additional information about the lead in your CRM, you’ll see details such as the CRM name, associated accounts, and related opportunities.

This view is only available in Sales Navigator Advanced Plus with CRM Sync enabled.

Experience Account insights

This section provides visibility into employee growth and lets you easily view similar leads to those you currently view. This can help with multi-threading into one account.

You can directly access the account map that includes the lead you are viewing, or you can view more leads at the same company as the lead you are viewing.

These insights are only available with the Sales Navigator Advanced and Advanced Plus editions.

Another Inbox for LinkedIn Messaging

Sales Navigator Inbox

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has a separate inbox for InMails and messages sent within the platform.

This can be a great way to manage your professional communications separately from your personal LinkedIn messages.

However, it’s important to note that messages sent on Sales Navigator don’t sync with those sent on the core LinkedIn platform.

This means that you will need to manage your Sales Navigator inbox separately, but it also ensures that your professional messages do not get lost in your personal LinkedIn communications.

InMails

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s InMail feature allows users to send direct messages to any LinkedIn member, making it a valuable tool for lead generation.

Users receive 50 InMail monthly credits and can earn them back if the recipient responds within 90 days.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides sales professionals with the Social Selling Index (SSI), which measures their performance in four key areas: establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships.

Users can track their SSI over time and compare themselves to industry peers and their own network to improve their LinkedIn activity for lead generation.

Smart links

Smart Links in LinkedIn Sales Navigator allow you to host and link to assets like case studies, brochures, and demo videos and track who visits them without requiring visitors to fill out a form.

Smart Links have replaced PointDrive landing pages and provide a simplified version with better tracking capabilities.

This feature is available to customers of Sales Navigator Advanced Plus and Advanced Edition.

CRM Integration

The Sales Navigator CRM feature lets you sync your leads and accounts with your internal CRM software.

You must have Sales Navigator Advanced or Advanced Plus to use the embedded profile. To use CRM sync, you need Advanced Plus.

Enabling synchronization between your CRM and Sales Navigator allows you to import accounts and contacts and write back select data from Sales Navigator to your CRM.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has certified integrations with several CRMs, including Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce.

Conclusion

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool for lead generation that offers a variety of features and filters to help you find, organize, and reach out to potential customers.

From advanced search filters to lead recommendations and account hubs, Sales Navigator provides everything you need to make your lead generation efforts more efficient and effective.

This tool can help you save time and effort, reach out more strategically, and attract many ideal customers for your business.

If you are looking to grow your business and find new customers, you might want to consider giving Sales Navigator a try.

Many people say it is one of the best tools for finding leads, and with its many features and benefits, it is easy to see why.