LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Search Filters Tutorial

LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers 30+ search filters to find leads and accounts.

LinkedIn Basic search only offers 18 filters.

Sales Navigator is by far the best tool to find potential customers and ideal candidates in just a few clicks.

In this article, we cover everything you need to know about how to get the most out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and more…

Let’s dive right in.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Search Filters

There are 6 types of lead filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Keyword Filter
2. Company Filters
3. Role Filters
4. Spotlight Filters
5. Personal Filers
6. Workflow Filters

1. Keyword Filter

The keyword filter is located on the top of your Sales Navigator search results.

The keyword filter will look into the whole profile of LinkedIn members meaning:

• Headline
• Job title
• About
• Skills
• Schools
• Recommendations
• and more…

It means you should be cautious when you use this filter.

Let’s take a dumb example:

Imagine you write “sales” in the keyword filter.

If someone writes “I hate sales” in its About section, then this person will be picked by the filter.

2. Company Filters

4 company filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Company Headcount
2. Current
3. Past Company
4. Company Type
5. Company Headquarter

1. Company Headcount

This filter help you build a leads list of people working in companies of a certain size.

Be aware that his filter takes into account the manual input of companies on their company page and not the real number of employees declared on LinkedIn.

These two numbers can be different if the company forgets to update it as it grows.

Make sure to double-check your lead lists to see if the 2 numbers match.

Plus the LinkedIn count will only matter if a majority of employees are on LinkedIn.

Let’s say you are looking for Construction companies, a large part of the employees won’t necessarily be on LinkedIn.

Better not trust the LinkedIn count for non-digital companies.

2. Current Company

This filter allows you to look for people working in specific companies.

3. Past Company

The Past Company filters allow you to target people who used to work at a Company.

You can also combine Current Company and Past Company filters to look for alumni of a company into another company.

For example people who used to work at Apple and now work at Microsoft.

4. Company Type

This filter allows you to filter companies based on their type.

Most of you will obviously target Privately Held companies but some of you might be interested in other types.

5. Company Headquarters

This filter allows you to target people who work for a company that is based on a specific country, region, or city.

Here you are not targeting the location of your leads or candidates but the location of their company.

2. Role Filters

6 role filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Current job title
2. Past job title
3. Function
4. Seniority level
5. Years in current company
6. Years in current position

1. Current job title

The job title filter will look into all the current experiences of your prospects.

When you use the job title filter, LinkedIn will search within all the job experiences marked as “Present“

The thing is, many people forget to correctly update their job position when they change jobs.

They create a new experience, but they don’t close the previous one, which is still marked as present.

With this “multiple current experience problem” going on LinkedIn, you might see unqualified leads in your search even you enter the right job titles.

Hopefully for you, Evaboot takes care of this problem by automatically double-checking your search results when you extract them.

2. Past job title

The Past job title filter works exactly the same way but will only look in the job experiences that are not marked “Present”.

3. Function

LinkedIn uses an algorithm to guess the function of people based on their job titles.

We recommend not to use this filter as it’s not reliable.

LinkedIn creates a Function for every opened job position on your leads’ profile.

Here you can see that this person with 3 current experiences has 3 functions:

• Marketing
• Business Development
• Education

This creates a lot of confusion and can lead you to add unqualified leads in your search results.

4. Seniority Level

Same thing here, LinkedIn uses an algorithm to guess the seniority levels of your leads based on their job titles and other information. We recommend not to use it.

LinkedIn will create a Seniority Level for every current experience on your profile.

So if you have 4 opened experience, you will have 4 different Seniority Level attached to your profile.

You can see in this example that a CEO can be considered as in intern.

That is why If you know exactly which job title you want to target, our advice is to not use this filter.

After all, if you know the job titles you want to target, you don’t need this filter.

5. Year in current company

This filter can be useful if you want to target:

• Heads of who just getting started in their new companies and might be open to use new services or product (using the less than 1 year filter).
  
• Targeting entrepreneurs who launch their company from enough time to have the budget to pay you.

5. Year In current position

The “Year in current position” works exactly the same way but take as input the time in the current job position.

3. Spotlights

9 leads spotlight filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Changed Job in the past 90 days
2. Mentioned in the news in the last 30 days
3. Posted on LinkedIn in 30 days
4. Following your company
5. Have shared experience with you
6. With Teamlink Intro
7. Past colleague
8. Viewed your profile in the last 90 days

1. Changed Job in the past 90 days

This filter allows targeting people who recently took a new position.

This is useful if you want to target decision-makers who just arrived in their companies.

They usually want to implement new things so they are more likely to buy new products or services.

2. Mentioned in the news in the last 30 days

This filter gives you excellent icebreakers ideas for your messages and follow-ups on LinkedIn.

You can mention the news displayed on LinkedIn to craft super-personalized messages.

3. Posted on LinkedIn in 30 days

Same thing here. LinkedIn post are a great way to break the ice with someone.

What you can in that case:

1. Like the post
2. Leave a comment
3. Send a message mentioning the post

You are sure to get a good reply rate with this technique.

4. Following your company

People following your companies are already interested in what you are doing.

They are often an unnoticed source of qualified leads.

Take the time to launch this campaign from time to time.

5. Have shared experience with you

Shared experience can be jobs, schools or volunteering.

It’s also a great way to break the ice with someone.

6. With Teamlink Intro

LinkedIn Teamlink is a Sales Navigator Advanced feature.

It allows you to connect to see which member of your Sales Navigator team could introduce you to your target.

This feature basically gives you access to all the network of your team members.

8. Past colleague

You got it. This feature identifies all the person that used to work with you.

Meaning, you worked in the same companies during the same periods.

9. Viewed your profile in the last 90 days

People who visited your profile obviously had interest or curiosity for what you do at one point.

You can reach out to them to find out why.

Maybe don’t mention that they visited your profile because that could freak some people out.

Find another icebreaker in that case.

3. Personal Filters

11 personal filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Connections
2. Geography
3. Industry
4. Years of experience
5. Connections of
6. Groups
7. First name
8. Last name
9. Profile language
10. Teamlink connections of
11. School

1. Connections

This filter allows you to filter your lead list based on their degree of connections with you.

If you are doing LinkedIn lead generation, you obviously want to select 2nd and 3rd degree connection because you want to contact people you are not connected with yet.

2. Geography

This filter allows you to target your leads based on their own location (not the location of their company).

Concretely, you will target people based on the location they indicate here.

3. Industry

This filter allows you to filter leads based on the industry they have selected on their profile, not the industry of their company.

A lot of people thinks this filter look at the industry of the lead’s company, but it finds the info here:

4. Year of experience

If you target people who change companies often (such as freelancers, cooks, or waiters), this filter can be useful for targeting individuals with extensive experience in one field, even if they change companies regularly.

5. Connections of

This filter allows you to target all the common connections you have with people in your first degree connections.

6. Groups

This filter allows you to target people who are members of specific groups.

This is interesting to do interested-based targeting. You can for example target all the members of a group and mention the fact they are part of this group in your prospecting messages.

7. First Name

Target people based on their names.

Not so useful, except you want to contact all the Johns on Earth.

8. Last Name

Target people based on their last names.

Same thing. Not so useful except if you want to find all Rothschild’s on LinkedIn.

9. Profile Language

This filter allows you to target people based on the primary language of their LinkedIn profile.

Use this filter with caution because many people select English as their primary language even if they speak another language.

10. Connection Of

This feature will display all the connections you have in common with someone.

You can leverage that to get warm introductions to people you just added to your network.

11. School

Looking to network with your alumni or recruit people from the best schools in your country?

The School filter is perfect for that need.

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Now that we covered how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator lead search filters.

Let’s get to the account search filters.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Accounts Search Filters

There are 4 types of account filters on Sales Navigator to find accounts:

1. Keyword Filter
2. Company Attributes Filters
3. Spotlights Filters
4. Workflow Filters

1. Keyword Filter

You can find the account keyword filter on top of your account search results.

The keyword filter will look into Overview and Specialties fields:

2. Company Attributes Filters

10 company attributes filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Annual revenue
2. Company headcount
3. Company headcount growth
4. Headquarters location
5. Industry
6. Number of followers
7. Department headcount
8. Department headcount growth
9. Fortune
10. Technologies used

1. Annual Revenue

This filter allows you to filter accounts based on the estimation of their annual revenue given by LinkedIn. For that they use:

• Information from the web
• Extrapolations from LinkedIn data

This is not always reliable.

For example, Lemlist publicly announced they reached 10M$ ARR and LinkedIn classify them between 2.5 and 5M$ revenue.

2. Company Headcount

Like on the lead search, you can filter companies based on the number of people working in it.

3. Company Headcount Growth

This filter is super useful to find growing companies in good health. You can, for example, target companies that grew at least 10% over the last year.

Remember that this growth is calculated on the headcount, not the revenue.

To be really precise, the number is taken from here:

4. Headquarter Location

This filter allows you to target companies based on the location of their headquarters.

5. Industry

This filter allows you to target accounts based on the industry they have selected on their company page.

You can see this info here:

6. Number of Followers

This filter allows you to filter companies based on their numbers of followers.

The only use I can see for this one is to only select companies with at least 100 followers. That can be a sign that they have a legit business. Company pages with more than 100 followers might be managed by people without the budget to pay you.

7. Department Headcount

If you sell a product or a service that target specific departments in companies like Accounting, Sales, Engineering, this filter is super useful.

For example, you can use it to target companies with at least 5 salespeople in their Sales team.

8. Department Headcount Growth

Same thing as Headcount Growth, you can detect if a specific department is growing quickly inside a company.

9. Fortune

Easily find Fortune 500 companies with this filter.

10. Technologies Used

This filter is a good idea but it doesn’t work.

There is absolutely no information on LinkedIn’s documentation about how they find technologies used by companies.

It makes it really hard to trust them on this.

If I use What’s Run which is a reliable plugin to find technologies used on a website, it doesn’t mention Webflow on the website to detect.

You want to target companies based on which technology they used?

It is much better to use services that have been built especially for that, like Wappalyzer or BuiltWith.

You can see the process and details in the 3rd part of this video

This example is about finding ecommerce business using Shopify, but you can apply this technique to any technology.

2. Spotlight Filters

3 accounts Spotlights filters on Sales Navigator:

1. Hiring on LinkedIn
2. Recent activities
3. Connection

1. Hiring on LinkedIn

This filter is also a good way to detect if a company is growing. If a company is hiring, it means that it’s in a good health and can have the budget to pay you.

This filter will show you all the companies that have at least of job offer posted on LinkedIn Jobs.

2. Recent Activities

The arrival of new senior executive in a company is a great timing to propose your product or your service. Indeed, newcomers like to implement their ideas and try new things.

With this filter, you can easily identify which companies have seen recent changes in their top management and even identify the decision-maker who just arrived.

When a company raises fund, it means it’s about to burn cash. Better burning cash on your product or service?

LinkedIn identify companies raising funds by scanning the web. Every time they find an article talking about a fundraising, they add it into the list and give you the link to the article.

You can use these articles as icebreakers by sending them to your prospects, congratulating them on the fundraising.

3. Connections

This filter allows knowing in which companies you have first degree connections in.

This filter can be useful if you are looking for ways to make contact with an account or get warm introductions.

Advanced Techniques for Sales Navigator Search

5 pro-tips to master Sales Navigator advanced search filters:

1. Use Boolean search
2. Use saved searches
3. Use blacklists
4. Use account-based searches
5. Upload CSV files
6. Use Evaboot to find emails

1. Use Boolean search

Sales Navigator Boolean search is really simple programmatic language to make your searches much more precise.

It works with a combination of logical connectors and punctuation:

• AND
• OR
• NOT
• Parentheses
• Quotes

It has a strange name but it’s really simple. I explain everything in this video:

2. Use saved searches

The Save Search feature allows you to get notified when new people match your search results.

It is a great way to identify new opportunities and get in contact with people as soon as they get into their new position.

If you click on the New, you will get access to the list of leads that recently matched your search filters.

To save a search, it’s really simple.

Just click on “Save Search” on the top right of the search interface.

3. Use account-based searches

Here’s how to find decision-makers within an account list using Sales Navigator:

1. Go to the lead search:
2. Go to Workflow
3. Open the filter Account List
4. Select your account list

Once you have selected your account list, all the people working at these companies will appear in the search results.

Your job is now to add filters to get the right decision-makers. Obviously, the job title filter is a great way to do that.

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Congrats, you have found the right decision-makers inside the companies of your account lists in just 2 clicks.

4. Use blacklists

When you are doing LinkedIn outreach, you want to make sure that you won’t contact your past or current clients and your competitors.

To do that:

• Look for your clients and competitors
• Add them into an account list

Then, when you are on the lead search:

• Go to Workflow
• Select the blacklist
• Click on Exclude

All the people working in the companies inside your account list will be excluded.

5. Upload CSV files

If you’re using other sources of data than LinkedIn to identify accounts, this feature can really change your life.

Account upload allow importing CSV with account information, so LinkedIn can try to find these account into its database.

Here is a video tutorial:

This process can automate Account list building and allow to identify decision-makers inside companies you have scraped on:

• Google
• Crunchbase
• Madyness
• Job boards

If you can get the LinkedIn URL of the company page for every account, the match rate will be 100%!

6. Use Evaboot to find emails

Once you have your lead list or lead search ready, you might want to find their emails to start sending prospecting them.

This process is super simple with Evaboot.

Here is a video tutorial: