Sales Navigator Search Filters: The Ultimate Guide [2023]

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 in just a few clicks. Once you know how to use search filters, it’s only a matter of time before you start generating dozens of meetings thanks to linkedin prospecting.

In this article, we cover everything you need to know about Linkedin Sales Navigator advanced search and more…

Let’s dive right in.

How To Use Linkedin Sales Navigator Search Filters To Find Leads?

There are 20 filters on Sales Navigator to find leads:

1. Company headcount
2. Current & Past Company
3. Company Type
4. Company headquarters
5. Function
6. Job Title
7. Seniority Level
8. Year in Current Company Or Position
9. Spotlights
10. Posted Content
11. Connection
12. Geography
13. Industry
14. Year of experience
15. Connection Of
16. Groups
17. First Name and Last Name
18. Profile Language
19. Teamlink connections of
20. School

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 2 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 & Past Company

This filter allows you to look for people working or who used to work in specific companies.

You can also combine these 2 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 but the location of their company.

5. 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.

6. Function

Linkedin use an algorithm to guess the function of people based on their job titles. We recommend to not 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.

7. Seniority Level

Same thing here, Linkedin use 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.

8. Year In Current Company Or Position

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

9. Spotlights

There are 4 spotlights filters:

1. Changed Job in the past 90 days
2. Mentioned in the news in the last 30 days
3. Posted on Linkedin in last 30
4. Have shared experience with you
5. Following your company
6. Teamlink Intro

All of these offers great icebreakers ideas for your Linkedin prospecting messages.

You can mention…

• the job change
• a news
• a linkedin post
• a shared experience
• a common connection

… to personalize your message to this audience and increase your reply rate.

10. Posted Content

This filter allows you to target people who used a specific keyword in a linkedin posts or a linkedin article they recently published.

That way, you can use the content they publish as an icebreaker and mention it into your linkedin outreach messages to dramatically improve your reply rate.

People love to be complimented on the content they write.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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:

14. Year of experience

If you target people who change companies often (like freelancers, cooks, or waiters) this filter can be useful to target people with a lot of experience in one field, even though they can company regularly.

15. Connections of

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

16. 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.

17. First Name & Last Name

Target people based on their names. Not so useful expect if you want to contact all the Johns on earth.

18. 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

19. Teamlink Connection Of

Linkedin teamlink is Sales Navigator Advanced (previously named Team) feature that allows you to have access to all the network of your teammates (1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections)

If you have a Sales Navigator Advanced account, this filter helps you easily search into the connections of your teammates.

20. 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.

---

Now that we covered how to use the lead search filters. Let’s get to the account search filters.

How To Linkedin Sales Navigator Search Filters To Find Accounts?

There are 13 filters on Sales Navigator to find accounts:

1. Annual Revenue
2. Company Headcount
3. Company Headcount Growth
4. Headquarter Location
5. Industry
6. Number of followers
7. Department Headcount
8. Department Headcount Growth
9. Fortune
10. Technologies Used
11. Job Opportunities
12. Recent Leaderships Changes
13. Funding Event

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 selected companies with at least 100 followers. That’s 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 un details in the 3rd part of this video

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

11. Job Opportunities

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.

12. Recent Leaderships Changes

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 see recent changes in their top management and even identify the decision maker who just arrived.

13. Funding Event

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.

5 Sales Navigator Advanced Search Filters Pro Tips

5 pro-tips to master Sales Navigator search filters:

1. Use boolean search
2. Use saved searches
3. Use blacklists
4. Do account based searches
5. Build account lists via CSV upload

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 gets 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. Do account based searches

Here is 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.

---

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. Build accounts list via CSV upload

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