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Advanced tips & tricks

Advanced tips & tricks

So far what we've seen is pretty standard usage. Let's now see how to get the most out of Linkedin Sales Navigator: the advanced stuff, the best practices, the real deal!

Master those and you will be prospecting on sales navigator very effectively.

Using lists effectively

Lists are really helpful to segment your data so you should be using them all the time. With effective lists built, your leads & accounts searches will become much easier because you will be able to leverage the "Leads lists" & "Accounts lists" filters we've seen above to create highly relevant searches.

One trick is to use lists to build other lists: you start by building one broad list and then use that list as a filter + some additional filters to narrow it down. At the end of the process you end up with multiple nicely-segmented lists you can work with + master lists if needed to easily create new segments.

Leveraging saved searches

Saving a search is a very underrated tactic on Sales Navigator. If you configured your Sales Navigator right as described above, it means you will receive a notification whenever a new lead/account is added to one of your saved searches. And that's your opportunity!

The goal will be to save searches that have events where timing is important so that you can be notified and act on them instantly.

For example :

  • on a lead search: save a search with the filter "Changed jobs in the last 90 days" (and your other filters) and you'll find out right away when say, a new hire is on your target role.
  • on an account search: the "Funding event in the past 12 months" filter can be a bit outdated... but if you save the search, you'll get notified instantly of that funding event

Understanding the filtering system

To get the most out of Sales Navigator you need to really understand how each part works otherwise you will get unexpected results.

For example, do you know where the "keyword" filter is looking the keyword for?

You must assume it's looking at the profile headline + description, maybe the job description?

But the correct answer is it's looking for the keyword everywhere in the profile. Including in past experiences, education, etc. that are in most cases irrelevant to your prospecting effort.

Quick tip: if you're using Findymail to extract your Sales Navigator results, you will have an additional column "keyword_match" telling you if yes or no the lead actually matches your keyword filter in the profile description + job description. This can help you quickly clean your results.

Create an account list via CSV upload

Do you have a list of accounts from somewhere else (maybe your CRM) and want to use it in Sales Navigator?

Say no more, if you have it as a CSV file you can upload directly as an account list to use it directly in Sales Navigator. Follow the guide :

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Importing an account list from CSV upload. (Image source: abundsocial)

  1. Click Accounts at the top of the page.
  2. Click the Account lists tab.
  3. Click Create account list and select Upload accounts from CSV from the dropdown that appears.
  4. Add your CSV to the Upload account list window, then Map the column headers in your CSV to LinkedIn’s account fields.
  5. Name your list and click Finish

A few things to note :

  • Make sure your accounts are in CSV (comma-separated values)
  • Maximum 1000 accounts at once
  • Make sure your CSV file includes columns containing the account name (required) and other relevant fields (optional)

Maintaining a blacklist

A best practice on Sales Navigator is to maintain a special list of accounts that you don't want to contact ie. a blacklist.

This will include accounts such as your customers, your competitors etc.

You can then use that as an exclude filter in your searches so that you're sure you don't contact such accounts by mistake. This is especially useful if you don't have the CRM integration enabled.

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