Identifying your ICP
Defining your ICPKey decision makers and stakeholdersNeeds & pain pointsSales Navigator
Setting up Sales NavigatorThe FrontpageThe Account pageThe Lead pageSearching & filteringBoolean searchAdvanced tips & tricksScraping leads
Exporting emailsSearches larger than 2500 results?Reviewing leadsIntent-based scrapingCold email campaigns
Technical SetupWriting good cold emailsMore advanced tipsBoolean search
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Boolean search is a great way to find potential customers and increase sales productivity. By searching for certain criteria, you can target specific users that are more likely to be interested in your product or service.
Additionally, Sales Navigator provides valuable insights and information about users so that you can better understand their needs.
Where can I use boolean search on Sales Navigator?
You can search for keywords using boolean queries in three places on Linkedin Sales Navigator:
- In the job title search
- In the global keyword search
- In the company field
1. In the global keyword search
The global keyword search is the search bar at the top of your Sales Navigator search screen.
This global keyword search will scan all profiles sections for the keyword:
- Skills
- About Section
- Description
- Job experiences
- Education
- Recommendation
- Etc…
This is the field where you're the most likely to use the power of boolean searches as it will help you make really accurate lead searches.
Quick tip: As described above, this will look for the keywords in ALL profile sections... and that often yields irrelevant results.
For example below, I was looking for Sales doing outbound work so I had "outbound" as a keyword filter. This yielded profiles with the keyword "outbound" in the profile yes... but this one was doing outbound in 2013! And was now (in 2023) doing completely something else. Absolutely not a relevant lead for me.
Fortunately if you're using Findymail to extract your Sales Navigator results, you will have a column in the output helping you filter out such irrelevant leads. The column "keyword_match" will be "YES" only if your keyword is present in the current job description or in the "About" section, which is closer to what you typically look for when using a keyword search.
2. In the job title search
You can also search for keywords in the "Job title" filter field.
Where it will be looking for keywords will depend on the additional setting you choose between "current", "past", "current or past" and "past not current".
"Current" will look for keywords only in currently active job experiences
- Current: will search for keywords only in currently active jobs ie. those with the "-Present" ending. (note: someone can have multiple current jobs)
- Past: will search for keywords only in past jobs ie. job experiences with a defined end date.
- Current or past: will search for keywords in both fields described above
- Past not current: equivalent to the "Past" option with the exception that it excludes people having the keyword in their current job experience description.
How To Use Linkedin Sales Navigator Boolean Search?
You must become proficient with each type of boolean query in order to use Sales Navigator's boolean search effectively.
- Quoted searches
- NOT searches
- OR searches
- AND searches
- Parenthetical searches
Also note that the keywords (NOT, AND, OR) must be in uppercase letters to work. Otherwise, they will just be considered common words.
1. Quoted searches
To search for an exact phrase or terms that include:
- More than 2 words
- Punctuation
Include quote marks around the word. In addition to other modifiers, you can utilize these. For instance:
- “V.P”
- “head of sales”
- "marketing manager"
- “customer success manager”
If I don't put quotes around "marketing" on LinkedIn, it will interpret it as meaning "marketing AND manager"
In the screenshot above, you can see that some search results are not relevant. To fix that, simply use quotes around your query: it will match exactly the expression "marketing manager" and nothing else. The words won't be split as they were previously.
Using quotes: all results match what we expected
2. NOT searches
If you want to exclude some keywords from your searches, simply type "NOT" before the keyword.
Here's a classic example (in job title field):
- CEO NOT Assistant NOT Intern
Will target CEO but exclude any profiles with "Assistant" or "Intern" in their job title.
When you click, the button turns red, and the exclusion operates as though you had entered a NOT boolean operator
Note that in the case of the job title filter, you can achieve the same result through the interface with the "exclude" button.
In the global keyword search though, you don't have that possibility so you have to use the "boolean expression" way to exclude the results you want.
3. OR searches
You can use OR to divide the terms you wish to search for in order to identify profiles that contain one or more of them.
When looking for similar-sounding phrases or different spellings, OR is most frequently employed. For instance:
- "Revenue Operations" OR "RevOps"
- "CEO" OR "Chief Executive Officer"
4. AND searches
AND searches will return profiles that contain both keywords in the profile.
For example: "B2B" AND "Sales"
will return profiles containing both "B2B" and "Sales" in the profile. But as we've seen in section 1. (quoted searches) they won't be necessarily next to each other. If you want the full expression "B2B Sales" you have to quote it.
This is the default operator. If you type:
B2B Sales
It will get interpreted as: B2B AND Sales
5. Parenthetical searches
Now comes the fun part. You can take everything we've seen above and combine it together in complex queries.
And to prioritize some parts over others, you can put them in parentheses just like in algebra. For instance:
SaaS AND (Freelance OR Consultant)
will get profiles with the words
"SaaS" AND "Freelance"
OR
"SaaS" AND "Consultant"
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