Here's the meat of Sales Navigator: using it as a big database that you can filter to find relevant leads & accounts to target.
That is to me the most important feature of Sales Navigator so it's important you understand it correctly.
First to access the search page, simply click on the lead filters or accounts filters in the search bar on your homepage, depending on if you want to search for leads or for companies.
Let's start by reviewing the accounts filter.
Accounts filters on Sales Navigator
- Annual revenue: again I don't recommend using this as it's self-reported so not very accurate. You risk missing a lot of accounts if you use it. Or use with wide margins.
- Company headcount: Company size, you will use it in most cases as targeting big companies is not the same as SMB.
- Company headcount growth: Useful to target growing companies, I usually put >20% growth. One thing to note is that it's tracking growth over the last year only.
- Department headcount: Very useful if you're targeting a specific department. For example if you sell only to sales-heavy companies, you'll definitely use this.
- Department headcount growth: Same as 3. but at the department level. Again very useful if you're interested in a specific department.
- Fortune: if the company is a Fortune 500, Fortune 100 company etc. I don't use it but maybe you will need it.
- Headquarters location: Most likely you have privileged target countries: enter them there.
- Industry: You will use that one often as well, feel free to pick a few adjacent industry to your "main" ones as people often misclassified their company.
- Number of followers: I don't use it, not very useful
- Technologies used: Quite inaccurate I don't recommend using it. If you need to target technologies you will be better off with specialized tools such as Builtwith.
- Job opportunities: This can be useful if you're looking for companies that are currently hiring. The only downside is that it's hiring in general and you can't specify eg. hiring only new sales.
- Recent activities: Very useful, senior leadership changes and funding events are usually highly relevant signals you absolutely want to pick up.
- Companies in CRM: Self-explanatory, use it if you have your CRM synchronized.
- Saved accounts: can be useful once you have started actually saving accounts
Most of these filters are "include only" but some of them can also be used to build exclusion. For example if you want all except one specific industry you can exclude it from your search.
Now let's do the same for lead filters:
Leads filters on Sales Navigator
- Company headcount: Same as the filter in the Accounts section. It shouldn't be needed though if you already filtered your accounts and put them in a list.
- Current company: If you want to do some sniping inside a specific company otherwise no utility.
- Past company: Same as 2. but in the past.
- Company type: Can be useful if you're targeting a specific type of company only eg. Non Profit
- Company headquarters: Same as 1. shouldn't be needed.
- Function: What area they work in. Depending on the area this can be very accurate or very inaccurate. If you need to use it will mainly depend on what job titles you're targeting and if those job titles are specific to a department or generic.
- Job title: One of the most useful filters here you will use it all the time. Make sure to include all possible variations of your target job title!
- Seniority level: Same as 6., if you know the job title to target I wouldn't rely on it much.
- Years in current company: Can be useful if you want to target somebody that has been X years working at a company.
- Years in current position: Same idea as 9.
- Activities: Very underrated filter. Some hidden gems are here, highly recommend having a look. One of my favorite filters is "Changed jobs in last 90 days" as it's a highly relevant signal -> people starting a new position are often expected to make changes and try new tools etc.
- Keyword in articles: I don't recommend using it for the simple reason that almost nobody is posting articles on Linkedin so you will get rid of 99% of your leads
- Connection: Are they a 1st, 2nd, 3rd-degree connections on Linkedin? Do you belong to the same group?
- Geography: Can be useful even if you filtered for the geography of the company as some companies are multinational.
- Industry: /!\ warning there, it's NOT the company industry but the self-selected industry on the user's profile. Often not accurate, I recommend using the company industry instead
- Years of experience: self-explanatory
- Connections of: If they're a connection of somebody. Can be useful to target the connections of your competitors 👀 or of a friend
- Groups: If you want to target people in a specific Linkedin group
- First Name: No use except if you're looking for someone in particular?
- Last Name: No use except if you're looking for someone in particular?
- Profile language: Can be useful if you want to make sure they speak a given language
- TeamLink connections of: Same as 17. but with TeamLink
- School: Not very useful unless you want to do a campaign with school personalization.
- Lead lists: Very useful once you start organizing yourself in different lead lists. This will help you create relevant sub-lists. You can also use those as exclusion to only find new people you haven't reached out to.
- People in CRM: Again, can be useful if you have your CRM synchronized.
- Account lists: A must! Once you've created an account list you will use it here to find the right people in those companies.
- People you interacted with: Exclude people where you already saw their profile or contacted them.
- Saved leads and accounts: Self-explanatory