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LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Search: Tips & Tricks for 2023

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced search is an amazing tool for finding leads within your target audience. With over 500 million users, nearly anyone you’ll need to do business with will be on there.

More than that, the ‘search and save’ feature on Sales Navigator means the platform can be a great way to target qualified leads for your business.

The bad news is that most people aren’t using Sales Navigator to its full potential.

Yes, it’s super useful. But finding great leads on Sales Nav can take time. A lot of time.

LinkedIn Targeting

The first step is going to be to hammer down who we’re targeting. If you already know who you want to target, skip on to the next section.

If not, here are the most important 4 filters to make sure you’re targeting the right leads on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Geography

This is a good one to start with. Where do you sell your product? Which market are you focused on?

If your product or service can be sold anywhere, think about which countries are more likely to buy and what language they speak.

Even if you can reach out to any market, consider targeting specific geographical areas to make outreach more customized.

Job Title

This is another basic one to touch on. Think about what the job title would be of someone that would buy your product.

Also, remember that you want to touch on the seniority of the person as well. Would a Vice President buy your product? Or is it typically purchased by a Coordinator?

Determine who the decision-makers are and target accordingly.

Company Headcount

Headcount can often be overlooked, but the size of the company is critical for most products. Do you sell to startups or enterprise clients?

It’s rare that a product will be sold to both. Think about it and make sure you’re using this filter in your searches.

Even if you are reaching out to companies of all shapes and sizes, break down your lead lists into specific company sizes so that you can tailor your outreach.

Similar companies

Let’s say you found several companies that fit your criteria just perfectly. You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced search option to your advantage.

More specifically, you can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator search filters to search for similar companies in a couple of ways. Firstly, you can discover similar prospects by clicking on a drop-down button on a lead interested in and selecting the “View similar” option. After you do it, you’ll see the list of leads with similar job titles and roles.

Secondly, you can also see which leads share something in common with you by using the “Share experiences with you” filter. You can build relationships based on these similarities.

Sales Navigator Boolean Search

The key to getting the most out of LinkedIn Sales Navigator advanced search is using boolean operators.

A boolean operator works as a ‘code’, telling the search engine what to include, what to exclude and what to focus on. Examples of boolean searches for Sales Navigator include:

AND
OR
NOT
Quotation marks

Let’s walk through an example. To find managers for marketing and social media teams, you can run “marketing” OR “social media” AND “manager”.

Thankfully, Sales Navigator’s advanced search makes it even easier to use most of these booleans by including a ton of advanced filters on the left hand side for you to choose from.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced Search: Recommended Features

These are my recommended advanced search features for using Sales Navigator.

Explore keywords

What’s interesting, I find that most people use the basic keywords such as title, industry, and so on, without making the full potential out of keywords. That said, I’ll show you how you can take full advantage of Sales Navigator keyword search.

Keywords have led to me amazing pools of leads by allowing me to get ultra-targeted. The keyword search field allows me to look for specific words or phrases within a profile that may relate to my solution.

For Wiza, I use keyword search to find people who mention “LinkedIn Lead Generation” in their titles. This finds amazing contacts who deal with lead generation at their companies. Our messaging connects with this need, and the results are amazing.

Exclusions

A new feature from LinkedIn allows users to exclude particular things from keywords. I threw this in here because this can be really valuable to more complex searches.

For example, when we target people who mention “LinkedIn Sales Navigator”, we inevitably get a lot of prospects who work at LinkedIn, which is not who we’re after.

With the new exclusions, we can exclude people who’s “current company” is LinkedIn. Problem solved. Think about how this can be used in your searches to get more accurate results.

Unique Rapport Building

This one’s more basic, but make sure you’re utilizing ways to pool prospects based on similarities.

Things like “schools,” “groups” and “past company” can find you a group of leads with similarities you can reference in your outreach, at scale. You can even build a list focused just on 1st and 2nd degree connections. By focusing on the similarities you can build rapport from your first email.

Past Company

Past company is one of the most underrated fields within the LinkedIn Sales Navigator search. With this criteria, you can search for prospects based on their past company. Filtering by past company on LinkedIn is a great way to unearth potentially warm leads.

If you set this to one of your clients, they may be familiar already with your solution. If they are not, it’s still a great client to reference, knowing that they worked there. Try a search using this criteria and you will find some great leads.

Seniority Level

Looking for decision makers in an organization?

Use the “Seniority level” filter to focus on leads you want to connect with. Depending on the size of the company, this could range from senior-level to owner and partner.

Return to Top Searches

Let’s say you ran a search in the past that got you great results. You’ve already exhausted it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to build future searches.

Set yourself a calendar reminder to return to it, with one of two changes.

For example, you can add “became a member” to a short time period and you’ll be able to find people that were recently added to the search results because they recently signed up for LinkedIn.

You can add “years at current company” to find people who changed companies and are now a part of your search results.

Exporting Your Saved Searches as Leads

Once you have a list of promising leads, how do you typically run outreach?

With Wiza, you can get verified emails for your leads (ready for outreach!) in just three steps.

#1 Run your search: Put some of the tips from above to good use!
#2 Run Wiza: Sign up for Wiza and install the extension, you’ll see a blue “Export emails with Wiza” button on the top of your search or list page.
#3 Download your leads. After Wiza finishes running, you can download your leads as a .csv or export them to your CRM!

Do you want to make the most out of your LinkedIn searches? Wiza can help!

Check our detailed guide on how you can export leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and easily find their emails.