Most people treat Sales Navigator like a search engine, type what they want into the keyword box, and give up when the results come back wrong. The fix is knowing which of the two searches you are running: a lead search looks for individuals, an account search looks for companies, and stacking one on the other is where precise targeting lives. We work through all three, including a real client search for animal free, high protein food companies and the job titles we pulled out of it.
What you will learn
- Why current company and job title are the filters we lean on hardest: along with keywords they are the only fields you can type freely into, which means they accept Boolean search logic.
- How that logic works in practice: quotation marks for an exact term, parentheses to group terms, and the words AND, OR and NOT to combine or exclude, as in pharmacist NOT coach, or sales NOT marketing.
- What a keyword does in a lead search: it reads the whole profile, the headline, the about section, the posts, and every past experience, current or not, which is why it hands back people who mentioned your term once years ago.
- What the same keyword does in an account search: it reads only the company page, where there is far less noise, which makes it the right tool for a trait nobody would ever list on a personal profile.
- When a lead search on its own is enough: a straightforward title at a company type that is easy to identify, with few variables to work around.
- The hybrid we use for a niche inside a niche: run the account search, hand pick companies into a saved account list, then switch back to a lead search filtered to that list and add the titles you need, such as manufacturing, engineering or supply chain.
- The distinction to carry into every search: in LinkedIn terms leads are individuals and accounts are companies, so finding the right person at a very specific type of company always takes both halves.
If you want the targeting for your market built and tested by people who do it daily, book a call.
