How to layer searches on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get ridiculously specific results

In an environment where companies are firing entire departments, anyone going outbound would want to go after companies that are still growing. But it’s hard to use Sales Navigator to search for leads working in thriving companies—those hiring or recently raised funding—without layering search filters. In this article, we’ll show you how to layer different searches and find leads from fast-growing companies quickly.

The problem

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has two types of search filters:

Sales Navigator search filtering by accounts.

This option allows you to search for companies on LinkedIn and includes filters that enable you to curate companies who are hiring, growing headcount or have raised funds within 12 months of the search. But getting a list of these companies, you’d still have to go into each of them and search for individuals in the roles you’re targeting, which wastes time.

Sales Navigator search filtering by leads

With the leads filter, you can search for individuals (instead of companies) in roles you want, e.g. CFOs in the financial services industry. But there’s no direct way of telling LinkedIn to only show you CFOs from companies that are growing their sales department, hiring and have raised funds recently.

Here’s how to solve this.

Understand how your ideal customers look like

Let’s use the example of Leapfin, a robotic process automation fintech that helps companies get visibility into their GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) revenue numbers.

From the screenshot of their website copy below, we know that Leapfin’s product targets high-growth/ high transaction companies.

We also know that the people in charge of buying their product in target companies are CFOs or financial controllers. (Found this out from the testimonial below).

However, if you were a Leapfin sales rep, there’s no easy way to search for the CFOs of fast-growing companies on LinkedIn, so we are going to layer two searches.

Step 1: Filter Accounts

Go into the search bar at the top and click on the account filter tab on the top right. You’ll see options to filter your search based on a variety of factors.

Find a section labelled “Spotlights”, click on “Job opportunities” and select “Hiring on LinkedIn” as a search filter. Click on “Recent activities” and filter in companies hiring on LinkedIn, and those that have raised funding in the past 12 months. If you want, you can also add companies that have grown their headcount by over 10%.

Save this search.

Screenshot of account filtering on Sales Navigator

Step 2: Create a list of companies that meet your growth indicators

Select all the companies on the first page of your search results and click “save to list” to save them to a new list. I’ll name our list of fast-growing companies. Repeat this for all the pages in the search results.

Step 3: Lead search and layering

Once you’ve saved your list of companies meeting your filters of growth indicators (save as many as you can), do a normal lead search for CFOs.

But since you’re layering, look for a tab named “workflow”, click on “account lists”, and include the account list you created in the preceding step. In our Leapfin CFOs campaign, it’s going to be the Fast-growing companies account list.

When you do this type of lead search, LinkedIn will search for people who meet our lead search filters, e.g. CFOs in Europe. But it will search for them among the employees of the companies in the Fast-growing companies account list we created.

What we get are curated search results of CFOs in companies that are currently hiring on LinkedIn, growing their company headcount by over 10% and have also raised funds in the past 12 months.

Conclusion

There you go, that’s how you layer searches on Sales Navigator. If you’ve got tips and tricks that can improve salespeople’s workflow, write to me at [email protected] and we’ll share it here.

PS: People who land here are either passively looking to learn or are searching for specific answers. Whatever your reasons, send us your questions. We’ll either research and write about it or send it over to sales experts to share their perspectives.