In our opinion, LinkedIn is the most powerful B2B solution for finding high quality business leads, but there’s really only one feature to the platform that makes this the case.

Hey, how’s it going? Ryan Caswell here from B2B leads.com, and if you’re wondering what it is that makes LinkedIn such a powerful B2B lead generation platform, it really is because of its ability to search and find your ideal prospects on the platform and reach out to them and start conversations. So it’s because of their search functionality, but more specifically their functionality through Sales Navigator.
So it’s one of the premium subscriptions on the platform. And today we’re gonna be taking an in-depth look. Step by step guide on how to use Sales Navigator, how to build a list, how to find your ideal target markets, and the different ways that you can organize them and reach out to them. So it’s really quite in depth.
We’re gonna be going into a lot of detail, but we’re also gonna be moving pretty quickly so that it’s a very concise lesson on how to get started with Sales Navigator covering everything so you can build really tight list for your ideal clients on LinkedIn. Let’s get started. All right. As I mentioned, we’re going over a complete sales navigator tutorial for 2023.

LinkedIn changes a lot, so we’re gonna be going over some of the new features, some of the updates, what’s new, what’s different. Honestly, by the time you watch this video, it could be changed again. It does change quite regularly. But I wanted to get this out cuz it should be the most up to date by the time you’re watching it.
So very, very high level. I’m just gonna go over what we’re gonna be covering in today’s lesson and very quickly as well. This is really centered around how to find your ideal clients on LinkedIn. Actually, that’s not true. You could use it to find prospects, you can use it to find potential employees.
It’s just around how to find exactly who you want to based on people’s professional characteristics, the types of companies they work. Primarily we use it to find leads for business, for sales. So bit of an introduction. What is Sales Navigator, how to sign up to it, what’s it cost, and why you potentially need it versus just the free version.

We’ll go over some terminology and ways to search using Sales Navigator. So filters and searches, the difference between leads and accounts, the difference between lists and searches, the different categories of people you can find first, second, third degree active users, open profile. The different types of campaigns you can run on LinkedIn, the different ways to contact people, and this is gonna determine the different ways you’re gonna build your lists.
And then of course, we’re gonna jump into some real world examples of finding peoples and pro people and prospects on LinkedIn. So how to define your, your client. How to make sure you’re only bringing in the right types of people when you’re searching for them. How to get your search right, how to build company.
And how to find people like really specific types of companies where to start when it comes time to actually messaging people, where to actually start in terms of getting the best conversion rate. And then a few limitations of sales navigator so you know how to use it more effectively. And yeah, if you have any questions, you can obviously put them in the comments below.

So what is Sales Navigator? How to sign up to it? Let’s get started. Let’s kick this off. If we look at, if you sign into your LinkedIn, I’m guessing if you’re watching this, you should be at least familiar with LinkedIn as a platform. You can actually, if you click on the little work button here, you’ll see sales solutions.
And if you click on that, it should bring up a range of different options and premium solution premium subscriptions that you can use. And sales navigators, the one we’re actually talking about, So if you jump in, I’ve already signed up to it, obviously you can see it here, and it costs around roughly a hundred dollars to about $130 a month depending on where you’re located.

And whether you buy a yearly subscription or pay month to month. And this is what it looks like. And it’s a little funny in that it’s, it’s actually separate from LinkedIn. You see it has a different, it has a different look and feel, and it’s almost like a different website. It’s separate, but connected at the same time.
So if you reach out to people and connect with people, here on LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, it’s actually connected to their LinkedIn and so they’ll see it in their inbox and when they reply, you see it here, but you can also respond and reply on your actual LinkedIn profile and it’s, it can be quite, it’s actually quite annoying, I would say.
It’s one of the downsides of LinkedIn. So what we recommend doing is even if you’re using Sales Navigator to find your prospects on LinkedIn or people on LinkedIn, you use it, but you find your way. Like, say you find them here, this is still on Sales Navigator. You can potentially message people here in Sales Navigator, but what we actually recommend is going to LinkedIn and doing all your activities, engagements, and communication through the LinkedIn platform, cuz that keeps everything in one place.

And if you. Should you stop paying to use things like Sales Navigator or the premium subscription. What that means is that you’re not gonna lose all that information, conversation, history, it’s all gonna stay retained within LinkedIn. So a little tip one of the downsides of using Sales Navigator, but a, a very easy workaround, but a lot of people fall into that trap when they first get started.
What is sales Navigator? Essentially it’s one of the premium subscriptions and what’s really powerful about it and why you would actually need it versus the free search. Free model. So if you look at LinkedIn and you wanted to find people on LinkedIn, , it really has limited options. In terms of your filters.
You can put second, third degree, you can choose location. There’s a few other things you can even go on title. The problem with title is it doesn’t let you write really advanced rules around the specific people you want to reach out to. But really importantly, the. Types of people you don’t wanna reach out to.

It’s very limited and also doesn’t let you save list, doesn’t let you organize them. And there’s a bunch of other things like company headcount, activity, all things that are really useful in sales Navigator. So the research is a great place to get started, but if you want to take. Lead generation seriously.
On LinkedIn, you gotta get sales navigators a hundred bucks a month. Geez. You get one client from that and it’s paid for itself for the year for most people. So definitely worth it. Let’s go over some of the terminology. So I’m gonna work pretty fast here. I wanna try and get this to be a fairly concise lesson.
For those who are not familiar with it. So when you first get into Sales Navigator, it looks like this or something like this, or by the time you watch this, it might have changed layout again, but more or less the key features haven’t changed in the last five years. You can start doing a search, just press enter and you’ll get something like this cuz it’s blank.

Now what you’ve got are searches and filters and you’ve got list. So if you look up here, you’ve got accounts and leads, and then if you look here, you’ve got saved searches. So this is, these are your list’s, account list, lead list, and these are your searches. And you can search for leads or accounts. So this might get a little confusing, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple.
And account is like this organization or the company that the person actually works out, works out. So people create company pages on LinkedIn and people can say that they work at that specific company or that specific account. Because it’s not called companies because you can have organizations not-for-profits, government organizations, they call them accounts on LinkedIn.

And a lead is a person and, and a specific. So you can do a search for people, leads, or you can do a search for accounts, companies, organizations. They’re the two ways that you can search. Now, up here are where you have your lists. So here, when we do a search, We’re run, we’re building rules to find leads.
We’re building rules to find accounts. Up here is where you can save people to a list or save people to, or save accounts to an account list, but there’s no rules. I could save an ice cream store and I could save, you know head office of Amazon to the same, like, same account list. Or I could, same thing.
I could save the ceo. Amazon and I could save, you know, Jerry plumber. I don’t know. I’m not feeling very creative. X, Y, Z plumbing. So there’s no rules here. So you can save any people and any account to an list. And you can say, have various account lists. You can have various lead lists, but when you’re doing searches, they have the people that fall into your search have to fit the rules based on the filters that you’ve set up.

Now, depending on who you wanna find, you may need to do, use a combination of. and we’ll touch on that in just a minute. So I just wanted to get yourself, get you familiar with what the difference is between the lists and the actual searches in terms of categories. I’ve got a little diagram that I’ll show you that’ll help describe this.
Essentially you’ve got your first, second, and third degree contacts, active users in open profiles. So this is a lesson from our paid program, but this is a, gonna be a very up to date lesson going over everything that we’d cover in that. So if you think about this big red block here as everybody on LinkedIn and you do a search or you create a list, or you create a filter and you find a specific subset of those people on LinkedIn, you can have first degree contacts within that list of.
People that you’re looking for, which are people who are in your direct network, they’re connected with you. If, if you’re familiar with Facebook, they’re like a friend on Facebook if second degree, meaning they’re not directly connected to you, but they’re connected to a connection of yours. So second degree contact, and third degree means they’re not connected to a connection.
but they’re one more degree removed from you. So first degree, obviously they’re in your network. You can start conversations with them for free. You don’t need to connect with them. Second and third, we need to connect across first, second, and third degree contacts. You can have what we call active users, and that just, that basically just means people who are using the platform.

So if we’re trying to reach out to people and start conversations, it’s not gonna help us if we. if, if they don’t even use the platform. So we have people who are actually using the platform and we have ways to find who’s actually using it as well and try and, for the most part, avoid those who aren’t.
And then you can have an overlap over across these, what we call open profiles. And an open profile is essentially someone that you can use InMails to freely communicate with. And you don’t need to connect with them cuz their profile’s open. A lot of people when you first set up a premium subscription, I think it automat.
Puts you as an open profile and you have to change it back. So there are a few people with open profiles but it is a very small percentage of the overall user base. And when it comes to running campaigns on LinkedIn or reaching out to people, this is kind of your sweet spot, really here. It’s your active users on LinkedIn, people that we know who are using them and who are in your ideal search or target market.

Then you can also run, like I said, you can do an search on accounts or c. . And so if you look at this spread block as every single company on LinkedIn and these are the companies that you actually want to work with, then you can actually find these companies. And then you can apply these same search filters on the types of people within those companies as well.
So there’s a few different ways that you can build lists of people using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. We’ll go through some examples of simple ones and more complex ones shortly. So that’s enough of the theory. Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of campaigns or ways you can reach out to people on LinkedIn, because once again, that’s gonna determine.
The type of list that you’re going to build or the types of searches you’re going to build. So for the most part, we like to run what we call regular or network growing type campaigns. And that would be an exam, like an example of that. So let’s, let’s jump in and start having a bit of a play around. So if you come in and you just simply go second and third degree contacts.

Let’s say in Australia. So what I would say is a regular campaign is reaching out to people who you don’t know yet or you’re not connected with. You reach out to connect with them. So let’s open up here as an example. You can connect here on Sales Navigator, but like I said, I recommend doing it through LinkedIn.
So keeping everything within LinkedIn, not on Sales Navigator. And you click on more and you can send a connection message. And then once they connect, or if they. Then you can send more messages and have an actual conversation with the people. I go into the types of ways to connect, or the types of messages to send.
I’ve done very detailed videos on that in the past. and there’s probably some more coming as well. So that’s a regular campaign, second degree, third degree contacts, people who aren’t in your network, reaching out to them to connect so that you can have a conversation with them. The other ways you can con communicate with people is people who are already directly connected to you.
So we’re trying to get people directly connected to us so we can communicate freely. And this is essentially just looking at people in your network. I mean, you go to my network. or you can find just say Bob, someone, I’m sure I’m connected to Bob People Connections, first degree Bob Bishop. And you can see, you can just directly message them.
You don’t need to actually request to connect with them. You can just have an open conversation with them. And so that’s really where we want to get to on LinkedIn. Now, the other type of campaign you can. , what type of way you can reach out to people is using InMail. So let’s say someone doesn’t want to connect or you just want to get a message in front of them, you can send what’s called an InMail.

So here you can see she’s got an open profile, which means you can InMail without using up your quota of InMails. Now if that’s the case, if they have an open profile, you don’t even, you can actually head to their LinkedIn and message them through LinkedIn and I’d recommend doing. , like I said, oh, hang on, view LinkedIn profile.
See, you can message them directly here cause they have an open profile, but if they don’t have an open profile, then you have to message them through sales navigator or you have to use up your email quota and you don’t have a lot. So this can work. It works best in higher volumes for the most part.
If you, you’re pretty new to this. I recommend your standard campaign where you’re trying to grow your network with new users. Second and third degree contact. Get them into your network and then start conversations with them once they’re in your network. Once again, I’ve got tons of great resources on how to start the conversations, how to get people onto calls.

For the most part, we’re just talking about how to find them today and how you find them will depend on how you wanna reach out to them, whether it’s first degree. second or third degree or in mail. So a lot of theory to get through before we sort of jump into the actual filters. All right, so let’s say we want to find our people now.
So first thing you need to do is before you just jump in and start playing around with the filters, you really gotta define your target market first. And honestly, you could do this on a scrap piece of paper or just on a blank piece of paper. This is pretty much what we do, our process for finding prospect.
And we just start brainstorming. The way I like to do it specifically is coming up with your general rules. What’s not gonna change? What’s your core rules around who are you gonna target? You know, what’s things like headcount, industry or industries? Titles? Titles can change quite a bit and I like to put them sort of in the more specific rules, but try and think of what are the core rules?

What are the more specific. Or what are the titles of these specific companies? And just have a bit of a brainstorm before you just start playing around with the filters. Although if you are new to this, I guess having a look at the filters will help you determine what you can actually do in terms of brainstorming.
You’ve done a client avatar in the past. This is gonna be really helpful and will help you build out this ideal client as well. Don’t be shy as well. Try and brainstorm ideas that you might not have thought. Sometimes the direct buyer isn’t always the best person to reach out to people. Further down the line, further up the line, head decision makers, people on the tools experiment with, with lots of different titles because you never know where the pain is felt, felt the most in terms of your solution or where you’re gonna get the best traction.
So you might have your head decision makers, you might have your operational leaders you might have your finance. Leaders and just think of the people, more specifically operational HR leaders. And then in terms of coming up with the actual titles, we’ll get into that in a minute, but you never want to just say, head only targeting head of finance.
You wanna write rules that’ll give you all the head decision makers in finance. So for instance, rather than saying head of finance or director of finance, you might say, look for, write a rule to find all directors and the word finance together. Then you’ll. You’ll be coming to Sales Navigator and it’s filter on.
Look for all the filters. Expand that. job title. I’m gonna get finance director, director of finance, director of this and that, and finance, managing director of corporate finance. Like you bring in all the titles that, that we want. We’re writing rules that are gonna bring in all the relevant people, and that’s what makes the sales navigator really powerful.

So have a bit of a brainstorm. Think about who your ideal client is before you start building out the lists and how you’re gonna organize them. What are the different pain points of the different, you know, potentially across different in. , what are the different pain points across the different titles?
How are we gonna, when you reach out to people, what are you gonna say? Is it gonna be the same for, you know, your head decision maker or someone in operations role or someone in HR specific? Most people do a shit job of this and that’s why they get crap results on LinkedIn. It’s cuz they don’t get specific on their target market.
Where was I defining your clients and company? Yeah. So you want to, like I said, get a piece of paper out, get a blank word document and. Filtering. So let’s have a bit more of a play with your filters in LinkedIn and talk about how we actually use them to build a list now. So this is probably why you’re here, but it’s, it’s important to go through a lot of this initial stuff first to help you understand.
So I mean, if you have sales navigator, sales navigator, core is what we use. That’s kind of the cheapest one, and it does everything you need to in terms of search. Basically the. The filters are pretty self-explanatory. You know, company headcount, company headquarter, location, company headquarters function.
I don’t tend to use function much. I found it’s sort of how LinkedIn decides what function they’re in. So I, I tend to just try and get the title right cuz that pretty much indicates their function in anyway. Seniority level, I never use that as well. Once again, the title is the best indicator of that what people call themselves if it is, and shared experience.

This is a really great filter and we’ll come to this later. First, what we wanna do is get our search right on the types of people, and then we can find people who are active users using this. And that’s a great way to increase conversion rates as you reach out to people. Industries a really good one.
Now they’ve made some changes recently where if you look at as an example, manufacturing is a. Category, whereas before it had more specific companies and then they’ve got a number of niche manufacturing areas within it. So you’ve got manufacturing, you’ve got finance leaders in manufacturing across Australia.
You can have people who are connections with people, you know, years of experience, profile, language, like I said, a lot of these pretty pretty specific. What I wanted to talk about is something a lot of people don’t know is, remember these are rules. Here we’re actually writing rules to find people based on titles and things like that.
Sometimes someone will fit the rule, but we know they’re not a fit, so we want to exclude them, but we can’t change the rules to get rid of them. So the way we do that, what we do is we save them to an exclusion list. So you might call it, I don’t know, example, I’ll just call it example, exclude, and then you go Lead list, example, exclude.

You can see ’em. , and then I want to exclude everyone on that exclude list, and that’s saving them to a lead list. So you can save people to a lead list that you wanna exclude and then say, I want to exclude those people. At the same token, if you say, well, I want to exclude everyone from adas Australia, so you can open up ADAS Australia, you can save that account to an account list, let’s call it an example, excluded.
Accounts and then you can come back. You gotta refresh the page. So this is great if you have a list of companies that you know you don’t wanna reach out to existing clients, things like that example. So you notice I refresh the page. Sometimes you need to refresh the page to get the list to actually show, but then I exclude, they’ll exclude everyone from that company and anyone that I save to that exclusion list.

So it’s a little bit of a roundabout way to do it, but this is the best way to exclude specific companies and specific. Then you simply just save that as whatever you want it to be. Let’s just call it example. And then you can access that through your saved searches. If you are building an account list, you would save it as an account search.
You can see your saved searches under accounts, and you can see your saved lead searches, which are people, it’s a little confusing. I know cuz you’ve got lists and you’ve got searches and you sometimes need to use a combination of both. If you have any trouble, just put a comment below and I’ll, I’ll provide some.
Right, so getting your search right, it’s really just a matter of playing with the filters. The only real tricky part is excluding people. The other way you can exclude people, and this is really useful, is if you’re coming back to your core rules on the types of people you wanna reach out to. You want to make note of who you don’t wanna reach out to.

And if you haven’t done this before, chances are you don’t know. But these are some great common terms of people you gen. A lot of people want to exclude. So, consultants, advisors, coaches. Sales, marketing recruiters find their way into a list. So if you were reaching out to, let’s say IT professionals out of it, if you search on it as a term under title, you might get recruiters or recruiting professionals who recruit IT specialists and things like that.
So these are good terms to use as exclusions, and you can do. This all function means I want you to exclude this, all this, all this, all this. If you want to combine them together, you need to use an end function, capital A and d capital or, so these are what’s called bullying search rules. And really powerful way to build really like specific rules on who you want to reach out to.
Now if I come back to. Original people search. Let’s say I wanted to exclude all those titles I had put in before I put them in my job search, and then I exclude them. Now it’s going to exclude anyone with the word consultant, advisor, et cetera, et cetera, in their titles. So that’s how you build a list, finding the right people.
Now, let’s say you wanted to find people at really specific types of companies. , the industry categories, just don’t cut it on LinkedIn. Say manufacturing, you can go more specific, but let’s say you want to find a, you know, ice cream machine manufacturing or gym equipment manufacturers, they are in there, sports equipment manufacturers, but you want to talk, talk about manufacturing, gym equipment specifically.

What you need to do is basically find those companies, save them to an account list, and then look for those people. So we do account search. Let’s just go back to one page of sales navigator and we do a search, a blank search. We do an account, we do headquarter location, Australia quarter account. We won’t worry about that.
And industry manufacturing. And then, I don’t know. Jim, let’s say we’re looking for gym equipment. There’s 74 results here. What you now need to do is save them to an account list, so we’ll call it example gym equipment. So this keyword search up here looks for the term gym either in the title or in the actual company description itself.

So you gotta go through page at a time. It’s a little bit manual. , but you’ve gotta save all these guys to that equipment count list. And when you come back here and you refresh that page, you should have be able to select that account list. Now they make, because there’s only 74 companies, and that’s a pretty specific title.
It may not find anyone and find anyone. That’s fine. We’ll just do a general decision maker, rules director rec. . Yeah, so you can see how it works. This is for really complex or different specific types of companies, and you’re finding specific people at those. For the most part, most people will get away with just doing a regular search and just using the industry filter.

Now, in terms of where to start, so this is how you build the right rules and you want to actually start. I’d be looking at who are you actually connected to? So if you’ve built this search rules, see who you are actually connected to, and I’ll get rid of this one cuz it’s very niche and that’s always a good place to start, especially if there’s an existing relationship and you’re looking to actually like start a conversation with someone.
Second and third is also really good. in terms of where to start. If you have a list of, let’s say thousands of prospects, you know, 110,000, what you want to do is say, well, where’s a good place to start? Let’s look for active users and post on LinkedIn is a great indicator of people who are active on the platform.
And what is also really powerful is it’s generally easier to build trust closer to home. So, you know, start close to home for those active members. And then that’s gonna give you the best chance of conversion and a great place to start as well in terms. Messaging people and reaching out to people. Cuz otherwise you can see a list of 50,000 strong and you be like, Ooh, where do I start?

And you’ll only be able to see two and a half thousand of those results. And after that it’s cut off. So you wanna make sure the list size is under two and a half thousand too. So just before we wrap up some of the limitations of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is unfortunately if someone has multiple positions, it can kind of combine them with the. So they may be CEO of Bob’s Ice Cream, Stan, and they may be, you know working in the warehouse of Amazon and it may essentially, your rules could be picking them up as CEO as of Amazon. And it’s kind of frustrating. It does that, but that is one of the limitations you gotta be aware of, of Services Navigator.
Also, based on how people categorize themselves and how LinkedIn categorizes the. It’s not always up to date. And it’s not always accurate. Like I just said. The search size two and a half thousand is, you’ve gotta make sure if you have a big list and you wanna reach out to everyone, you’ve gotta build mutually exclusive lists.
So basically list when they’re not gonna overlap with each other so that you can find. And each one has to be, pardon me, under two and a half thousand. Sometimes third degree connections can bring in strange results. People who don’t use LinkedIn, no profile pictures, weird sort of robot accounts. So just be aware of that and try and focus on second degree where possible or active third degree and if it lapses you for the most part, you can reach out LinkedIn and I can reinstate some of the data sometimes, but for the most part you lose the list and all the rules. So make sure if you wanna get rid of Sales Navigator, save the list. If you wanna save it outside of LinkedIn, you can basically put a list and you can save the url.
And then if you want to get sales, navigate again, you can use that url. One thing to be aware of though, is if I save this, I won’t be able to use it again because it’s referencing a saved ses, a saved id. But if I change it one thing and then add that back, if I to add that English back, now the URL changes from the list ID to the actual rules.

It has all the rules up here. So if I copy that and paste that down here, it’s a massive list, so you might want to nest it. Give it a name, insert that. And you can even share that with other people who have sales navigator. That’s a great way to share lists and save lists outside of Sales Navigator.
And one other limitation, it’s constantly changing. In fact, you help people with on multiple different plat on multiple different profiles, and my platform looks different to theirs. So they’re constantly changing and they’re constantly rolling it out sporadically. So your profile might look different to mine.
For the most part, it should have the same, more or less functionality. So it’s constantly changing. In my experience over the last five years, the core functionality still remains the same. I hope that’s helpful. I can get kind of confusing. So if you have questions around rules, feel free to reach out, ask questions, put in the comments below.

I’m happy to help. Plus it helps the algorithm seeing comments and so it’s kind of a win-win. I can help you out and you’re helping out the channel to grow as well. Free to subscribe if you found this useful black kind of stuff. Always. Ryan Caswell from B2B leads.com. Have a great day, cheers.