Find b2b leads using sales navigator account filters – The Ultimate Lead Generation Tool

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account filters is one of your best investments and most satisfactory paths to finding qualified B2B leads.

We previously spoke about Sales Navigator Lead filters, a complementary tool that is essential for narrowing down your search result to that particular decision-maker that you need. That’s why, in the manual cited above, you will find each Sales Navigator Lead filter explained in detail accompanied by 9 hacks for quality prospecting, that can come in handy once you identify companies that match your Ideal Customer Profile.

In this blog, we will go through Sales Navigator Account Filters, 15 in total, some of which are Sales Navigator only, that is, available only to users of this premium LinkedIn platform.

You can expect:

But first, let’s start with explaining what LinkedIn account profiles are and why they are the right place to start if targeting B2B sales leads.

LinkedIn Company Pages AKA Accounts

LinkedIn Company Pages are dedicated to individual companies, organizations, and institutions. They have been created with the goal of reaching and connecting with their customers, potential future customers, and followers.

LinkedIn Company Pages allow other LinkedIn members to learn more about their brand, products and services, career opportunities, and even have an insight into who their employees are.

LinkedIn Basic & Premium also have the option of researching account profiles. However, it is limited to the following filters.

On the other hand, Sales Navigator Account Filters give you plenty of search options for exhaustive results.

Go to your Sales Navigator and choose “Account Filters”.

Define your Ideal Customer Profiles first, use Sales Navigator Account filters to find them, and outline decision-makers within and outreach them. That’s why Sales Navigator in general comes in handy, not only due to the number of filters and other options for narrowing down your leads but also because it is so easy to switch from Account to Lead filters and combine them for better prospecting. But more on that down below.

Let’s start by explaining two useful filtering options, and then how to use each Sales Navigator Account filter to get qualified B2B leads.

Filtering Options For Finding Qualitied B2B Leads

The Boolean Search

Boolean search allows you to combine words and phrases using the Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT to limit, broaden, or define your lead generation.

Here’s a detailed explanation of how Boolean search works for Sales Navigator Account filters and how you can play with it to ensure qualified leads.

Key instructions

When applying the Boolean search, make sure that the operators are written in uppercase.
If using more than one word, it needs to be quoted (i.e. “medical practice” OR pharmaceutical).
If combining operators, use parentheses to define your expectations from the search engine (i.e. (“medical practice” OR pharmaceutical) AND hospital).

The Exclusion option

Some Sales Navigator Account filters allow you to exclude certain parameters from the search results.

Currently, the only account filters allowing this option are the Industry and the Headquarter location filters. Once you pick which industry you wish to blacklist, this filter will exclude all account profiles and leads belonging to that specific industry.

Use this option to refine your search or simply to avoid your competitors or existing customers.

This is how you do it.

By clicking on this button.

Excluded parameters look like this.

Sales Navigator Account Filters Explained

Keywords

Sales Navigator Account filter “Keywords” works on the principle of listing all account profiles containing the word you enter.

As simple as it might seem, the “Keywords” filter still stays at the very top of the most valuable filters of this advanced search engine. Since it supports the Boolean search, it gives Sales Navigator users numerous options to refine their lead generation. Boolean is available for both Sales Navigator Leads and Account filters and is one of the top hacks used by industry professionals to generate qualified B2B leads.

Section: COMPANY ATTRIBUTES

Annual Revenue

The annual growth is counted in millions.

Manually enter the range.

The dropdown menu allows you to choose the currency. It contains currencies of the top 22 economies.

Company Headcount

Choose from the menu what company headcount range suits your lead generation needs best.

Depending on how precise these data need to be for your lead generation, this Sales Navigator account filter can or cannot be useful. As you may see, the size range is pretty broad. The headcount of a certain company can be on the lower or the higher end of the spectrum.

Company Headcount Growth

Headcount refers to the total number of employees in a certain company. Headcount growth shows how much this number changed over a certain period of time.

Manually insert the percentage of the company headcount growth that is valuable for your B2B lead generation.

Department Headcount

This Sales Navigator Account filter can be useful in case your product or service is particularly aimed at smaller, medium, or larger-sized departments.

Choose the department from the dropdown menu. Manually enter the headcount range.

Department Headcount Growth

Department headcount refers to the number of employees in a certain department, and department growth shows how much this number changed over a certain period of time.

First, choose the department of your interest from the dropdown menu. Then manually insert the percentage depending on the desired department growth valuable for your B2B lead generation.

Fortune

This Sales Navigator Account filter shows you the top 50, 51-100, 101-250, and 251-500 wealthiest companies in the world listed on Fortune.

Headquarters Location

You can filter headquarters location by continent, geographical divisions (EMEA), country, region, city, postal code, etc.

Region: you can add multiple regions or exclude one or several regions from your search.

Regional abbreviations

Oceania
Asia
Nordics
MENA: the Middle East and Northern Africa
EMEA: Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Europe
DACH: acronym that stands for D – Deutschland, A – Austria, and CH – Confœderatio Helvetica (Switzerland’s official name in Latin).
Benelux: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
North America
APJ: the Asia Pacific and Japan
South America
APAC: Asia – Pacific
Africa

Postal code: since postal codes for different cities in different states match, this filter gives you a drop-down menu based on the number you enter. That way, you can choose not only the postal code but specify the town and region/country. You can add more postal codes for different city areas.

Industry

Pick one or more industries that you wish to target.

Number Of Followers

Filter down LinkedIn company accounts by how many users are following their company page on LinkedIn.

NOTE: Reaching out to your or your target company’s page followers is one of the 2022 LinkedIn prospecting hacks that can bring you more qualified B2B leads than you could imagine.

Technologies Used

This filter is useful in case your business is providing services regarding certain tools, platforms, software, etc.

By running this Sales Navigator Account filter you are able to target companies who use certain technologies. You can add multiple technologies to your search.

Section: SPOTLIGHTS

Job Opportunities

Find companies on LinkedIn that are currently hiring. This is one of the tips we also mentioned in our list of 2022 must-apply LinkedIn prospecting hacks. Companies that are hiring either got funding, are expanding, are doing very well on the marketing, therefore need certain (additional) professional profiles, etc. Furthermore, as mentioned in the LinkedIn hacks above, new employees or people who got recently promoted to new decision-making positions are more prone to novelties, changes, and testing out different services and solutions. This might be the perfect moment to approach those companies. The same applies to the following filter – Recent Activities.

Recent Activities

As mentioned above, companies that had senior leadership changes in the last 3 months and/or funding events in the past 12 months are more likely to be expanding, testing out different novelties, new solutions, or simply being prone to major changes.

Section: WORKFLOW

Companies In CRM

This filter is available to the Sales Navigator Advanced Plus plan only since it’s the only plan that can be actively synced with your CRM and move important information like leads and accounts from CRM to Sales Navigator. The sync is also enabled to write back specific Sales Navigator information to your CRM. Apply other Sales Navigator filters to the leads and accounts pushed through your CRM.

Saved Accounts

This filter takes into consideration all accounts that you saved. You can use other Sales Navigator filters to narrow down your list to that ideal company and decision-maker profile.

What Are My Saved Accounts?

My Saved Accounts gathers:

All accounts that you saved in different Account lists.
All current companies of the leads that you saved in different Lead lists automatically get saved here too.

This is where you can see My Saved Accounts.

These are your saved accounts.

9 Sales Navigator Account Filter Hacks For Getting B2B Leads

We are about to show you how to use Sales Navigator Account filters to find companies that match your ideal leads and then get through to the decision-makers crucial for your B2B sales process.

While it is true that The Ultimate Lead Generation doesn’t work with Sales Navigator Account filters, once you filter out the Account List through any of the Lead search filters, you can save your results as a Lead List and use it in The Ultimate Lead Generation. We will get to all the options down below.

Hack #1 Make an Account List

Making an Account list will gather your target companies. This is useful for many reasons, such as – you’ll be able to follow what’s new more easily, find employees (and decision-makers) within by using lead filters, keep your ICPs in one place, etc.

This is how you make an Account list.

#1 Set your Sales Navigator Account filters so they get you as close as possible to your ICP. Select all companies or handpick those that match your B2B lead criteria.

#2 Add them to a new or existing Account List here.

Hacks #2 Apply Sales Navigator Lead Filters On A Specific Account List

This hack will help you single out the decision-makers from specific Account lists.

#1 Go to Sales Navigator Lead filters and find the filter Account Lists.

#2 Once you picked other Sales Navigator filters that get you to your Buyer Personas, you can go ahead and reach out one by one, or save them in a Lead List.

Hack #3 Use The “View All Employees” Option

This hack is similar to the previous one, where you get the chance to further filter leads belonging to a specific company. The difference is, that you don’t need to make an Account list, but you hit the “View All Employees” button and use Sales Navigator Lead filters.

#1 Once you narrow down the list of company accounts to your ICP, go ahead and click “View Current Employees”.

#2 It will find all current employees of the first 25 companies, that is of those companies that are on the first page of your search. Once you click “View Current Employees”, Sales Navigator will switch to Lead filters, and this is what your options will look like. As you may see, the Current Company profile will be automatically filled out.

You can either save these leads in a Lead List, narrow them down to decision-makers and then save only those individuals, blacklist certain people from the list (see below), etc.

Hacks #4 Blacklist

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, the exclusion option on Sales Navigator can work as a Blacklist. You can use any filter that supports this option to exclude specific leads and companies, or simply the entire lists from your search.

To exclude employees from certain companies from your search, first, make an Account List as explained above. Then, go to Sales Navigator Lead filters and use the filter named Account lists. Pick the list of companies which employees you wish to blacklist.

If considering a Sales Engagement Platform, The Ultimate Lead Generation allows you to Blacklist leads and companies in a simpler way.

You just need to go to Settings – Blacklist and insert the lead’s full name, email, company name, and company domain.

Hack #5 View Similar

Find a company that matches your Ideal Customer Profile criteria best. Once you’ve found it, click on the three dots in the top right corner.

Choose “View Similar”.

Sales Navigator will find up to 50 LinkedIn company accounts as similar to your Ideal Customer Profile as possible.

Once Sales Navigator has done the research for you, go ahead and save it in an Account List. From here you can further narrow down the leads you want to target.

Hack #6 Saved Search

#1 Set up your Sales Navigator Account filters so they match your ICP criteria. Once you’ve done it, click Save Search. Over time, Sales Navigator will automatically push all LinkedIn accounts as they match the criteria.

#2 Give a name to your Saved Search.

#3 This is where you find your Saved Search. Click here.

#4 This is your Saved account search list. The number that you see is the number of NEW leads only. Click on the number to see who was added to your saved search.

Hack #7 Use Alerts

The Sales Navigator Alerts page is your #1 insight into what’s new, what’s trending, what company is hiring, growing, getting funded, etc., all of the facts that can be valuable for your business and outreach. There are different kinds of alerts and possibilities that you can take advantage of when it comes to this Sales Navigator feature.

All Alerts

#1 Go to the Sales Navigator Home page and choose “Accounts” to see alerts referring to the LinkedIn company pages.

#2 These are the types of alerts you will be seeing for your saved companies. You can learn anything from whether a company is hiring, posted something, if it was mentioned in the news, etc. If someone from an unsaved company viewed your profile, it will be cited in the alerts as well.

You can bookmark specific alerts and go back to them later.

If you are interested only in certain types of alerts, this is where you filter them.

Set your alert preferences by clicking on the cogwheel icon.

It will take you to the page with a list of preferences to choose from. Scroll all the way down to see them all.

My priority accounts

On your right, you will also see the My Priority Accounts option. It gives you a direct insight into the company’s decision-makers, growth, and new decision-makers.

It chooses the top 5 among your saved accounts. The ones you mark as starred will have priority.

Hack #8 Add A Note

Add notes to specific accounts so you always know where you stand with those leads.

Hack #9 Upload A CSV File And Apply Sales Navigator Filters To Your List

This option is available only to Sales Navigator Advance and Advanced Plus. It is particularly useful if you already have a CSV file with a list of companies that represent your B2B leads. Once you upload the file, Sales Navigator will match the data and find the LinkedIn accounts of these companies. You will be able to apply to them all Sales Navigator Account and Lead filters.

#1 Click Create Account List. Then, Upload Accounts from CSV.

#2 Upload your CSV file. The only required column in your CSV file is “Account Name”. Other columns such as LinkedIn Company ID, LinkedIn Company URL, Website URL, etc. are optional, but better if you have them because LinkedIn will more easily find the accounts in question.

The more columns (optional) from the Optional section you have, the higher the chances are that Sales Navigator will match that data with the actual LinkedIn company pages.

#3 Your Account list will be marked as CSV. It works just like a regular Account list. You can use it to filter leads additionally.

Summary

Hopefully, by the end of this blog, you’ve realized the enormous potential of Sales Navigator Account filters to generate B2B leads that turn into prospects.

With the in-depth knowledge of how to use Sales Navigator Account filters, combined with the 9 little-known hacks used by the industry professionals, you can easily hand-pick leads on mass.

Make Account Lists
Apply Sales Navigator Lead Filters to specific Account Lists
Use the View All Employees option
Blacklist certain companies and their employees
Find your ICP companies are click View Similar
Make a Saved Search
Take full advantage of the Alerts Section
Add a note to certain accounts so you don’t forget where you stand
Upload a CSV file to your Sales Navigator and apply its full potential to the leads you already collected.

For more details on how to speed up your outreach process and focus only on building meaningful relationships with your B2B leads and closing the deals, schedule a free demo with our sales representatives that will gladly answer any questions you have.

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