How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A 10-Step Prospecting Guide

Learning how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator is not about memorizing menus. It is a sequence: decide who you are looking for, build a search that returns exactly those people, secure the result, and only then reach out. This guide walks you through that sequence in ten steps, from the first search to a booked meeting. Every step links to the matching article in our Sales Navigator knowledge base, so you can go deeper wherever you need to.

Whether Sales Navigator is worth the money is a different question, and we answer it in our overview All features and plans at a glance. This article is only about one thing: how to use it well for prospecting. Last updated: 29 September 2026. Every LinkedIn statement comes from the help pages linked in the text, every CompLeadly statement from the linked knowledge base articles.

How to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: the short answer

The ten steps in one paragraph: define your ideal customer, find matching companies with the account search, filter the decision makers inside those companies with the lead search, sharpen the search with Boolean operators, save the search, build a lead list, use signals such as job changes and posts, warm people up with a profile visit and a follow, only then connect or send an InMail, and follow up after a few days without a reply. Stick to the order and you will contact fewer people and get more replies.

Prerequisites: subscription and profile

You need an active Sales Navigator subscription. LinkedIn offers Core, Advanced and Advanced Plus. All three include what LinkedIn calls “50+ advanced search filters” and 50 InMails per month; the buyer intent filters are only available in Advanced and Advanced Plus. Source: LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Compare plans and LinkedIn Help: Sales Navigator search filters (a1452817), retrieved 29 September 2026. Which plan fits you and what it costs is covered in the overview, not here.

The second prerequisite is your profile. Everyone you contact in steps 8 and 9 looks at your profile first and decides within seconds whether to reply. Your headline, About section and photo need to match your offer before you send the first request. If you want help with that, our Headline Generator and Summary Generator are free.

Step 1: Define your ideal customer profile

The most common mistake in Sales Navigator prospecting is starting with the filters. Filters are the tool, not the goal. Before you set a single one, write down the answers to three questions: Which companies buy from you (industry, size, region)? Which role there makes the buying decision (function, seniority)? And how do you recognize that the timing is right (job postings, growth, a job change)?

The answers form your ideal customer profile, or ICP. If you have never written one down, use our free ICP Generator: it turns product, price, target market and your best customers into a customer profile with roles and buying triggers that you then translate into filters. For a walkthrough of the Sales Navigator interface and which connection degrees to pick for new contacts, watch the video in the knowledge base article Tutorial: Introduction to the use of Sales Navigator.

Step 2: Account search, finding the right companies

Sales Navigator has two separate searches: one for companies (accounts) and one for people (leads). Start with the companies. It sounds like a detour, but it saves time, because company criteria such as revenue or growth are only available in the account search.

According to LinkedIn, the account filters are: “Annual revenue”, “Company headcount”, “Company headcount growth” (last 12 months), “Headquarters location”, “Industry”, “Number of followers”, “Department headcount”, “Department headcount growth”, “Fortune”, “Job opportunities”, “Recent activities”, “Connection”, “Buyer intent”, “Companies in CRM”, “Saved accounts” and “Account lists”. Source: LinkedIn Help: Sales Navigator search filters (a1452817), retrieved 29 September 2026.

Three are enough to start: “Industry”, “Company headcount” and “Headquarters location”. Add “Company headcount growth” if your offer depends on companies that are growing. Save the result as an account list. That list is the key to the next step: in the lead search you select it as a filter and only get people from exactly those companies. The knowledge base article How you can use employees from Sales Navigator account searches shows how.

Step 3: Lead filters that narrow down the decision makers

Now switch to the lead search. LinkedIn groups the lead filters into categories. The most important ones to begin with:

• Company: “Current company”, “Past company”, “Company headcount”, “Company type”, “Company headquarters location”.
• Role: “Function”, “Current job title”, “Seniority level”, “Past job title”, “Years in current company”, “Years in current position”.
• Personal: “Geography”, “Industry”, “First name”, “Last name”, “Profile language”, “Years of experience”, “Groups”, “School”.
• Recent updates: “Changed jobs” (in the last 90 days), “Posted on LinkedIn” (in the last 30 days).
• Workflow: “Persona”, “Account lists”, “Lead lists”, “People in CRM”, “People you interacted with”, “Saved leads and accounts”.

Source: LinkedIn Help: Sales Navigator search filters (a1452817), retrieved 29 September 2026.

A combination that works well in practice: “Account lists” (your list from step 2), “Seniority level” set to the decision-making level, “Function” set to the department that has the problem you solve, and “Profile language” set to the language you write in. Set the connection degree to 2nd and 3rd, because you are already connected to 1st-degree contacts.

Two filters deserve a closer look. “Category interest” shows people who, according to LinkedIn, may be interested in a product category; it is not included in every license. And “Posted on LinkedIn” narrows the results to people who have published something in the last 30 days, which means they are active and more likely to read messages. Both are explained in the knowledge base article Sales Navigator: Find interested leads through product categories, and in more depth in our post Sales Navigator: How to find targeted leads by interests.

Step 4: Boolean search that hits job titles precisely

The “Current job title” filter accepts free text, and this is where care pays off. A “Head of Sales” is a “Sales Director” at the next company and a “VP Sales” at the one after that. Boolean operators catch every spelling in a single search. LinkedIn supports AND, OR and NOT, and the operators must be typed in uppercase. Wildcard searches with “*” are not supported. The operators work in the company, title and keyword fields, with a limit of about 15 search operators. Source: LinkedIn Help: Boolean search in Sales Navigator (a168061), retrieved 29 September 2026.

An example for the title field: ("Head of Sales" OR "Sales Director" OR "VP Sales" OR "Chief Revenue Officer") NOT Assistant. Use straight quotation marks ("); according to LinkedIn, Sales Navigator does not recognize curly ones. Put multi-word terms in quotation marks, otherwise LinkedIn searches for the words separately. If you would rather not write the syntax by hand, our free Boolean Search Generator builds it for you.

Then comes the step almost everyone skips: checking the size of the result. Sales Navigator shows 25 results per page and a maximum of 100 pages, which means 2,500 contacts, even when the result counter shows a higher number. This is not a LinkedIn statement but our observation from daily use; LinkedIn does not publish a figure in its help pages. Our recommendation: set the filters so that a search returns fewer than 2,500 results, and split larger audiences by region. Why this also matters for InMails is explained in the knowledge base article Why you should have fewer than 2,500 results in Sales Navigator.

Step 5: Save the search and get alerts

A good search is work, and you do not want to repeat it every week. So save it. According to LinkedIn, you can save a total of 50 lead searches and 50 account searches. From then on you receive weekly emails and alerts on your Sales Navigator homepage when new people or companies match your criteria. You can also share saved searches with colleagues. Source: LinkedIn Help: Saved searches in Sales Navigator (a102024), retrieved 29 September 2026.

Those alerts are the real value of a saved search: every week the new matches come to you without you searching. For automation there is one catch you should know about. A search saved inside Sales Navigator has a short URL containing “savedSearch”; it does not carry the filters. If you want to reuse the audience in a tool such as CompLeadly, you need the long URL with all filter parameters. The knowledge base article Save saved lead searches from Sales Navigator in CompLeadly shows how to get it.

Step 6: Build a lead list

A search and a list are two different things. The search delivers new matches every week. The lead list is your deliberate selection from it: the people you actually want to contact in the coming weeks. You go through the results, open the profiles, check them against your ICP from step 1 and save only the ones that fit. Afterwards you find the list under “Leads”, and in the lead search it is available as the “Lead lists” filter (LinkedIn Help a1452817, see above).

One thing many people only notice when they cancel: lead lists live inside Sales Navigator. End the subscription and they are gone. So back the list up outside. With CompLeadly you do that through the profile export function, which stores the contacts of the list as an Excel file. The knowledge base article Saving lead lists from Sales Navigator to CompLeadly describes the process.

Step 7: Use signals that show the right moment

Up to this point you know who fits. Now it is about when to reach out. Sales Navigator gives you three signals you can use directly in the search.

Job changes: the “Changed jobs” filter shows people who changed positions in the last 90 days. Someone new in a role is reviewing vendors and has no fixed suppliers yet. Posts: “Posted on LinkedIn” shows people who published something in the last 30 days. The post doubles as your reason to reach out. Hiring: the account filter “Job opportunities” shows companies with open positions posted on LinkedIn. A company hiring in sales has growth on its plan right now. Source for all three filters: LinkedIn Help: Sales Navigator search filters (a1452817), retrieved 29 September 2026.

What Sales Navigator does not have is a filter for the “#hiring” frame on a profile photo. That frame is only displayed on LinkedIn itself, not in Sales Navigator. If those are exactly the people you want, use the keyword field of the regular LinkedIn search with the term “hiring”. The knowledge base article Search for contacts on LinkedIn who are looking for employees or have #hiring in their profile picture shows the way.

Step 8: Connect, but in the right order

A cold connection request to someone who has never seen your name is the weakest form of outreach. A three-stage order works better: first you visit the profile. Your visit may show up in the contact's list of profile viewers, depending on how you have set your profile viewing options. A few days later you follow the person. Your name shows up a second time without you asking for anything. Only then do you send the connection request. By that point your name is familiar and the request no longer feels cold.

Whether the request needs a note depends on context. If you found one of the person's posts in step 7, one sentence about it is the best note you can write. If not, a request without text is often better than a generic line. With CompLeadly the three-stage order can be automated with a fixed gap between the stages: two visit-and-follow sequences and one connect sequence, scheduled through the calendar. The knowledge base article How to use Visit & Follow explains the visit-and-follow function.

Step 9: Use InMail deliberately

InMail is the message to people you are not connected with. In Sales Navigator you get 50 InMail credits per month, the same in every plan. Unused credits transfer to the following month, you can accumulate up to 150, and each credit must be used within 90 days. For every InMail that receives a response within 90 days of being sent you get the credit back; the quick replies “Interested”, “Maybe later” and “Not interested” count as well. An InMail with no response costs you the credit. Source: LinkedIn Help: InMail credits in Sales Navigator (a101030), retrieved 29 September 2026.

The strategy follows from that: do not treat InMail as a mass channel, but reserve it for the leads where connecting does not work or the timing is pressing. Two rules from the same LinkedIn source are worth knowing. If you send a second InMail to the same person before receiving a response, another credit is used. And you can only edit or delete an InMail within 60 minutes of sending it. Subject line and body can have up to 200 and 2,000 characters respectively. Source: LinkedIn Help: InMail messages FAQ (a554514), retrieved 29 September 2026.

Part of your audience you can reach without any credits: Premium members with Open Profile enabled. CompLeadly's Auto-InMail function distinguishes between free InMails to Open Profiles and InMails from your credit balance; the knowledge base article Tutorial: Auto-InMail function shows how to set it up. What an InMail is exactly and when it beats a connection request is covered in our post What is LinkedIn InMail? Meaning, credits and InMail vs. message.

Step 10: Follow up without pressure

Most replies do not come on the first message. That makes the follow-up not an optional step but the one that books the meetings. The rule: after the connection is accepted, send a short opener that refers to the trigger from step 7. If there is no reply, a second, shorter nudge follows a few days later with one concrete offer, such as a 15-minute call. As soon as there is a reaction, the sequence stops. More than two follow-ups without a reply rarely achieve anything; then the timing is wrong, not the person.

You can test which gaps and how many stages fit your case with the free Outreach Sequence Planner. For the message itself: write it in the LinkedIn chat, not in the Sales Navigator inbox, because messages there are seen more often and are stored permanently. If you get stuck at any step, the whole Sales Navigator knowledge base is sorted by topic.

The same process for recruiting and job seekers

The ten steps are not limited to sales. In recruiting your ICP is a candidate profile: role, experience, region, language. The account search becomes the list of companies you would like to hire from. The filters “Years in current position” and “Changed jobs” tell you who might be open to a move right now. If you work with Recruiter Lite instead of Sales Navigator, the process stays the same, only the search changes. CompLeadly uses Recruiter Lite searches, pipelines and saved audiences as the source for the same workflows. The difference between Recruiter Lite and Recruiter is covered in LinkedIn Recruiter cost: Lite or Recruiter?, and the recruiting use case is on the page CompLeadly for recruiters.

As a job seeker you turn the process around. Your ICP is the company you want to work for, the account search with the “Job opportunities” filter shows you who is hiring right now, and in the lead search you find the team lead and the recruiters of that company. Visit the profile, follow, connect, then a short message referring to the position: it is the same path a salesperson takes, just with a different goal. It also works without Sales Navigator using the regular people search, as the knowledge base article Targeting audiences on LinkedIn without using Sales Navigator shows.

What CompLeadly automates out of the ten steps

Steps 1 to 4 remain thinking work. Who you are, who you are looking for and what the search looks like is your call. From step 5 onwards CompLeadly takes over the repetition, using your own Sales Navigator license on your own computer:

• Create an audience from your Sales Navigator search, saved search or lead list, by link or directly in the audience builder with the same filters. The difference between the short savedSearch link and the full search link is explained in the knowledge base article Difference between a savedSearch and a regular Sales Navigator audience.
• Split audiences with more than 2,500 results and work through them one after another, with a progress indicator per audience (How you can use more than 2,500 results in Sales Navigator with CompLeadly).
• Visit, follow and connect with a fixed gap, then an opener after acceptance and a follow-up after a number of days without a reply that you define; the sequence stops at the first reaction.
• Auto-InMail split into Open Profiles without credits and InMails from your balance, with a daily limit and a time window.
• Back up lead lists as an Excel file so they are not lost when the subscription ends.

All features, including which plan each one is part of, are on the Features page. You can try CompLeadly free for 10 days, no credit card required. Why the order of the steps matters more than the tool is the subject of our post Sales Navigator won't get you customers without this system.