How to Successfully Find 10K Prospects on LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With over 900 million users, it’s safe to say that LinkedIn is full of high-quality prospects However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be difficult to find qualified leads. That’s why we’ve put together this short guide on how to target 10K contacts, split the contacts, and manage each contact either by yourself, with automation tools, or alongside your sales team.

Using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator To Search For Contacts

Searching for contacts on LinkedIn can be a daunting task. Thankfully, LinkedIn offers multiple search filters to refine your search so that you can see only relevant contacts. Some of these filters include location, job title, company size, industry, and plenty more. However, since the LinkedIn network is so large, oftentimes search results show up in the thousands.

Though LinkedIn displays a big number of contacts, it only allows you to see up to 1,000 contacts (with 25 contacts on each page) per search. LinkedIn blocks all search results after 1,000 contacts.

So how do you view all the other contacts and connect with them? Well, a simple spreadsheet-based system can solve this puzzle. With a little creativity using the Sales Navigator’s search filters, this system will help you create multiple campaigns for prospecting (especially if you’re using an automation tool like We-Connect). This method will free up a lot of time, so you can focus more on engaging with leads and closing deals.

Of course, this isn’t the only method we recommend while using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Here are three more techniques we use and

8 Steps To Generate 10K Prospects on a LinkedIn Search

In this example, we use a search with the job title “Marketing Manager” in the “United States” to illustrate the strategy.

Here’s what we did:

Step 1: Search Your the Total Addressable Market (TAM) on LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator

In your Sales Navigator search, hover your cursor on the “advanced tab” and click “search for Leads”. In the window that pops up, select “geography” region as “United States,” and “Title” as “Marketing Manager.”

My search for “Marketing Manager” in the “United States” shows up 320,343 contacts.

Step 2: Add Search Filters To Narrow Your Contacts

The search number 320,343 is too big and is bound to include people that are not relevant to your search. For example, if you want to target Marketing Managers from the “Computer Software Industry,” the total contacts drops down to 12,012.

Depending on the campaign you’re trying to run, you’ll want to decide if you want to target 1st-degree connections. If you’re running a “invite contact” campaign (to connect with someone on LinkedIn), you’ll want to make sure that you do not invite 1st-degree connections. Therefore, select 2nd and 3rd-degree connections along with Group members.

Step 3: Create a Spreadsheet to Track Contacts on LinkedIn

The number of 12,012 seems manageable. However, you can’t reach out or save searches of all 12,000 on LinkedIn – only 1,000 at a time. To narrow things down, you can filter your search even more. Before you start though, put this data into a spreadsheet so that you can remember all the criteria and data.

Let’s create a spreadsheet containing all the search filters from Sales Navigator as column headers along with the number of contacts. See the format below:

Step 4: Narrow Down the Geography

The easiest way to break down this list further is to filter by individual states in the USA. To do this, we recommend starting an individual search on each state and writing the total number of contacts in your spreadsheet.

For example, remove the “United States” from the Geography and selected “Massachusetts” instead. Sales Navigator shows me 888 contacts.

Step 5: Create Small Geographical Units.

Repeat the above step for each state you want to target and write the number of contacts in the spreadsheet.

In the example below we searched for 12 states and got a total of 7,619 contacts. You could keep adding more states until you reach a number closer to 12k or you can stick with the 7k. For this example, we stopped at 7k.

This spreadsheet format is scalable as you can add more states or pick other industries. And, you will never run into a situation of targeting the same contacts twice. While you can stop here and start running your campaigns with lists close to 1,000 contacts, we’ve added two more steps to make things easier for you.

Step 6: Assign Campaign Numbers

Next, let’s assign campaign numbers to each data set of 1,000 or lesser contacts. For example, Massachusetts and Texas both have close to 1,000 contacts each. Therefore, we can assign campaign #1 to Massachusetts and campaign #2 to Texas. Similarly, you can create a combined campaign #3 for Florida, Illinois & Pennsylvania as their total equals 972. See below how I created 5 distinct campaigns from the same segment.

Step 7: Add Another Search Filter (If Required)

Notice that California has 3,479 contacts. However, to start a successful campaign, it needs to have less than 1,000 contacts. To do so, you can add another filter. In this example, we filtered by “company size.” LinkedIn provides some standard size ranges based on the number of employees for each company. You can select the company size that you think is relevant to you. For example, we selected all options other than “Self Employed” and “1-10”.  See below, how we assigned campaign numbers 6, 7, and 9 for California.

I have now been able to create 9 separate campaigns for targeting 7,619 contacts.

Step 8: Convert Your Spreadsheet Into an Actionable Dashboard

Let’s add some additional columns to the spreadsheet to monitor the campaigns. If you have a team, you can add a column for team members and assign campaigns to them. Your team members can then create the respective campaigns in their We-Connect account. You can also add a “campaign status” column to track active and pending campaigns. Similarly, start date, end date, and comments can be helpful columns.

Finally, you can add some colors to highlight what needs your attention and when. See below how a simple spreadsheet has transformed into an actionable dashboard.

Conclusion

In the above example, we used a total of 4 search filters (location, industry, job title, and company headcount) to create a list of 7,000 prospects. However, you’ve got a lot more than four search filters to choose from. In fact, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator offers a total of 26 different types of filters – all of which you can use to identify and narrow down your target audience. Similarly, you can customize the format of your spreadsheet based on the search filters.

Manual prospecting takes time. That’s why we recommend using automation tools – like We-Connect. We connect automates all you prospecting from initial contact, follow-up messages, and auto-inviting. To try the tool for 14 days free, click here.