33% Of You Are In The Wrong Industry

When I joined LinkedIn, I was working as an inside sales associate at Parc Place Systems, a developer of object-oriented development environments. My job was to generate leads for the quota'd inside sales team, keep paper in the printer, and bring coffee to the closers and keep Francisco from hogging the paint when we played hoops at lunch. When creating my LinkedIn profile, I naturally chose 'Software Development' as my industry because, well, that's the industry ParcPlace was in. Sound familiar?

But not everyone stays in the same industry. Actors become lawyers , car mechanics become doctors , real estate developers become President, and river raft guides become bankers. According to an EdX survey , since starting work after college, 29% of people have changed their field of work.

Those of you who use Sales Navigator (let's call it SNav) as a core business tool may have wondered at some point whether or not using Industry was finding everyone you were looking for. I know I certainly did.

To answer that question definitively, I looked at 10 top companies each in Venture Capital, Law Firms, Software Development, Biopharma, Airlines and Banking, first using SNav to search for the Company Name in order to get the employee count, and then searching for the Company Name and with the Industry filter set to the Industry the company has categorized itself in.

The overall results:

Venture Capital:

Software Development:

Biopharma:

Law Firms:

Airlines:

Banking:

Predictably, people industries like legal and biopharma--which require more specialized skills--are more likely to be in the same industry as their company because they switch industries less often. Anecdotally, everyone I know who started in pharma is still in it.

Conversely only ~50% of people working at companies in Venture Capital or Software Development are in the same industry as the firm they work at. VC's often work in an industry, get to a mid/large-size exit and then join the VC ranks, and people at software companies have stepped onto that high-growth train from all walks of life.

While this all makes sense, it doesn't make it any easier to use Sales Navigator's search parameters. What I'm trying to tell you is that you'll be chopping yourself at the knees if you rely on SNav's Industry parameters and you'll miss fully one third of your target market. To get around that, I have two suggestions:

1. Use the Industry groupings spreadsheet I put together here. As of March/April 2022 LinkedIn now has over 400 industries, but my Industry groupings spreadsheet groups those 400+ industries into a much smaller group so that you don't have to spend all day hunting for a choosing all the right ones for your SNav search.
2. Rely more on Account-Based Marketing (ABM) lists you have so that rather than searching for prospects by industry, you search for prospects based on lists of Company Names at your disposal.

Sales Navigator has dozens of fundamental limitations, but don't ever settle for one-third less of your market than you are responsible for selling into!