LinkedIn's Missing Functions

When using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find your B2B prospects, there are two ways to target specific functional roles - by Title or by Function. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages:

Targeting by job title rewards you for thinking of all the possible titles you're looking for, but for practical purposes this is impossible. First, no one has the time or ability to think of all the possible job titles they want to target. Second, the Sales Navigator search interface doesn't let you paste in lists of titles, which means you have to laboriously type in each title one after the other.

Targeting by job function in theory lets you find everyone who works in a particular functional area, without missing people for lack of awareness of the variety of titles people have. Many people I know use this approach thinking it returns all results in a given company, industry or geographic region.

Turns out this is not the case.

I measured the total number of LinkedIn users in several geographies, and for each geography also measured the number of people in the Sales Navigator search result for each of LinkedIn's 26 functions. What I found is that results vary widely be geography:

Whereas in San Diego (where I live) 100% of LinkedIn users can be found by function, only 87% of Silicon Valley users can be found by a function, 72% in North American, 67% in Europe, 51% in Asia and 63% worldwide.