Sales Navigator and Frankenstein Searches: Part 2 - Industries

My Sales Navigator and Frankenstein Searches series shows you how to optimize and assemble all the individual components that comprise one monster of a Sales Navigator search.

Each component is really its own little search project to be fully optimized independently of the other criteria. Then, you combine them into one BIG search like a Frankenstein monster.

In this segment of the Sales Navigator Frankenstein search, I will discuss LinkedIn Industries, which is extremely important (and a little difficult) to understand.

?? 20-Year History

For about 20 years, LinkedIn has used the same list of 147 LinkedIn Industries for users to put into their profiles, companies to put on their company pages, and for use in searches.

Everything changed in 2023, and LinkedIn now offers over 400 Industries for users to choose from. This sounds great, but you must peel the onion back a little to understand and take advantage of it, or you will be searching for things you don't want.

For example, if you search for technology today, you'll find libraries in your search results, but most people aren't looking for librarians in this instance.

?? 5 Levels Deep

Besides the expansion of Industries, there is one substantial fundamental change. The industries are nested inside one another, like a folder system on your computer or in Google Docs. The LinkedIn industry hierarchy sometimes goes as deep as 5 LEVELS.

Selecting only one LinkedIn industry, like Manufacturing, can mean you are selecting over 80 Industries, and they can vary greatly, hence my library example.

Fortunately, LinkedIn and Sales Navigator use the same system, so I speak for both when I speak about this.?

The difference is that Sales Navigator searches can not only include industries but can also exclude them. That's where the gold is to be found.

?? Master Industries

The Master Industries in LinkedIn (and Sales Navigator) includes the following:?

Accommodation and Food Services | Administrative and Support Services | Construction | Consumer Services | Education | Entertainment Providers | Farming, Ranching, Forestry | Financial Services | Government Administration | Holding Companies | Hospitals and Health Care | Manufacturing | Oil, Gas, and Mining | Professional Services | Real Estate and Equipment Rental Services | Retail | Technology, Information and Media | Transportation, Logistics, Supply Chain and Storage | Utilities | Wholesale

All 400+ industries fall into one of these Master Industries, which serve as categories.

?? Big Investment

We spent over 100 hours reverse engineering all of the LinkedIn Industries, recreating the hierarchies, and assembling them into a tremendously helpful database to plan the targeting for our clients and ourselves. We even searched all 400+ to discover how many prospects (individuals and companies) there are for each in North America.

?? The Process Exposed

When you select an industry in Sales Navigator, it shows a green bubble. That bubble has an "x" to the right and a circle slash to the left of the “x” (see below). Using this approach, you can choose to exclude an industry instead of including it. Combine the industries you want with the ones you don't want to zero in on your precise target audience. This image shows you what it looks like.

I must point out that there are two technology industry categories, and one is tucked underneath the other, making it extremely difficult to understand if technology is one of the areas you target (like we do.)

“Technology, Information and Media” is the Master Industry and “Technology, Information and Internet” is actually underneath it. Who would have thought of that?

See Part 1 of my Sales Navigator and Frankenstein Searches series on Locations here.

If you want to master the art of Sales Navigator searches, book a free 30-minute call with me. We can do some “knowledge transfer” and even create a search for you on the call.