Save Time by Cleaning Up Your LinkedIn and Sales Navigator Searches

The secret to efficient searches on LinkedIn is more than simply finding people. It is in excluding certain folks that accidentally get “caught in the net”. You can do some of this with ordinary LinkedIn.com (Free and Premium $60/mo), but you can do very sophisticated excluding with Sales Navigator, the sales-specific version of LinkedIn ($80/mo). Let me show you...

There are many aspects to focus on when including and excluding your top targets and ONLY your top targets. I will specifically cover the job title field in this example. You have seen this before, right?

CEO OR President

It misses a lot of important people you probably want (e.g. Founder) and it brings in a lot of other people that you might not want (fraternity president). It also takes a lot of time to sift through such a broad and sometimes "dirty" search.

The Key is the NOT

The steps you take to “Include” certain job titles can be used to “Exclude” them as well. LinkedIn lets you use up to 6 titles or title phrases (with quotes around them) to get specific about what job titles are good for you. The OR and NOT must always be in ALL CAPS. I suggest you put the rest in lowercase as shown as it makes it easier to understand, but it is irrelevant in how it works.

For example:

president OR ceo OR founder NOT vp NOT “vice president”

The limitations become apparent quickly as you realize how much more room is needed. Breaking one search up into multiple searches is not productive.?

Sales Navigator

In the very same example, Sales Navigator provides the capacity you need to get far closer to your ideal targets. It has an included title list that uses the familiar OR command vs the less familiar NOT command and it can include as many as 100 titles or title phrases (vs free/premium LinkedIn’s limit of 6 titles or phrases).

president OR ceo OR “chief executive officer” OR “managing partner” OR founder OR co-founder OR cofounder OR owner OR visionary

Sales Navigator goes even further with a little known feature called “Exclude”. Here you create a similar list of titles you DO NOT want. You would be surprised at the odd words that appear in the job title field and most are disqualifying. See below for the reason why.

For example:

“vice president” OR vp OR vice OR “v.p.” OR evp OR svp OR director OR manager OR architect OR engineer OR associate OR assistant OR juggler OR former

This is what it looks like in Sales Navigator. Each can have 100 titles and phrases plus you can have MULTIPLE sets. It’s seemingly endless in its capacity for precision.?

We use it internally for our clients with special includes and excludes. These come from our own experience scrubbing LinkedIn search results using Sales Navigator Lead Lists, which I will cover next.

Why Exclude

Most of the targets that get caught up wrongly in this process have multiple current jobs or no start or stop date to their jobs. They get “caught in the net” of a search that they don’t really qualify for, but the LinkedIn search can’t differentiate this (yet).

So, use this technique to include the titles you want most and exclude those that you don’t want. Still, many will get pulled into the results by accident.?This simply can't be helped in LinkedIn alone.

Use Sales Navigator if you feel you need more power and really want to take advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. You can usually get a free month if you want to give it a thorough test drive. There are over 30 filters in Sales Navigator, and we only talked about one here. Imagine the possibilities!

Learn More

Find great free resources to improve your searches, make sense of your inbox, plan and run campaigns, create LinkedIn articles and posts and more at IntegratedAlliances.com. You can also book a free call to discuss your individual needs.

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