Title = 1/2 * Function in Sales Navigator

If you use Sales Navigator regularly, you probably already know that searching by Function generally returns more profile results than searching by Title. To quantify this disparity, I measured how many profile results Sales Navigator returned for the same search, first by Function and then by Title for the following:

• Sales
• Research
• Finance
• Engineering
• Marketing
• Operations

To keep the results manageable I constrained all searches to the San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas.

2 of the 6 sets of Title searches--those for Engineering and Marketing--returned 66.5% as many results as the same Function search. The other 4 Title searches--Sales, Research, Finance and Operations--returned 32.5% as many results as the corresponding Function search.

Takeaway: you're very likely to miss a big part of your target market if you rely on one or few Titles. This is unfortunate because Sales Navigator's search interface makes it beyond tedious to input multiple titles, let alone the 20-50 Titles that you and your team will be aware of if you look through your CRM system.

When SearchQuant.ai launches in October, it'll have its own search interface that will let you cut & paste up to 50 Titles and/or Company Names into it in order to generate the corresponding Sales Navigator query. For those of you who understand how important hyper targeting on Sales Nav is, I think you'll like it.

Here's the Function vs Title dataset: