Best Filters for Creating Targeted Sales Lists

Sales Navigator Tip 2/6 Sales Navigator, one of LinkedIn's premium platforms, has powerful advanced filters that enable sellers to precisely identify their ideal accounts and buyers and who in their network can help them gain access to them. These filters encompass a range of parameters, including company size, industry, job function, seniority level, geographic location, social proximity (1st, 2nd degree, etc.), and more. By leveraging these filters strategically, sellers can create highly targeted lists of buyers that align with their ideal customer profile helping them in the first stages of #deepsales. Benefits of Advanced Filters for Identifying Ideal Accounts 1. Precision Targeting: Advanced filters enable sales professionals to define specific criteria for their ideal accounts, ensuring that they target organizations most likely to benefit from their products or services. 2. Efficient Use of Resources: By narrowing down the pool of potential accounts, sellers and teams can allocate their time and resources more effectively, focusing on high-value opportunities with the greatest likelihood of success. 3. Increased Relevance: Tailoring outreach efforts to prospects that match certain criteria increases the relevance of messaging, leading to higher response rates and engagement. 4. Better Alignment with Sales Strategy: Advanced filters allow sales teams to align their prospecting efforts with their overall sales strategy, whether targeting specific industries, geographic regions, or company sizes. In addition to targeting ideal accounts, Sales Navigator's advanced filters can also help sales professionals identify the key decision-makers within those organizations. By filtering prospects based on job function, seniority level, and other relevant criteria, sales teams can pinpoint the individuals who have the authority and influence to make purchasing decisions. Sales Navigator's advanced filters empower sales professionals to streamline their prospecting efforts, target high-value opportunities, and drive meaningful connections with their ideal accounts and buyers. By harnessing the power of advanced filters, you can take your prospecting strategy to new heights and unlock a world of possibilities for business growth.

If you sell to niche / hyper targeted personas, traditional data tools alone aren't going to cut it. Most sales folks have used LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but have you heard of its little brother, LinkedIn Sales Insights (LSI)? It's only been around since 2021 and I only started using it this year, but it can be a game changer to help you build an accurate list of accounts in your SOM (serviceable obtainable market). A couple examples of how I've used it: 🎯 Selling to a hyper-targeted persona. Let's say you want to find every company within a certain revenue, headcount, or geography range that has a distinct team for AI/ML research. You can build that out as a "persona" within LSI, and use any combination of title keywords that you can imagine. ⚖ A/B testing personas. Let's say you've made a bet on selling to AI/ML personas, but you also want to find out how many of those companies ALSO have DevOps teams with over 10 members. LSI can help you find those so you can hyper-target the right account list for A/B testing your messaging, without having to build separate contact-level searches first in Sales Navigator. 👨🔧 Sourcing contacts once you've narrowed down your target account list LSI lets you export your account list to Sales Navigator, so now you can simply add a filter in a contact-level Sales Navigator search to ONLY search for individuals within the account list you've built and specified in LSI. This is basically like Sales Navigator on steroids, because now you don't need to click through pages of results of contacts from accounts that don't match your EXACT ICP, trying to find the hidden gems. A practical example of this is selling to software companies - Sales Nav will let you filter by industry such as "Internet," "Computer Software," "Information Technology," etc. But let's say you DON'T want to sell to IT consultants. Well, with the traditional method in Sales Navigator, all those consultants will still show up in your search results and you'll have to manually sift them out. With LSI, you can simply build out a persona excluding those titles, port the results over to Sales Nav, and then search from a subset of accounts that is filtered with much greater precision. As a bonus, LSI can also assist with CRM sync and refreshing account firmographic data, allowing you to add custom SFDC fields for things like number of employees matching your target persona, that get updated in realtime as prospects switch companies. Finally, LSI is great for companies with small RevOps teams because it's easy enough that a non-technical manager or rep can act as an admin on their own. Anyone else have experience with LSI and discover any useful tricks? #LinkedIn #sales #sass #prospecting #sdr #salesdevelopment #revops

The key to leveraging LinkedIn and Sales Navigator effectively is to combine your creativity with the power of their data. Every search you create, for example, is a chance to tell a story about how you are going to help your customers.  The search parameters are a step-by-step narrative that walks you towards the right conversations with the right people at the right time. Here’s a Sales Navigator process for helping to uncover green field opportunities at new accounts. 1. Go to the Accounts search filters. 2. Add in the industries you want to sell into (suggest keeping this as focused as possible). 3. Scroll through the Headcount Size filter to find the department you sell into and set a minimum number (so that you aren’t selling into one-person departments). 4. Scroll through the Headcount Growth filter to find the department that you sell into and set a minimum growth target.  This doesn’t have to be super-high, but it should be meaningful.  Let’s say at least 15-20%. 5. SAVE THIS SEARCH!  (This is the key because now you are going to be drip-fed companies that are in a growth phase every week). 6. Now the hard part – don’t immediately spam people there.  Instead, create a compelling outreach campaign on how what you sell is going to help departments that are growing.  Is it efficiency, communication, etc?  Create collateral and material that supports that narrative. 7. Save these accounts to an account list. 8. Use the Relationship Explorer to see what potential inroads you have at that Account. 9. And/or - Use that account list as one of your search filters in the Leads Search page to identify decision-makers and influencers at that account. 10. Now start your outreach. And as companies go in and out of growth spurts, you’ll have a steady stream of new prospects that are being fed to you by the system. Instead of blind and cold outreach, you’ll have cold outreach that is super-focused.  For example, you could say, “I know that the sales team has grown by almost 25% lately.  One growing pain I’ve seen with high-growth teams is _____, and here’s how we help orgs solve for that.” There are many stories you can tell with Sales Navigator searches, this is just one of many.  They key is to dig in and find what works for you. Alexander T. Beck  Alexander Low  Alex Coop Sophie Peremans Bas Belfi Kicki Bjorkvall Alistair Dickinson #Deepsales for the win. #linkedIn #socialselling #outreach

Your goal when list building should be to have the highest percentage of accurate data. Seems obvious... But most lists are only 60%-80% accurate. Think about what that means... Before you even start your sequence, 20%-40% of your list has no chance of converting. And I’m not just talking about accurate emails and phone numbers. But also accurate job titles and account types. For example, if you want to build a list of SaaS companies, you'll probably use the “Software” or “Tech” industry filters. But a good amount of those accounts won’t be SaaS unless you filter it down further. Now let’s say you want to find the VPs of Sales at those accounts. Even if you filter for “VP of Sales” your list will still have Area VPs, Regional VPs, and Fractional VPs. So how do you ensure your list is 90%+ accurate? Use keywords and exclusions. This is why I build the majority of my lists in Apollo.io. When I first build my list, I look at the results it gives me and add exclusions for the irrelevant job titles that are still appearing in my search. Then I keep doing that until all I see are accurate job titles. I do the same for the industry: exclude irrelevant industries and add keywords like “SaaS” to ensure the account type is as accurate as possible. This is the easiest way to increase reply rate without changing ANYTHING about your messaging. What other list-building tips do you have? #sales #apollopartner