Within LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you enter the right keywords. Set the right advanced search filters. Follow all the steps diligently. And press okay.
LinkedIn gives you a clean, polished list of prospects that look like your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP). You then save the list and start running sales and marketing campaigns.
Across businesses, salespeople and business developers use these filters to refine LinkedIn Advanced Search results and build lead lists. But in an overly simplified search market, how do you move past quantity and focus on the best-fit leads?
At AIMS—over the last 6 years—we have spent countless hours on LinkedIn Sales Navigator and curating a well-rounded list of prospects is to-date the most focused undertaking of our lead generation process.
In this article, we talk about the two approaches we take when partnering with startups and enterprises in capturing the full value of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Suggestive Approach
The biggest flaw in LinkedIn prospecting is not that people search wrong. It is that they search exactly the way LinkedIn wants them to. And to some extent it plays out to our benefit.
Type ‘Marketing Head’ in the search bar and you have a neat stack of profiles with the exact industry tag, seniority level and company size you have filtered. Clean, polished and structured. And to be fair, LinkedIn has spent years perfecting these search pathways.
You now have two clean routes to build your lists:
Lead filters, which narrow down people based on title, seniority, geography, function, and keywords.
Account filters, which narrow down companies based on size, industry, funding stage, headcount growth, and more.
On top of this, LinkedIn’s search operators—like the classic Boolean search—have evolved into a precision toolkit. Type “Chief Executive Officer” and you will find profiles with the exact keyword matches.
These tools have made the suggestive approach feel almost foolproof. You click; it complies.
But while the suggestive approach feels efficient, it caps your total addressable audience.
Which makes it a good place to start, but a terrible place to stop.
Sales Navigator filters like geography, company headcount, seniority level work beautifully for the most part. They do what they’re supposed to do: narrow down your search results and help you get closer to your ideal customer.
But anyone who has used them long enough knows they’re far from perfect. They are not outright flawed, but they operate in a grey area—accurate enough to make you trust them, yet superficial enough to leave your lead lists incomplete.
And nowhere is this more deceptive than the Job Titles filter.
Job titles follow no universal standard. Yes, they can be loosely categorized by experience levels—senior, junior, manager, head, director, intern—but beyond those labels, everything becomes subjective and inconsistent. Think of labels like:
- Director of Marketing
- Marketing Director
- Head of Marketing
- Marketing Head
- Head of Digital Marketing
- Digital Marketing Head
- AVP – Growth & Marketing
- Senior Manager – Performance Marketing
All these might represent the same decision-maker, but the titles can look widely different depending on the organizational size and structure.
By relying completely on LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Filters, you risk excluding a category of people who should have been in your ideal customer profile (ICP).
And this isn’t new. Lead search inefficiencies have existed for as long as sales teams have. Now, with the introduction of tools for sales prospecting, the problem has become more systemic, and the gaps have moved upstream.
To break out of that loop and build a complete ICP, you need to stop treating Search as a guided experience and start treating it as an investigative one—expanding beyond the default filters and leaning into exploratory pathways LinkedIn will never surface unless you deliberately force it to.
Investigative Approach
Investigative Approach
If the suggestive approach is LinkedIn showing you what exists, the investigative approach is you digging into LinkedIn to find what else to look for. It is slower, more research-based and that is why it works.
Example: Testing new keywords instead of assuming
While looking for Founders, we stumbled upon a title we hadn’t actively considered: Founder Director. Instead of making assumptions, we simply copy-pasted that exact phrase into LinkedIn’s search bar to check:
Does this title exist in a meaningful volume?
Are the people under this keyword relevant to our ICP?
Although the volume was small, it showed us how differently people list their titles on LinkedIn. If the keyword had been relevant, we would’ve added it to our ICP to broaden the pool for that client.
In a way, you could say that we flipped the script. Instead of relying on LinkedIn to find profiles as per a pre-determined ICP, we used LinkedIn to build a keyword directory of the B2B Buyer Persona. In the below video, we have covered how you can do it too.
Example 2: Finding people of a particular origin, living overseas, using broader search cues
While building a list of Indians settled abroad, we noticed that relying only on platform filters was not enough. To expand our search, we added broader cues to the LinkedIn search bar.
Language
Surnames
Education
This method allowed us to uncover Indians abroad who could be potential hires, customers, partners, or even market entry informants.
Here are a few use cases it can be helpful for:
Agencies looking for clients similar to the one they are working for.
Recruiters looking to connect with talent having specific education and linguistic expertise across the globe.
A business looking for the right talent to establish GCCs in any market.
A student looking to connect with the right people for exploring career paths abroad.
LinkedIn search operators further help you expand this playbook. You can use them in addition to the investigative approach to narrow down your lead list.
AND: Narrows your search results. Use this when you want all conditions to be true in a profile.
Eg: B2B AND Demand Generation
OR: Expands your search. Use this when there are multiple labels for the same function.
Eg: Growth Lead OR Demand Gen Lead OR Performance Marketing Lead
NOT: Excludes irrelevant keywords.Use this to clean your results.
Eg: Product Marketing NOT Intern
() (Parentheses): Combine complex logic.Use this when mixing AND + OR to avoid messy, irrelevant results.
Eg: ( (VP OR Director) AND (Growth OR Marketing) )
Our Approach
Much like most parts of outbound and B2B sales, the lead-generation industry isn’t immune to the Suggestive Approach. Inflated databases, recycled lists, template-driven targeting, forced automation, superficial ICPs—there’s no shortage of shortcuts disguised as “best practices.” But from day one, our approach has been to avoid all this.
For us, thinking from first principles about the client’s business isn’t an afterthought—it’s the core of how we operate, design workflows, and build lead systems.
And it is visible in the way we work.
We don’t rely on purchased databases or scraped lists.
If we can’t defend how a lead entered your pipeline, we don’t add it.
We don’t force-fit automation where it doesn’t belong.
Automation should eliminate friction, not empathy.
We avoid vanity metrics.
More emails, more connections, more sequences—none of it matters unless it results in qualified conversations.
We prioritise context, not shortcuts.
Tools matter, but judgment matters more. ICPs are designed from real business problems, not recycled personas.
Transparency sits at the centre of everything.
We show you the full picture—what your actual Total Addressable Persona looks like and where are they along the pipeline?
Here’s more about our consulting-led approach and lead generation services at AIMs Consulting Services.