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Title drift
The same job is Head of Growth here, Growth Lead there, VP Marketing next door, so title text alone drops most of your market. Search seniority plus function, which LinkedIn normalises.
Nearly every LinkedIn prospecting guide online is published by a company selling a scraper, an email-finder or an automation sequencer, and it ends where its product begins. This one covers the step they hurry past — the finding: building a search that returns people you would genuinely contact, and turning it into a queue you work weekly.
Prospecting has three jobs: deciding who, finding them, contacting them. This page owns the middle one. Buyer definition sits on the lead generation hub; messaging on LinkedIn outreach.
LinkedIn is a trademark of LinkedIn Corporation. Searcora Digital Ltd is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or officially partnered with LinkedIn unless stated otherwise.
Prospecting is the repeatable identification of people who plausibly have the problem you solve, sit close enough to the decision to act, and can be reached. It is a search-design discipline before a communication one.
That rules things out. Buying a list is purchasing somebody else’s stale guess. Firing connection requests at everyone holding a job title is a volume habit dressed as strategy. Messaging happens after prospecting has succeeded or failed.
The output is a finite population of named people. If you cannot state it in a sentence, you are not prospecting yet.
Measure a search by the share of results you would genuinely contact, not by how many rows came back.
People move, firms get acquired, roles get renamed. A quarterly list is wrong before you work it.
The result count is a vanity metric. Four thousand results is not four thousand opportunities — it is a search you will never finish and cannot learn from.
Work back from capacity. Approach twenty-five people a week and a quarter is three hundred, so two to six hundred names is a working search. Far above that is under-specified; under fifty means a filter has excluded your market. Three failure modes cause most of it.
The same job is Head of Growth here, Growth Lead there, VP Marketing next door, so title text alone drops most of your market. Search seniority plus function, which LinkedIn normalises.
Headcount and industry come from company pages and members’ own profiles. A firm that doubled last year may still be banded as it was. Treat both as approximations.
Geography reflects where the member says they are, which after years of remote work is often not where the company is. If the business location matters, filter the account.
Then run the test almost nobody runs. Sample twenty. Open twenty results at random — not the first twenty, which are ordered in your favour — and mark each as someone you would genuinely contact. Fourteen or more, work it. Ten to thirteen, tighten a filter. Below ten, do not work the list.
Sales Navigator exposes dozens of lead and account filters. A handful carry nearly all the weight, and the order you apply them matters more than people expect.
| Filter | Why it carries weight | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Seniority level | Decides whether they can act, escalate or only advise. | Set first. Take two bands: the buyer and whoever briefs them. |
| Function or department | Normalised across companies, so it survives title drift. | Pair with seniority: the backbone of a workable search. |
| Company headcount | The best single proxy for budget, process and pain. | Band deliberately: 11–50 and 201–500 are different products. |
| Geography | Governs timezone, language and whether you can serve them. | Add the account filter when the office matters. |
| Changed jobs recently | The strongest timing signal on the platform. | Apply last, as a slice, never as the search itself. |
| Keywords and boolean | Finds problems and tools no structured filter describes. | Use for how buyers describe their work, not titles. |
| Exclusions | Keeps saved, viewed and contacted people out of results. | Leave on permanently. Stops searches recycling faces. |
What each filter does, and how lead search differs from account search, is on what Sales Navigator is; tier differences are on Core vs Advanced. This page covers order and judgement.
Free LinkedIn gives a shorter list: keyword, location, current company, industry, connection degree. You can prospect with that. What you cannot do is separate a Head of Operations at a forty-person firm from one at a four-thousand-person firm.
Systematic prospecting on a free account ends the same way for everyone: search stops returning people, part-way through a month, with no warning you noticed.
That is the commercial use limit — a monthly cap on searching and out-of-network profile viewing, aimed precisely at the behaviour described here. Ordinary networking rarely trips it; working a population of strangers weekly trips it reliably. It resets on the 1st, LinkedIn publishes no number, and support cannot lift it. Which plans raise it is on the commercial use limit page.
The cap punishes sloppy searching hardest: every profile opened to check relevance spends a view a tighter filter would have saved. Whether a seat earns its cost is argued on is Sales Navigator worth it, with the arithmetic on the ROI calculator.
Saving a search is not a bookmark. It is a standing question that reports back, and a lead list is the queue you work from. Search is where you think; the list is where you work.
A search re-runs live, so results shift underneath you and nothing records who you already assessed. A list is static.
Name it as a sentence — Ops leaders, 50–200, UK, manufacturing. If you cannot, it is not defined well enough to save.
A saved search reports who newly entered it. That trickle — a handful weekly, not hundreds — is the most valuable output here: entering the population means something changed.
Every new result gets a decision the first time you see it: onto a list, or gone. “Undecided” means re-reading the same profile four times.
A list is a batch you will approach with one angle over a few weeks, not a permanent database. Past roughly 250 names it is an archive, not a queue.
Closed, moved on, or silent for a quarter — all come off. A list you trust gets worked; one full of dead entries gets avoided, and that avoidance is what people call prospecting not working.
Teams running several loops across client accounts have extra seat questions, covered on Sales Navigator for agencies.
A filter says someone matches a description. Qualification asks whether contacting them this week is sensible. Ninety seconds each, and it separates prospecting from spraying.
| Check | Looking for | Fails if |
|---|---|---|
| Still in the role | A current position with a plausible start date. | The role ended, or nothing updated in years. |
| Company still fits | The employer really is the size your filter claimed. | Acquired, wound down, or the band is stale. |
| Decision surface | They own the outcome, the budget, or brief whoever does. | Title looks right, scope sits elsewhere. |
| A reason now | New role, hiring push, funding, a relevant post. | Nothing changed — write anyway, expect less. |
| A route in | A mutual connection, shared group, prior interaction. | No route — not fatal, but harder. |
| Reachability | Posts, comments or reactions in recent months. | Dormant for years — a perfect fit who never logs in is not a prospect. |
Two disqualifiers should be automatic: three or four weeks into a new role is too early, and a profile silent for a year will not read you however well you write. Diary both.
Prospecting fails more often from irregularity than bad technique. Here is a week that fits around a real job, split so no block is long enough to postpone.
| When | Task | Time | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Read what saved searches returned; triage each name. | 20 min | 5–15 candidates |
| Tuesday | Qualification block one, down the list. | 40 min | ~20 assessed |
| Wednesday | Refine one search: sample twenty, adjust a filter. | 30 min | A better population |
| Thursday | Qualification block two, plus a signals pass. | 40 min | ~20 more assessed |
| Friday | Prune the closed, moved and silent. | 20 min | A list you trust |
| Weekly total | ~2h 30m | 25–40 qualified people | |
Add an hour for writing the approaches. These are workload figures, not outcome promises: replies vary enormously by market, offer and season, and any reply rate quoted before knowing what you sell is a guess.
One rule holds throughout: prospecting and messaging must not share a block. When they do, finding gets cut short so sending can happen, and you end up writing to whoever is nearest rather than whoever is right.
A signal is not a reason to buy. It is a reason to believe someone is thinking about your area now — a smaller and more useful claim.
| Signal | Why it matters | Useful for | The trap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job change | New arrivals audit what they inherited. | Weeks 4–16 | Weeks 1–3: too early, and everyone messages then. |
| Funding round | Budget, plus a mandate to spend it. | 2–6 months | Assuming the money is aimed at your category. |
| Hiring a related role | A public admission of where capacity is short. | While open | Pitching against the hire, not alongside it. |
| Posting about the problem | They have said it out loud, in their own words. | 2–3 weeks | Treating a like as intent. It shows reach, not need. |
| Headcount jump | Growth breaks processes that worked at the old size. | A quarter | Headcount lags reality. Check before citing it. |
Watch a few accounts properly rather than many badly — forty companies followed attentively out-produce four hundred you skim — and write the signal against the person the day you see it.
A qualified list is raw material with a shelf life of weeks, and the commonest failure is a good list built and never worked.
Work it in the order you qualified it, in small batches, one angle per batch. Twenty people approached the same way give a readable signal; twenty approached twenty ways give noise. What to write belongs to the outreach page, the sequence to the lead generation hub.
Be clear about what this method does not include, because most pages competing for this term monetise exactly that gap. Searcora sells activation support for LinkedIn subscriptions — not software. No scrapers, exporters, email-finders, contact databases, lead lists or done-for-you outreach. If you need verified emails or CRM enrichment, that is a different category of vendor.
On automation, the factual position: LinkedIn’s User Agreement prohibits scraping and unauthorised automated access, enforcement is real, and no subscription restores a restricted profile. The same reasoning applied to buying access is on is third-party Sales Navigator legit.
Searcora activation prices in USD. Each is a licence seat on your own account, on a fixed term that does not auto-renew.
Full filter set, saved searches, lists and alerts. Also $90 / 3mo, $170 / 6mo, $340 / 12mo.
Search, lists and alerts for one person. Tier differences on Core vs Advanced.
Lighter, for founders researching a few accounts rather than working a population. Also $100 / 6mo, $150 / 12mo.
How it works: tell us the plan, term and the email on your LinkedIn account, and pay for a defined number of months. A seat is assigned to that email, the invitation arrives at your own address, and you accept it on your own account. We never ask for your password. Then 30 days of support — steps on the activation guide.
Every term is fixed and nothing auto-renews — no stored card, nothing recharges. Searcora Digital Ltd is UK registered at 78 Dulverton Road, London SE9 3RL; everything is listed on buy Sales Navigator.