How to Find Leads on LinkedIn: A B2B Prospecting Guide

LinkedIn is the largest professional dataset on earth — well over a billion members and tens of millions of companies — which makes it the obvious place to prospect and, paradoxically, one of the easiest places to waste an afternoon. Type a job title into the basic search bar and you get a wall of near-matches with no way to act on them at scale. The people who actually pull pipeline out of LinkedIn are not searching harder; they are searching structured. They define exactly who they sell to, translate that into filters and Boolean strings, and then turn the matching profiles into a list they can work.

This guide walks through that whole workflow: how to use Sales Navigator's filters and Boolean operators to surface your exact ICP, which spotlight signals tell you a prospect is worth contacting this week, and how to turn a clean target list into a contactable, deduplicated spreadsheet with Kavex instead of copying profiles by hand.

Step 1 — Define your ICP before you touch a filter

The single biggest reason LinkedIn prospecting fails is searching before deciding. Every filter and operator below only works if you can answer four questions first:

• Industry — software, manufacturing, professional services, hospitality?
• Company headcount — are you selling to 1–10 founders, 51–200 scale-ups, or 1,000+ enterprises? Deal size usually lives here.
• Geography — and note that LinkedIn's geography filter targets where the person is, which is not always where the company is headquartered.
• Job titles — the literal words your buyers put in their headline. "Head of Growth", "Demand Gen Manager" and "VP Marketing" can all be the same buyer, and you need every variant.

Write these down. They map one-to-one onto the filters in the next step, and a search built from a real ICP beats a search built from a hunch every single time.

Step 2 — Stack Lead and Account filters in Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator's power is that it lets you combine Lead filters (attributes of the person) with Account filters (attributes of the company) so the two narrow each other down. Open the lead search and stack the four that carry the most weight:

• Geography — region, country or metro. Segment by it even if you sell everywhere, because buying speed and messaging differ by market.
• Industry — filters on the sector the company picked on its own page, so it is only as accurate as the company's own self-description; widen it if results look thin.
• Company headcount — the cleanest proxy for deal size. Match the bands (1–50, 51–200, 201–500, and up) to the customers you already close.
• Job title — the field that does the heaviest lifting, and the one that rewards Boolean search in the next step.

Each filter you add is an AND, so the result set shrinks fast. That is the point: you want a few hundred dead-on profiles, not fifty thousand maybes.

Step 3 — Make the title field precise with Boolean search

The title and keyword fields accept five Boolean operators, and learning them is the difference between a noisy list and a surgical one:

• Quotation marks lock an exact phrase: "VP of Sales" matches that phrase, not every profile containing "sales".
• OR captures every variant of a role: "Head of Sales" OR "Sales Director" OR "VP Sales".
• AND requires two things at once: marketing AND demand.
• NOT strips out the wrong matches: NOT assistant NOT intern clears the junior noise from a director search.
• Parentheses group the logic: (VP OR Head OR Director) AND (Sales OR Revenue OR "Go-to-Market") NOT (assistant).

That last string is a workhorse. It pulls every senior commercial leader across the titles companies actually use, while quietly dropping the EAs and coordinators who would otherwise pollute your list. Build one Boolean string per persona and save it as a search you can re-run as new people enter the role.

Step 4 — Use spotlight signals to prioritise warm prospects

Filters tell you who fits. Spotlight filters tell you who is worth contacting right now — they filter on what a person or company is doing, not just what they are. The high-intent ones:

• Changed jobs in the last 90 days — a new decision-maker is re-evaluating tools and vendors. This is the single highest-converting signal on the platform.
• Posted on LinkedIn recently — an active account is far likelier to see and reply to a thoughtful message.
• Following your company or viewed your profile — soft inbound intent you can convert with a timely, relevant note.

Sort your filtered list by these signals and work the warm rows first. A "changed jobs" prospect who matches your ICP is worth ten cold ones.

Step 5 — Turn the target list into a contactable lead list with Kavex

Sales Navigator is brilliant at finding the right companies and people. Where it stops is giving you a clean, workable file — you still have to assemble names, roles, companies and contact details into something your sequencer or dialler can use, and doing that by hand across a few hundred prospects is the part that eats your week.

That is the gap Kavex fills. Point it at the companies and people your LinkedIn search surfaced, and it builds a deduplicated spreadsheet — one row per target — with company, role and the contact data you need to actually reach them:

• The LinkedIn company list builder takes your account shortlist and structures it into a clean firmographic file.
• The LinkedIn profile builder turns a people list into rows you can enrich and act on.
• Layer the Email Finder to attach a likely business address, then the Email Verifier so your sequencer doesn't bounce on a list you built carefully.

The result is the thing LinkedIn never hands you directly: a current, deduplicated, outreach-ready list built from your ICP, not a stale broker file every competitor also bought.

A 30-minute prospecting sprint, start to finish

1. Write your ICP — industry, headcount, geography, titles.
2. Stack Geography + Industry + Company headcount in Sales Navigator.
3. Drop one saved Boolean string into the title field per persona.
4. Add the changed jobs in last 90 days spotlight and sort by it.
5. Hand the matching companies and people to Kavex to build the contactable file.
6. Verify emails, then import into your sequencer or CRM.

From a blank search to a clean, prioritised list is well under an hour once the Boolean strings are saved — and they are reusable forever.

Try it on your own ICP

Build one LinkedIn search around a single persona, run the matching companies and people through Kavex, and look at the file before you spend anything. Start free with 1,000 credits — no card — enough to build and enrich your first list and see whether a self-built, current lead list beats whatever you were about to buy.

Start building your list →

Keep reading

• How to find decision-makers on LinkedIn — go past the company to the exact person who signs off.
• How to find employees at a company on LinkedIn — map a whole buying committee from one account.
• Build a prospect list in an afternoon — the end-to-end workflow from search to sequencer.
• How to find business emails — attach a verified contact address to every profile you found.
• How to clean and format a CSV for cold email — get the export sequencer-ready in minutes.