Beyond the basics: Sales Navigator advanced tips from our latest roundtable

Our latest Club Navigator Roundtable brought in Mike O'Neil, a Forbes-recognized top influencer, and an 11-year Sales Navigator veteran who joined the platform back in 2004. He was likely one of the world's first LinkedIn coaches.

As Mike put it, the topics discussed during the event are advanced, but you don't need to be an advanced person to use them. They're simply techniques that sit a little off the beaten path. Here's everything he covered.

The multiple current jobs challenge

Here's a nuance that can become a challenge even for seasoned users. Searches would be simple if everyone had just one job, but often they don't. Mike, for example, lists roughly eight roles on his own profile (speaker, trainer, service provider, and more) partly for SEO and partly because he genuinely wears a lot of hats.

Let’s say you’re searching for "President" at companies with 200 to 1,000 employees. Sales Navigator returns people who work at companies of that size and who have “president” on their profile, but they might not be presidents at that specific company. Someone might qualify because their title matches and, separately, because their headcount matches, even if those two things belong to different roles.

That's why your results sometimes include people who don't seem to fit. This shows up most often with broad titles like "President" or "Owner," and especially with people who hold multiple current jobs or work for large franchise organizations. It's rarely an issue with very specific titles like "QA engineer."

What to do: Move your search results onto a lead list, then scrub them there. Which brings us to Mike's first real time-saver 👇

Scrub your lead lists from back to front

Move your search results on a lead list. Once your leads are on a list, you can go through it and remove the ones who don't fit.

• When you remove people from page one, others shift up from page two to fill the gap, making it easy to lose your place. Mike's fix: start at the very last page, work from the bottom up to the top, then move backward toward page one. This approach minimizes keystrokes and avoids the page-shuffling problem entirely.
• One more tip from Mike: unless you're in HR, consider excluding people without profile photos: they tend to be less active.

Break up oversized searches with location

Searches often run too big, so you need to split large searches into smaller ones.

There are many ways to do this, but according to Mike one method beats the rest: filtering by location. Why? Because a person can only be in one place at a time. Company size and other filters can carry more variety, but location doesn't.

His recommended approach is to split by states and counties. You can also drop a pin on a city's zip code and draw a radius around it. For a greater Minneapolis search, for instance, he'll use a central zip code with a 100-mile radius to capture the city and all the suburbs in one clean sweep.

Negative Boolean and the A-to-Z elimination approach

When unwanted results keep appearing, negative Boolean is your best friend. In Sales Navigator, the terms you want show up in green, and you can toggle any term to red, meaning "exclude this." It's the same idea as a positive Boolean OR search, just flipped to strip out what you don't want.

Over time, you'll notice certain titles and keywords you never want to see. Mike groups these into an alphabetized list, his A-to-Z elimination approach, and pastes them into his exclusions, then toggles them red. A few habits make this far smoother:

• Keep everything lowercase, except the OR commands. It's much easier to spot a stray double space or a single quote where a double quote should be
• Use Gen AI to alphabetize and organize your exclusion lists
• When in doubt, wrap terms in quotes, especially anything with dashes or abbreviations like "V.P."
• Combine titles and qualifiers with AND and brackets. Instead of a sprawling list of ORs, pair a group of title variations (director, manager, VP) with a qualifier (sales, marketing) using AND. That shrinks a huge Boolean string into something manageable.

Mike also builds his exclusion templates campaign by campaign. A healthcare campaign doesn't need exclusions for IT or database terms, so he clones a master template and trims it to fit each industry.

People on page one always look good

LinkedIn will propose the best matches on page one. The titles you'd rather avoid tend to hide deep in the later pages. So to build a strong negative Boolean template, Mike goes hunting around page 90, collecting the lower-quality matches to add to his exclusions.

Getting there by clicking "Next" over and over takes time. The shortcut is to hack the search URL. The URL contains a page number: you can replace page 2 with page 90 and jump straight there. A quick reminder on the math: 2,500 results at 25 per page means 100 pages. If your search only has 1,000 results, you'll top out around page 40, so aim near the end rather than blindly typing 90.

The 7-second “crash”

Here's one tip almost nobody talks about. Heavy Boolean logic adds overhead, and that overhead slows your search down. If a search takes longer than seven seconds, it fails with a message asking you to reduce your parameters.

When you hit this wall, Boolean is the first place to look. Start trimming. Remove the exclusion terms that aren't relevant to your current campaign - a real estate campaign needs different exclusions than a healthcare or education one. That's another reason to clone and slim down your templates per campaign rather than running one giant list every time.

The "Posted in 30 Days" filter: use it wisely

The "Posted on LinkedIn" filter surfaces people who posted in the last 30 days and it is popular for good reason. Active posters are engaged, they almost always have profile photos, and you rarely need to scrub them from a list.

So where does this filter shine? On very large or nationwide searches - think 10,000 to 50,000 people. If 10% of a 25,000-person search have posted recently, you land right around 2,500, which is exactly where you want to be. For smaller, localized searches that already return 300 to 500 people, you probably don't need it.

Personalize your outreach by campaign

Advanced search is only half the equation. Your message matters just as much, and Mike's core principle is simple: one message does not fit all.

A generic line like "we work with business owners and help them do great things" lands flat. Compare it to "we work with business owners in Colorado in the healthcare space who want to increase X." Even as a pure template, the second version feels personal because it reflects who the reader is and where they are. That's why you niche both your searches and your messages together.

To make this repeatable, Mike recommends a message management system - even a simple Google Doc, a Word file, or a text expander works. Organize your templates by audience, then clone them for each variation. A Minnesota template becomes a Wisconsin template with a few local swaps. You can spice up messages with bold, italics, all caps, or emojis for emphasis, as long as every choice stays tied to the specific audience you're addressing.

And when you genuinely tailor a message to one person (referencing something specific from their profile) you signal that you actually read it. That's what earns a reply.

Account search strategy: keep titles for last

For those running account (company) searches, Mike's sequence runs opposite to instinct. Start broad with industry and location so you can see your total addressable market. Save job titles for last, and spend the most time there, since that's where Boolean precision pays off.

Two notes worth remembering here:

• LinkedIn industries are deeply nested. There are now 430 industries, up from 147, layered as many as five levels deep. A technology search can quietly pull in libraries. A manufacturing search might surface distilleries or seafood manufacturing. Get familiar with industries here.
• Chain account lists into lead searches: once you've built an account list of target companies, you can run a lead search that looks only at people who work at those companies, rather than scanning all of LinkedIn. This is especially useful for a small set of very large companies where you want specific titles inside a defined universe.