[Event Recap] Sales Navigator doesn't generate revenue. Your system does.
Tamika Brunetti, managing director at Ascent Social Capital and former leader of a Fortune 500 company's global Sales Navigator program, doesn't prospect by volume. She built a repeatable system that layers account filters, spotlights, keyword logic, and engagement signals to shrink big lead pools into a focused list she can work in 15-minute daily sessions, before ever sending an InMail.
Sales Navigator doesn't generate revenue on its own.
That's the core idea
Why does more activity not fix a soft pipeline?
When pipelines get soft, most sellers reach for the same fix: more searches, more lists, more outreach. Tamika pushes back on that instinct.
Logging more activity without a strategy just creates noise. Without a clear system for spotting buying signals, outreach starts to look like spam, and prospects will notice. Her fix isn't to just do more, but to work with a tighter, better-qualified list so each touchpoint counts.
That starts before you run a single search.
Step 1: Set up the tool properly
Most sellers skip this entirely. Before building any list, Tamika opens Settings and adds her products and services. This single step improves the Account IQ insights she gets throughout the platform: insights that become especially valuable later when reviewing specific accounts.
She points out that many organizations with 10 or more licenses never do this. If you do nothing else today, do this.
Step 2: Build a focused account list
Once the profile is set up, Tamika turns to account search and layers filters rather than relying on a single search to do all the work.
In her demo, she walked through the following sequence:
- Start with company attributes. She filters by headquarters location and company headcount to set a broad baseline. In her example, this produced 552 results.
- Apply spotlights. Filtering for active job postings signals that a company is in a growth mode. This narrowed her list to 390 companies.
- Add recent activity signals. Senior leadership changes in the last three months are worth paying attention to. New leaders are often more open to taking meetings as they look to make an impact quickly.
- Layer in first-degree connections. This step brought her list from 213 down to 23 companies, a size she can actually manage.
From there, she saves the account list and moves to the lead level.
Step 3: Narrow thousands of leads down to a workable number
Starting from geography alone, Tamika's lead search returned over 93,000 results. The goal is to get that down to something she can work with.
She narrows by function first (finance, human resources, legal, purchasing) because these roles typically carry reporting responsibilities tied to the decisions she cares about. She deliberately skips seniority level at this stage, noting that job title doesn't always reflect who actually holds budget authority.
From there, she layers in:
- her saved account list
- a Boolean keyword search tied to her focus area
- a filter for recent job changes.
That sequence took her from more than 20,000 leads down to 20.
That's a list she can work in 15-minute daily sessions — which is exactly the point.
Step 4: Research leads and track engagement signals
With a short list in place, Tamika checks each lead's activity before doing anything else. She looks at posting and commenting frequency, then logs notes directly on their Sales Navigator profile (something like "active biweekly") so she isn't guessing every time she revisits the list.
She also uses the relationship map feature to build a working org chart around each account, identifying champions, decision-makers, and evaluators. This helps her spot gaps: who she still needs to find, and who might be able to make introductions.
Step 5: Earn the right to reach out
InMail is Tamika's “absolute last resort”, not her opening move.
Instead, she engages first. She comments on leads' posts with genuine questions to spark conversation, and she monitors who views her own profile. When someone stops by, she'll often reach out to ask what brought them there.
The goal is to become a familiar name before sending a connection request. When someone has seen you show up consistently in their feed, they're far more likely to accept that request, and the relationship that follows is stickier from the start.
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Putting it all together
Tamika's approach isn't a shortcut. It's a repeatable system:
- Set up your profile before you search
- Layer filters to find quality over quantity
- Track engagement signals rather than guessing
- Earn attention before you ask for a meeting
Each step builds on the last. And with a system in place, she says 15 minutes a day is genuinely enough to keep it moving.
Share your learnings, and add your comments or questions for Tamika below 💬