There’s no shortage of sales tools out there — for lead research, intent data, outreach, data enrichment, automation and more.

But one of the most critical tools for SDRs on up to business owners is LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Beyond the lead research and the social selling element, Sales Nav is incredibly useful for building out robust campaigns for account-based opportunities.

Using Sales Nav to search for (and save) target accounts is a great way to build the foundation for your sales process. The insight and notifications you receive from taking the time to target accounts translates into account-based campaigns, ‘and and expand’ tactics, customer cross-selling and more.

In this guide, we walk you through how to start building account lists in Sales Nav, the search filters you should be taking advantage of, and how to turn your account list into an enriched list of targeted prospects.

We address some of the most important questions for leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator account lists for prospecting:

• How can you use Sales Nav to research accounts?
• Which filters should I be using for account search?
• How can I download my account list from Sales Nav?
• Can I search for specific prospects from my saved account lists?
• How can I extract emails from my account and prospect lists on Sales Nav?

Account Lists in Sales Nav: What, How and Why

What are account lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Sales Nav gives you the ability to create custom lists — a straightforward way to organize your sales prospecting process and keep track of both leads and accounts.

According to LinkedIn, customized account lists on Sales Nav let you:

• Filter lead search results by your saved accounts.
• Match leads and accounts within your customized lists.
• Share custom lists with your sales and marketing teams.
• Add notes to your account lists to organize your thought process

How do I create account lists on Sales Nav?

First things first, you’ll need to sign up for Sales Navigator. It’s $79.99 per month, but you can started your first month with a free trial.

Once you sign up and login to your Sales Nav account, enter your main keyword in the search bar on the homescreen. For example, if you’re selling into the HR space, enter “HR companies.”

On the search results page, click “Account results” to see companies instead of individual leads.

From there, you can click the “Save” button on individual accounts or select multiple accounts and hit “Save to list” at the top of the results. If you don’t have existing account lists to choose from, you’ll need to name your new account list.

Hint: If you want to go deep with your research, use the account filters to home in on the most promising target accounts. More on that below.

Why use Sales Nav account lists?

Two reasons (at least).

First, you can build a solid foundation for your account-based and prospecting efforts with account search on Sales Nav. By saving your filtered results to account lists, you can focus on the companies that are most likely to buy your product or service. Armed with geographic, tech stack and departmental information about companies, you can home in on the right people at the right time.

Second, LinkedIn makes it simple to keep your outbound efforts moving with Sales Nav. When you set up account lists, you’ll start getting updates from LinkedIn on the companies you save as accounts. These email updates include company news, lead updates, hiring and more. “Saving a company as an account allows you to see real-time insights such as lead recommendations, company-related updates, and company news right in your Sales Navigator homepage,” according to the LinkedIn page. “For example, if a saved account has raised money in the past 12 months, it will appear on the account lists page with a direct link to the associated news article.”

Don’t have a Sales Nav account yet? Better get on it.

Account Filters to Build Better Lists on Sales Nav

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has 13 account filters you can use to home in on the right accounts, on top of the keywords you use initially.

You won’t necessarily use all the filters all at once, but they will help you create more targeted lists depending on how you segment your accounts and prospects.  

• Geography: Use a specific country, region, postal code or city to narrow down your results. If you’re building out TAM or moving into greenfield territory, this filter will be critical.
• Industry: If you sell into a specific industry (or industries), select one or multiple options here to see only the most relevant company results. This is from a predefined list, but the options span everything from accounting to restaurants to computer software.
• Department headcount: Selling to a specific department with an established budget? Choose from more than 25 departments, and manually enter the department size you’re looking for.  
• Department headcount growth: Get even more granular (and hone your message to be even more relevant) by looking at department headcount growth. Selling a sales tool? Look for a growing sales department. Automating processes? Look for a shrinking HR or marketing department.
• Annual revenue: Target accounts that fit your ICP and contract value with a specific range. From $1M on up to unicorn status.
• Company headcount: This one’s as straightforward as it gets. Sales Nav has 8 company size bands, from tiny (1-10 employees) on up to 10,000+ employees.
• Company headcount growth: Find new opportunities by looking into how fast a company is growing or shrinking its workforce.
• Fortune: Targeting F50 or just those toward the bottom of the list? This filter will tell you exactly where companies stand.
• Number of followers: Look at — and speak to — how popular a company is on LinkedIn by filtering by the number of followers the company LinkedIn page has. This ranges from 1-50 to more than 5,000 followers.
• Technologies used: Talk about some keen insight. With this filter, you can either look at the type of technology a company uses (i.e. a Content Delivery Network) or specific tools that they leverage (i.e. HubSpot).
• Job opportunities: Is the company hiring? This filter will give you a simple yes or no — at least if they’re hiring on LinkedIn.
• Relationship: Quickly see if you have any 1st degree connections working at the accounts you’re targeting in your search. If so, we recommend saving them to a separate list to keep that clear in your outreach.
• Tags: This filter is based on previous searches and lists that you’ve built. As you prospect, you can tag accounts and leads with keywords you want to remember Later, you can filter search results for these key terms.

How to Download Your Account List from LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Since LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to export much (except for your connections), getting your account list off of LInkedIn isn’t as simple as hitting ‘export list’. Not quite — but close.

At the end of the day, your account list will help you drive an effective outreach strategy, set up account-based campaigns, and more. But to make contact, you’re going to have to first zero in on the contacts within those target accounts.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Build your account list

Use your keywords—and the filters outlined above—to create targeted account lists. These could be by stage, by geography, by company size and so on.

Step 2: Use ‘Custom List’ in search

Once you have your target account list built, switch over the Lead results tab on search. Instead of entering a keyword or separate filters, just select your account list from the ‘Custom List’ option at the top of the filters column.

Presto. You’ll see a complete list of all the leads that work at the accounts on the list you selected. From there, you can narrow down your search results further. Use the lead filters (like role, department, and title) to focus on the prospects you want to reach within your target accounts.

Step 3: Use Wiza to pull the account list

When you have your account-based search ready, it’s time to leverage Wiza to pull these contacts off LinkedIn.

Start by signing up for Wiza and installing the Chrome extension.

Then you’ll be able to hit the “Export emails with Wiza” button. On the pop up, you’ll be able to select all the data you want — company information, emails, phone numbers, and more.

If you want a more detailed rundown, we have our guide for how to export searches from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. If you want to focus on accounts, start with the filters and tips in this post, then move into exporting with Wiza.

You’re ready to go!

Pull out your most promising leads and accounts, but you can keep the ball rolling, too. Sales Nav will send you company updates, lead suggestions, job changes and more. Save searches  and use account lists generously — you’ll get some good momentum with prospecting.

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