The highest-leverage Sales Navigator filters — account-level, lead-level, and intent-based — plus how to run the same searches programmatically when you need the results as JSON.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator's advanced search filters are the difference between a prospecting list that looks like your ICP and one you spend half your week cleaning. Used well, filters narrow the world to accounts and people who resemble your winners. Used poorly, they drown you in false positives.
This tutorial walks through the highest-leverage advanced search filters in Sales Navigator — account-level, lead-level, and intent-based — then shows how to run those same filtered searches programmatically through the Edges Search API when you need the results as JSON instead of a screen of 25 rows at a time.
Before touching filters, write your ICP as observable traits: size, geography, function, tech stack, growth signals, and excluded industries. Filters are a translation layer — they only work if the ICP behind them is sharp enough to be actionable.
Then use lead filters and account filters together. Accounts set the lens (which companies are worth targeting); leads validate roles and urgency (which people inside those companies). Running one without the other is the most common way to end up with a bloated list that converts poorly.
These are the filters you'll combine on almost every account search.
Company headcount. From self-employed to 10,000+ employees. The most-used filter in any ICP description. Ranges matter — "50–200" is a different conversation than "200–1000."
Company type. Public, private, nonprofit, government, partnership, self-owned, self-employed. Useful in combination with industry filters, not on its own.
Company headquarters location. Focuses the search on regions where you've been successful, or lets you test new geographies. Note: a company headquartered in the UK can have employees anywhere, so pair this with a lead-level location filter when it matters.
Saved accounts and account lists. If you've already built lists in Sales Navigator — "my current accounts," "my customers" — use them to include or exclude from new searches. Customer lists are especially valuable as exclusions on prospect searches.
CRM integration (higher plans). On Sales Navigator Advanced Plus, you can include or exclude accounts based on whether they're in your CRM. Good for segmentation; not a replacement for proper CRM-side list management.
The filters most teams under-use — and the ones that separate a good account search from a great one.
Annual revenue. Range-based, with currency selection. Only useful in combination with headcount: $1M revenue on a 10-person company is impressive; on a 100-person company it's a red flag.
Fortune. Slices the Fortune 500/1000 into ranges — useful for enterprise motions or campaigns specifically targeting large-cap companies.
Number of followers. Signal for brand presence. Weak alone, sharper combined with headcount (1,000 followers on a 1,500-person company is thin; on a 30-person company it's strong).
Company headcount growth. +50% in the last year is a strong signal for scaleup-targeted motions. Negative ranges surface layoffs — useful for churn watching or for counter-cyclical plays.
Company department growth. Same logic at the department level. "Sales team grew 60% in six months" is a far sharper signal than overall company growth.
Department headcount. How many people work in a given function. Useful when your ICP requires a team of minimum size — e.g., "companies with at least five people in Sales."
Hiring on LinkedIn. Surfaces companies with open roles. Less precise than job search, but faster for a first-pass filter on growth.
Recent senior leadership changes. Internal restructuring is a strong signal for incoming tool evaluations, especially if you sell to the C-suite.
Funding events in the past 12 months. Classic buying-window signal. Has aged into a default filter — use it in combination with others, not alone.
Connections in those accounts. Warm-intro entry points. Even if the person you're connected to isn't the buyer, they can usually make the introduction or share context.
Technologies used. Target your competitor's customers, or companies running adjacent tools. Coverage is broad: Google, Microsoft, Meta stacks, plus WordPress, AWS, Stripe, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and many more.
Account intent is useful. Lead intent is what actually converts — because it names the person whose attention you need.
Current company. Filter leads to specific target accounts.
Past company. Track buyers who left. Especially useful for finding champions from previous customer accounts, or for spotting people who just left a competitor.
Job title. Keep a boolean string library for each persona — paste and go. Saves the time you'd otherwise spend reconstructing the same query every week.
Persona. Sales Navigator's saved persona feature lets you define a buyer profile once and reuse it. Worth the setup time.
Past job title. Great for promotions you want to act on — e.g., "currently VP Sales, previously Account Executive."
Function. Broader than job title. Useful when your ICP targets anyone in Business Development, regardless of specific title.
Seniority. Entry-level, manager, director, VP, C-suite. Often an entry-level contact is the path to the decision-maker.
Years in current company / position. Tenure correlates with buying authority. Many teams find their best deals come from reps who've been in the role 1–2 years.
Schools attended. Stronger when it's your alma mater.
Groups. Shared interests in a LinkedIn group is a useful warm-opener signal.
These are the filters that turn a prospect list into a live pipeline.
Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days. Pull their posts and use one as a personalization hook.
Changed jobs in the last 90 days. The single sharpest intent signal for most B2B sales motions. Pair with a job title filter and you've got a high-intent segment.
Mentioned in the news in the last 30 days. Smart paired with a connection filter — a warm intro to someone recently in the news.
Following your company. Self-declared interest. Pair with career-milestone filters for a focused re-engagement list.
Shared experiences. Companies, schools, groups you have in common. Useful common ground for cold outreach.
Past colleague. Strong warm-opener signal, with the caveat that you may not have overlapped in time.
Profile viewers (in the Spotlight section). People who viewed your profile in the last 90 days. Arguably the highest-intent segment available. You can also exclude them if you specifically want fresh contacts.
Connection depth. 1st, 2nd, 3rd degree, group members, and TeamLink connections. Useful at the campaign-design stage.
Connections of [person]. Build a list based on connections of your CEO, an industry influencer, or (carefully) a competitor's account manager you're connected to.
Sales Navigator's UI doesn't let you paste 80 company URLs into a Past Company filter. The workaround is well-known in RevOps circles: construct the search URL directly from a spreadsheet.
A Sales Navigator search with zero filters looks like this:
https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people?viewAllFilters=true
Add a single past company (Edges, LinkedIn company ID 27193685):
https://www.linkedin.com/sales/search/people?query=(recentSearchParam:(doLogHistory:true),filters:List((type:PAST_COMPANY,values:List((id:urn%3Ali%3Aorganization%3A27193685,text:Edges,selectionType:INCLUDED)))))
From there, the pattern is:
(id:urn%3Ali%3Aorganization%3A<ID>,selectionType:INCLUDED),Then =CONCATENATE(...) the cells to build the final URL. Keep each search under about 80 companies to stay within Sales Navigator's URL length cap.
Test the resulting search manually in Sales Navigator before running it at scale. If it breaks there, it will break on any downstream tool that consumes the URL.
Spreadsheet-built URLs are fine when a rep is running searches by hand. Once you need the results as data — for lead scoring, routing, or product features — the ergonomics break down.
That's where a Sales Navigator search API fits. Edges is a LinkedIn automation API with one key, documented actions, and consistent JSON across LinkedIn core, Sales Navigator, and Recruiter Lite. The Search API covers:
Paste your Sales Navigator search URL (with all the filters discussed above already applied) into the Search API, and get paginated, structured lead or account results back. No 25-row click-through. No scraper to maintain when Sales Navigator ships a UI change.
Pair Search with the other three Edges surfaces — Profile & Company Data (Enrichment), Signals & Intent, Messaging & Outreach — to build whatever your GTM stack actually needs on top.
To be explicit: Edges is not a workflow builder, a CRM connector, an email finder, a phone lookup service, or a multi-provider waterfall. It's the LinkedIn layer — the pipe that other tools in your stack call through.
Sales Navigator's advanced search filters are the best account- and person-level filtering surface in B2B. The filters above are the highest-leverage ones to master; the combinations are where the real edge lives.
When you need those filtered searches as data instead of as a screen, book a demo and we'll walk through the Search API on your ICP and your specific filter stacks.