Which Sales Navigator filters are best for finding B2B leads?
Start with seniority, function, company headcount and geography, then add one timing filter, such as time in current role. Four to six filters are usually enough.
Sales Navigator offers dozens of lead and account filters, and most poor searches come from using too many of them at once. Every extra filter shrinks the list, and filters based on profile keywords quietly drop people who never filled in their profile. A good search narrows by who can buy first, then by who is likely to buy now.
Role filters do the heavy lifting. Our Sales Navigator filtering guide reports that combining seniority level with function, such as Owner or Director in Marketing or Operations, gets around 27% more responses than a general search. It also finds that people less than a year into their role are noticeably more open to new suppliers, because they are still shaping how their team works.
A practical target is a list of 150 to 400 people. Below that you run out of prospects in a few weeks; above 1,000 the list is usually too loose to personalise. Say you sell bookkeeping software to small agencies: Owner seniority, 2 to 50 employees, Marketing and Advertising industry and your country gives a list you can actually work through with real messages.
A filter stack that works for most B2B offers
- 1Seniority levelOwner, Partner and CXO for companies under 50 people; Director and VP for larger ones, where owners rarely pick suppliers themselves.
- 2FunctionChoose the department that owns the problem you solve. If that is unclear, revisit your ideal customer profile before searching.
- 3Company headcount and geographyHeadcount sets budget and decision speed. Geography decides the language and time zone you will be selling in.
- 4One timing filterAdd under a year in current position, a recent job change, or recent activity on the platform. Pick one, not all three.
- 5Save and review weeklySave the search so new matches appear on their own. If the list stays thin, the filters are too tight, not the market too small.
- 6Skip the list when you want callsOn Meetcatcher you do not build the list yourself. It suggests companies that fit your offer and shows why each one might want to talk, so you can go straight to inviting a decision maker.
Treat filters as a way to find the right people, not as the goal. Once a search looks good, open a dozen profiles and check that they really are the people who make the decision. If more than three of twelve are wrong, adjust the filters before you send anything.