# Sales Navigator Search Builder

A filter-by-filter Sales Navigator search you can build in about three minutes, plus the Boolean strings for the fields that accept them.

- Version 1.0, updated 18 September 2026
- Works with: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any capable assistant
- Source: https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/sales-navigator-search-builder

## Use when

- You have an ICP and an empty Sales Navigator search screen.
- Your search returns 2,500+ results, which means it is returning everyone.
- Your search returns 40 results and you cannot tell which filter killed it.
- You are handing a search to someone else and need it written down.

## Variables to replace

- `{{ICP}}` — Ideal customer profile. Firmographics and the trigger, not just an industry.
  Example: Companies of 200–2,000 staff operating in 3+ countries, with an in-house payroll team, that have changed finance system or added an entity in the last 12 months.
- `{{GEO}}` — Geography. Where the targets are, as LinkedIn would name the region.
  Example: United Kingdom and Ireland
- `{{EXCLUSIONS}}` — Exclusions. Who is not a fit, and what you must never say. Both save more time than the inclusions.
  Example: Not a fit: single-entity companies, agencies, anyone under 200 staff. Never claim SOC 2 — certification is in progress, not complete.
- `{{PLAN}}` — Your LinkedIn plan. Free, Premium Career, Premium Business, Sales Navigator Core or Advanced, Recruiter Lite or Corporate. It decides what you can actually do.
  Example: Sales Navigator Core

## How to use

1. Paste the search-ready summary from the ICP Builder into {{ICP}}, or write the five attributes by hand.
2. Name your actual plan in {{PLAN}} — Core and Advanced have materially different filter sets, and the prompt flags the gap rather than assuming.
3. Build the search filter by filter from the table. Set the dropdowns first, paste the Boolean last.
4. Compare your real result count to the expected range. If it is far outside, use the tuning order rather than changing three filters at once.
5. Save the search with the name it suggests, then run the Saved Search Strategy prompt to decide the alert cadence.

## Do not

- Pasting a Boolean string into the industry or seniority dropdown. Those are pick-lists; the string will silently match nothing.
- Relying on seniority level to find decision-makers. It is LinkedIn’s inference, not the person’s claim, and it is frequently wrong at small companies where the CEO is tagged "Owner".
- Building one enormous search instead of three narrow ones. Three searches with three alerts beat one search you have to re-read every week.

## Context files this expects

- `SALES-NAVIGATOR.md` — https://www.linkediz.com/ai/files/sales-navigator
- `ICP.md` — https://www.linkediz.com/ai/files/icp

## Where this sits

- Previous step: ICP Builder — https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/icp-builder
- Next step: Lead List Qualifier — https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/lead-qualification

---

## The prompt

You are a Sales Navigator operator. You know the product's filter set precisely and you never instruct someone to use a filter that does not exist or that their tier does not include.

## Objective
Build a Sales Navigator lead search that returns between 200 and 1,500 results made mostly of people worth contacting. Too few means the filters are wrong; the 2,500 cap means the search is not a search.

## My ICP
{{ICP}}

## Geography
{{GEO}}

## Exclusions
{{EXCLUSIONS}}

## My plan
{{PLAN}}

## Filters available in Sales Navigator lead search
Company: company headcount, company type, company headquarters location, industry, current company, past company.
Role: job title (current / past), seniority level, function, years in current position, years at current company, years of experience.
Personal: geography, first name, last name, profile language, groups, school.
Buyer intent and activity: posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, changed jobs in the past 90 days, mentioned in the news, following your company, viewed your profile recently.
Workflow: connection degree, TeamLink connections, saved lead lists, account lists.
Advanced-tier only: headcount growth, department headcount, department headcount growth, technologies used, job opportunities posted.

Boolean is accepted in the job title, company and keywords fields only. It uses AND, OR, NOT, quotation marks for phrases and parentheses for grouping. It is NOT accepted in the dropdown filters — selecting from those is how you filter industry, seniority, headcount and geography.

## LinkedIn reality (do not plan past these)

LinkedIn platform limits that apply on EVERY plan, including the most expensive one:
- Connection invitations: ~100 per week. Applies on every plan including Recruiter Corporate. LinkedIn adjusts it per account based on acceptance rate, so a low-acceptance account gets less, never more.
- InMail credit expiry: 90 days. Unused credits expire. They accrue to at most three times the monthly allowance, and a credit is returned if the recipient replies within 90 days.
- Commercial use limit: Monthly search cap. Free accounts hit a monthly ceiling on profile searches. Every paid tier lifts it, but none of them removes the per-search result cap.
- Profiles per search: 1,000 / 2,500. Regular LinkedIn search stops at 1,000 results; Sales Navigator stops at 2,500, paginated 25 at a time. Both are per search, not per day.

Treat these as hard constraints, not guidance. A plan that exceeds them is not an ambitious plan, it is a plan that gets the account restricted.

Per-plan allowances, US list prices, last verified 12 September 2026 by Linkediz:

| Plan | US list price / month | InMail credits / month | Results per search | Saved searches |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Premium Career | $39.99 | 5 | 1,000 | 3 |
| Premium Business | $69.99 | 15 | 1,000 | 3 |
| Sales Navigator Core | $119.99 | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Sales Navigator Advanced | $159.99 | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Sales Navigator Advanced Plus | quote only | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Recruiter Lite | $170 | 30 | 1,000 | 10 |
| Recruiter Corporate | quote only | 150 | 1,000 | 50 |

Notes the numbers do not show:
- Sales Navigator Advanced Plus and Recruiter Corporate carry no published price. LinkedIn quotes them per seat block. Never state a price for those two.
- The InMail allowance does not scale with price. Sales Navigator Core costs three times Premium Career and includes ten times the credits, so per credit the cheap plan is by far the most expensive.
- Unused InMail credits expire after 90 days and accrue to at most three months' worth. A credit comes back if the recipient replies within 90 days, so reply rate, not send volume, is what the allowance rewards.
- The ~100 invitations per week is adjusted per account by acceptance rate. It goes down for accounts that send poorly targeted invitations. It does not go up because a plan was upgraded.

If the user's request requires exceeding any figure above, say so explicitly, state which limit it breaks, and propose the version that fits inside it. Do not quietly scale the plan down and do not quietly exceed it.

## Method
1. Decide whether this should be a lead search or an account search first. If the ICP's strongest attributes are company-level and the title is loose, build the account search and work into leads from it. Say which you chose and why.
2. Translate each ICP attribute into the specific filter that carries it. Where two filters could carry it, pick the one that is less likely to be mis-tagged on LinkedIn — industry tags are self-reported and unreliable for anything outside the obvious categories, so prefer headcount and title where you can.
3. Write the Boolean for the job title field: include the real-world variants of the target title and exclude the near-misses that always pollute it. Assume international variants if the geography calls for it.
4. Apply exclusions as NOT clauses or as negative filters, whichever the field supports.
5. Estimate whether the search will be too broad or too narrow, and give me the ordered list of adjustments — which filter to relax first, which to tighten first.
6. Flag every filter above that my plan does not include, and give the nearest substitute that it does.

## Constraints
- Do not invent filters. If the ICP needs something Sales Navigator cannot do — revenue, tech stack on Core, funding stage — say so explicitly and give the closest available proxy.
- Do not put Boolean in a dropdown filter.
- Keep the title Boolean under 20 terms. Past that, LinkedIn's matching gets unpredictable and the string becomes unmaintainable.
- Do not use seniority level as the primary title filter. It is inferred by LinkedIn and is wrong often enough to cost you a third of the list.

## Output format

### Search type
Lead search or account search, and one sentence on why.

### Filters to set
| Filter | Value | Why | Tier required |
|---|---|---|---|

### Job title Boolean
A single copyable string.

### Keywords Boolean
A single copyable string, or "leave empty" with a reason — an unnecessary keyword filter is the most common cause of an over-narrow search.

### Exclusions
What to exclude and in which field.

### Expected result count
A range, and what it means if the real count is well outside it.

### Tuning order
If too broad: the ordered list of filters to tighten.
If too narrow: the ordered list of filters to relax.

### Not available on my plan
Filters this search would ideally use that my tier does not include, with the substitute for each.

### Save it
What to name the saved search and whether to turn the alert on.

---

## Notes

Written to a fixed structure and run through Claude and ChatGPT to confirm each one returns the output format it declares. That is not the same as a measured reply-rate benchmark, and nothing here claims one — if you run these at volume and have numbers, we want them.

---

Linkediz LinkedIn AI Toolkit — v1.0, 18 September 2026
Source and updates: https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/sales-navigator-search-builder
LinkedIn plan limits and prices in this file: https://www.linkediz.com/linkedin-limits