LinkedIn announced additional search tools for Sales Navigator. New filters helps sales reps target accounts and leads.  Amongst the new screening options are searching for new execs, searching for specific departments by size, headcount growth at the company or department level, public company revenue, and headquarters postal codes.

One of the new search filters is senior leadership changes at companies which help identify new contacts with a higher likelihood of considering new products and solutions.  “Multithreading is critical to ensuring your deals don’t go dark. Start by identifying companies where senior leaders have changed roles or joined the organization in the past three months,” said LinkedIn Product Manager Alex Lee. “These could be great indicators that it’s time to reach out.”

Revenue screening will be underwhelming as it is limited to public companies listed on global exchanges.  While the data is screenable in multiple currencies, the revenue data is limited to US, British, Indian, and Australian companies; the vast majority of companies would not be screenable via this filter.  Furthermore, because the data is limited to four countries, it is likely to cover fewer than 20,000 of the 50,000 active global publics.  Unless a company is specifically targeting public companies, users should screen based upon LinkedIn employee sizes.  Employee values are based upon the underlying membership data and screenable to the department level.  As such, they provide much better filters for targeting by size, growth rates, and departmental size.

These new options offer a range of new opportunities in account targeting, utilizing LinkedIn’s vast professional data banks to help optimize and improve your outreach efforts. And as data usage and personalization becomes increasingly commonplace in marketing circles, the need to customize and focus your outreach will becoming ever more important – LinkedIn’s well-placed to capitalize on this trend and help give forward-thinking businesses an advantage.

• Andrew Hutchinson, SocialMediaToday

LinkedIn has published the full list of company and people search filters.  Sales Navigator filters operate against LinkedIn’s universe of eleven million companies and nearly half billion members.