This post shows you how to run each LinkedIn lead source: where to click, which filters to set, what to type, and how to tell a real lead from a name that only looks right. One product runs through it as a worked example. For the overview of methods, read how to find B2B leads on LinkedIn; for which signals mean intent, read LinkedIn buying signals.
Short answer: write down who buys from you in five lines, then pull people from eight places: a people search by title, company and location; companies hiring a role that implies your product; people engaging with relevant posts; people posting about the problem; profile viewers; your network and 2nd-degree connections; lookalikes of your best customers; and Sales Navigator lists. Check each person for role, company, reason now and activity, work the ones with a dated reason first, and rerun every source on a schedule.
Key Takeaways
| Source | Where on LinkedIn | Intent | Volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| Title, company, location search | Search bar → People → All filters | Low (fit only) | High |
| Companies hiring a role | Jobs → search the role → Date posted | High (dated budget) | Medium |
| Post engagers | Reaction or comment count on a post | Medium to high | Medium |
| People posting about the problem | Search bar → Posts → Latest | Very high | Low |
| Profile viewers | Me → View profile → Profile viewers | Medium | Low |
| Network and 2nd-degree | My Network → Connections; People → 2nd | Warm, not intent | Medium |
| Lookalikes of best customers | People search built from a customer's profile | Fit only, but precise | High |
| Sales Navigator lists | Sales Navigator → Lists → Lead lists | Whatever you saved | Your choice |
The Worked Example
Say you sell an on-call and incident management tool to software companies. Before touching LinkedIn, write the buyer down in five lines. This is your ideal customer profile, and every step below checks people against it.
- Who signs: Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, CTO at smaller companies.
- Who feels the pain: SRE leads, platform engineering managers, engineering managers who carry the pager.
- Company: software companies with 50 to 500 employees, in the UK and US.
- Not: recruiters, agencies, consultancies, students, other vendors in the space.
- Reason now: hiring SREs or platform engineers, complaining about alert fatigue or on-call burnout, engaging with incident-response content, or evaluating a competitor.
Line 5 matters most. A person who matches lines 1 to 4 is a fit. A person who matches line 5 as well is a lead worth messaging this week.
What a Good Lead Looks Like
A good lead for this example:
- Role: Engineering Manager, Platform, so they own on-call for their team.
- Company: a 180-person fintech in London. Right size, right industry.
- Reason now: their company posted a Site Reliability Engineer job eight days ago.
- Activity: they commented on an incident postmortem post last week.
- Reachable: 2nd-degree, with two mutual connections.
A weak lead looks like this: "CTO" at a three-person agency, no posts in two years, found because their headline contained the word "DevOps". Same keyword, no reason to buy, nobody reading the message.
1. Search by Title, Company and Location
This finds people who fit, not people who are looking. Treat it as a pool to filter, not a list to message.
On free LinkedIn:
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Type a keyword in the search bar and press Enter, then click the People tab.
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Click All filters.
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Under Locations, add "United Kingdom" and "United States".
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Under Industry, add "Software Development".
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In the Title field, paste a Boolean string. LinkedIn supports AND, OR, NOT, quotes and parentheses:
("head of engineering" OR "VP engineering" OR "director of engineering" OR "engineering manager") NOT (recruiter OR talent) -
Click Show results.
Two limits apply. LinkedIn shows at most about 1,000 people per search, so split big searches by country or industry. And heavy searching on a free account hits LinkedIn's monthly commercial use limit, which Sales Navigator and Premium Business remove.
On Sales Navigator, open Lead filters and set Current job title (same Boolean string), Seniority level (Director, Vice President, CXO), Function (Engineering), Company headcount (51 to 200, 201 to 500), Geography and Industry. Then add Posted on LinkedIn in past 30 days, which keeps people who will see your message, and Changed jobs in past 90 days, which isolates new leaders rebuilding their stack (see how to find people who changed jobs). Click Save search.
What it misses is timing: almost nobody in the results has a reason to talk to you this week. The next sources add that.
2. Companies Hiring a Role, and Who to Contact There
A job post is a dated announcement of budget and a problem. A company hiring a Site Reliability Engineer has on-call that is hurting.
- Click Jobs and search for the role, not your buyer: "Site Reliability Engineer".
- Set the location to "United Kingdom". Use the full country name.
- Open Date posted and pick Past week. Older posts are often already in final interviews.
- Open each job. Skip anything posted by a staffing or recruitment agency; the agency is not the company that needs you.
- Look for the Meet the hiring team section. If the poster is an engineering leader, that is your lead.
- If the hiring team is only a recruiter, click through to the company page, open People, and search "engineering" to find the Head of Engineering or the Platform lead.
Run one role per search; combining roles in one query returns worse matches. How to read the job description for stack and pain is in how to find companies hiring for a role.
3. People Engaging With Posts
Click the reaction count on any post to see names, headlines and reaction types, then scroll the comments. Three kinds of post are worth mining:
- Your own posts. The warmest names you will get, because they already know you.
- Competitors' posts, especially posts by their founders and product leads about features, pricing or comparisons.
- Influencers your buyers follow. Here, engineers who write about incident response. Pick two or three whose audience is practitioners, not job seekers.
Comments beat reactions. A comment describing the problem ("we have the same issue with alert noise") is a lead on its own; a single like on a viral post is not. Scoring rules are in how to find people who liked competitor posts, and the comment-first approach is in LinkedIn comment prospecting.
4. People Posting About the Problem
The strongest lead on LinkedIn is someone who writes, in public, that they have the problem you solve.
- Type a phrase in the search bar in quotes, such as
"alert fatigue"or"on-call rotation", and press Enter. - Click the Posts tab.
- Set Sort by to Latest and Date posted to Past week.
- Read the post, not the snippet. Keep authors who describe the pain, ask for recommendations, or complain about a tool. Drop vendors, recruiters and people writing thought leadership about the problem in general.
Good phrases sound like a buyer: "looking for an on-call tool", "[competitor] alternative", "our on-call is burning people out". Bare category words like "incident management" mostly find vendors. Keyword selection is covered in how to find LinkedIn posts by keyword, and the daily routine for checking them in LinkedIn keyword alerts.
5. Profile Viewers
Click Me, then View profile, then the profile viewers count in your analytics. A free account shows only the most recent few viewers; Premium and Sales Navigator show the full list. People browsing in private mode are never named on any plan.
Viewers spike after you post or send invitations, so check the day after. Expect recruiters and vendors; only people matching your five lines count. When you message a viewer, reference their world, not the view.
6. Your Network and 2nd-Degree Connections
Your 1st-degree connections need no invitation, so you can message them today.
- Click My Network, then Connections.
- Click Search with filters and filter by current company, location or industry, or type a title keyword such as "engineering" in the search box.
- Read the headlines. A connection from three years ago might now run engineering at a company in your ICP.
For 2nd-degree, rerun the section 1 search with Connections set to 2nd. Each result shows mutual connections; where one knows the person well, ask for an introduction instead of a cold invitation. More on why your network is underused in LinkedIn's network tab test.
7. Lookalikes of Your Best Customers
Your best customer is a better ICP than anything you write from scratch.
- Pick a customer who bought quickly and gets real value. Open their LinkedIn profile.
- Write down their exact title, company size, industry and location.
- Add the two or three other names for that role. "Platform Engineering Manager" is also "Head of Platform" and "Infrastructure Engineering Manager" elsewhere.
- Add industries next to theirs. A fintech customer suggests payments, insurtech and banking software as well.
- Build the section 1 search from that list.
Do this for three customers, not one; their titles often cluster in ways your written ICP missed. Skip customers with unique titles, which find nobody.
8. Sales Navigator Lists
Sales Navigator lead lists are where hand-picked leads live. While you work through searches, click Save on each good lead and choose a list, for example "On-call: hiring SREs" or "On-call: competitor engagers". Open Lists, then Lead lists, to work them.
Keep one list per reason, since the trigger tells you what the first message should say. Account lists hold companies, not people; you still need to find the person at each one (see how to find decision makers at target accounts).
Qualify: the 30-Second Check
Every source produces noise. Before anyone goes into a campaign, open their profile and check four things:
| Check | Pass | Fail |
|---|---|---|
| Role | Owns or feels the problem | Recruiter, student, consultant, vendor |
| Company | In your size, industry and location range | Agency, too small, wrong country |
| Reason now | A dated trigger: job post, comment, post, view | Matched a keyword in their headline only |
| Activity | Posted, commented or reacted in the last 30 days | Nothing in six months or more |
Activity is the check people skip. An invitation to someone who has not touched LinkedIn in a year sits unread, and with LinkedIn's weekly invitation limit (widely cited at around 100 a week; see is LinkedIn automation safe in 2026), every wasted invitation costs you a real one.
Prioritise: Which Leads to Work First
Work the leads with a dated reason first, because the reason expires.
- People posting about the problem. Message within a day or two.
- Commenters on your posts, then on competitors' posts. Within a day or two.
- Decision makers at companies hiring the role. Within the first week of the post.
- Profile viewers who fit. Within two days.
- 1st-degree connections who fit. Any time, but before strangers.
- New job changers from your search. In their first few weeks.
- Lookalikes and plain search results. Fill remaining capacity.
The first message should name the reason, not the click. "Saw you're hiring two SREs, which usually means on-call is stretched" works; "I noticed you liked a post" does not. Templates for each trigger are in signal-based outreach templates.
Keep the List Fresh Automatically
Doing this by hand works for a week. Then the job posts are old, the posts have scrolled away, and you are rerunning searches that return the same people.
Updately turns each method into a signal: a saved rule that runs on a schedule, checks whoever it finds against your ICP and adds the ones that fit to a lead list. For the worked example:
- Profile Search for section 1. Fill in titles and location, or paste a LinkedIn or Sales Navigator search URL to keep filters like seniority. Each run moves further down the results.
- LinkedIn Jobs for section 2. Job title "Site Reliability Engineer", location "United Kingdom", employee title filter "Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, CTO". It skips staffing agencies, turns matching members of the hiring team into leads, and when nobody on the hiring team matches, searches that company for people with your titles instead. One role per signal.
- Post Engagement for section 3. Leave it empty to watch your own posts, or list up to 10 profile URLs of competitor founders and influencers, and choose reactions, comments or both.
- Keyword monitoring for section 4, with phrases like "alert fatigue" and "looking for an on-call tool".
- Profile Viewers for section 5, Network for section 6 (filter connections by title, company or industry keywords), Warm Lookalike for section 7 (paste your best customer's profile and AI suggests similar titles and related industries), and Sales Navigator List for section 8, which keeps picking up leads you add to the list later.
Two more signals can feed the same list: Tech Stack (companies using, adopting or dropping a technology, then people with your chosen titles there) and G2 or Trustpilot reviewers.
Every lead gets an AI fit check against your ICP, so a recruiter who commented on a competitor's post never reaches the list. A person found by two signals lands in a list once. Each lead carries a LinkedIn activity tag (Active, Fading or Inactive), and you can exclude inactive profiles in the ICP or skip them in a campaign. Set the list as a campaign's trigger and new leads are enrolled automatically while the campaign is active. When a run saves fewer than 15 new leads, the signal shows Leads running low with the reason, so you know whether to widen the search or loosen the ICP.
To see what these signals find for your product first, the free lead report takes a description of what you sell and returns a sample of hiring, people and social leads.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I find leads on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator? Yes. Free search covers title, company, location and industry, and the jobs, posts, engagement, viewer and network methods all work on a free account. Sales Navigator adds seniority, function, headcount and activity filters, the full viewer list, lead lists and unlimited people browsing.
Which method should I start with? A people search, because it works on day one without anyone posting or hiring. Add companies hiring a role and keyword posts next, since those carry the strongest reason to reach out now.
What is the difference between a lead and a prospect list? A prospect list is people who fit. A lead is someone who fits and has a reason to talk to you now, such as a job post, a comment or a post about the problem. The LinkedIn lead generation strategies guide covers how the two feed a pipeline.
Should I mention how I found someone? Mention the reason, not the mechanism. Quote the job post or the point they made in their post. Do not say you saw them like something or view your profile.
How often should I rerun these searches? Job posts and keyword posts daily or every few days, since they go stale fastest. Engagement and profile viewers daily. Searches, lookalikes and your network weekly. Or let signals do it on a schedule.