Sales Navigator costs £79–£130 per user per month. For most SDRs and smaller teams, that's a line item that needs justification. But the free version of LinkedIn is still one of the most powerful B2B prospecting tools available — if you know how to use it properly.
Here's what you can do with a standard LinkedIn account, and how to get the most signal out of each source.
Company pages: more useful than most reps think
The LinkedIn company page for any prospect tells you four things immediately: headcount, recent growth, what they're posting about, and who works there. All free. All current.
Check headcount over time using the "About" tab. If a company has grown from 50 to 120 employees in the last 12 months, that's a buying signal on its own — regardless of what you sell. Fast growth creates operational problems that need solving.
Recent company posts tell you what the leadership team wants the market to think about them. A company posting heavily about a new product launch or market expansion is telegraphing their priorities. That's your angle.
Search without Sales Navigator
The free LinkedIn search is limited but not useless. You can search by job title and company name, filter by location, and identify the specific people you want to reach. Where it falls down is the 3rd-connection wall — profiles get blurred once you're outside your network.
Workarounds that still work:
- Google: site:linkedin.com/in "VP Sales" "CompanyName" — bypasses LinkedIn's own search limits and surfaces public profiles directly in Google
- Company people tab — visible for free, shows current employees filterable by keyword
- Boolean search — combine job titles and company names with AND/OR operators in the LinkedIn search bar for more targeted results
Profile signals: what to look for in 60 seconds
When you land on a prospect's profile, you have about 60 seconds to extract what matters. Don't read the whole thing — scan for signals:
- Tenure in current role — under 6 months means new priorities; over 3 years means established relationships and possibly change-resistant
- Career trajectory — did they come up through sales, ops, or a vertical? Tells you what they care about
- Recent activity — any posts or comments in the last 30 days give you something to reference specifically
- Shared connections — a mutual contact is worth more than any hook you can write yourself
- Featured section — if they've pinned something, they're proud of it. That's context.
"You don't need Sales Navigator to prospect well. You need to know what you're looking for."
Job postings as prospecting intelligence
The "Jobs" tab on any company page is an underused signal source. What roles a company is hiring for tells you exactly where they're investing. A company hiring five SDRs is building an outbound function. A company hiring a Head of RevOps is professionalising their sales infrastructure. Both of those are buying signals for the right solution.
The job description itself often contains the prospect's pain points — listed as requirements for the role they're trying to fill. "Must be experienced with managing a high-velocity pipeline across multiple territories" tells you a lot about the VP Sales' current headache.
Connection requests: use them carefully
Sending a connection request before reaching out can warm the conversation — but only if your profile is strong enough to make the right impression. A blank or generic profile is worse than not connecting at all. If you're going to use LinkedIn as a prospecting channel, make sure your own profile reflects what you'd want a prospect to see.
The approach that works best: connect with a short personalised note, wait for acceptance, then follow up with the outreach. Don't pitch in the connection request. Don't pitch in the immediate follow-up message after connection. Use the connection to warm; use the message to open a conversation.
Sales Navigator is useful at scale. But most of what it does can be approximated with free LinkedIn if you're deliberate about how you use it. The tool isn't the constraint — the process is.
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