Can I use Sales Navigator filters to find warm leads only?

Yes. Sales Navigator’s connection filters let you isolate first-degree connections, mutual connections, and past colleagues. These leads convert at higher rates than cold contacts because existing trust reduces friction in the first conversation.

Does Konnektys offer LinkedIn lead generation services?

Yes. Konnektys provides LinkedIn prospecting, high-intent lead research, cold email infrastructure, and end-to-end outbound campaign management for B2B companies. Learn more at konnektys.com/services.

LinkedIn Prospecting B2B Lead Generation Intent Signals

How to Find High-Intent B2B Leads on LinkedIn in 2 Minutes

Q: Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth it for B2B outbound?

For most B2B companies selling to 10–500 person companies, yes. Sales Navigator combines professional identity data with real-time intent signals — job changes, hiring activity, engagement — that static databases cannot match. The saved search feature alone pays for itself if your team prospects regularly.

Q: How many leads should I target per week?

Most outbound teams see better results from 50–100 tightly targeted prospects per week than from 1,000 generic contacts. Conversion rates, meeting rates, and reply rates all improve when targeting is narrowed correctly.

Q: Why do job changes predict buying intent?

New leaders enter roles with pressure to deliver results quickly and often have discretionary budget available early. They are evaluating what the previous team put in place, which makes them more open to new vendors — especially in the first 60–90 days.

The 6-step Sales Navigator system high-performing B2B teams use to surface 50+ warm leads per week — using job change signals, hiring triggers, and saved search automation that refreshes your pipeline without daily effort.

Konnektys TeamMay 22, 2026 · 12 min read · LinkedIn Prospecting

50+

warm leads surfaced per week using saved searches and intent filters

6 steps

to build a high-intent prospecting system that refreshes automatically

90 days

the window in which new executives make the majority of vendor decisions

There is a persistent belief in B2B outbound that the problem is always volume. Send more emails, make more calls, add more contacts to the sequence. More, more, more.

The reality is almost always the opposite. The constraint isn’t volume — it’s timing. Reaching someone the week they start a new role, the day after their company announced a funding round, or shortly after they posted publicly about a pipeline problem gets a reply. Reaching the same person six months earlier or later, when nothing is changing, gets ignored.

High-intent leads are not a personality type or a demographic filter. They are people who are currently in motion — experiencing change, pressure, or a new mandate — and therefore open to solutions they would not have considered last quarter.

What “High-Intent” Actually Means

High-intent is not a characteristic of a company. It is a characteristic of a moment. The same company that would ignore your outreach in January might be your fastest-ever close in March — because something changed.

That change is what you’re looking for. The five primary categories:

1. Job ChangesHighest ROI Signal

New leaders enter under pressure to show results quickly. They question existing vendor relationships and in many cases have discretionary budget available before the next planning cycle locks in. Research on B2B buyer behaviour consistently shows that new executives make a disproportionate share of vendor decisions within the first 90 days of a new role. After that window, they’ve made their decisions and shifted to execution.

2. Hiring ActivityLive on LinkedIn

A company posting aggressively for SDRs, RevOps engineers, or a VP of Sales is actively building outbound capacity — one of the most reliable signals that a company needs exactly the kind of infrastructure that surrounds outbound sales. Available publicly and updated in near-real time. Hiring intent data automates this signal monitoring across your full ICP universe.

3. Funding Announcements30–90 Day Window

A funding round creates budget pressure to deploy capital and demonstrate growth. Companies that have just raised Series A, B, or C are in an active evaluation window for tools and infrastructure that accelerate revenue. The window is roughly 30–90 days post-announcement. Events and buyer intent data tracks these trigger moments in real time.

4. LinkedIn EngagementFree Personalisation

Prospects who post regularly hand you specific, defensible first-line material. A cold message opening with a reference to something a prospect wrote always outperforms one opening with a generic value proposition. The “Posted on LinkedIn” filter makes this possible at the filter level, not just in individual research.

5. Technology Stack SignalsTargeting Precision

A company’s current tech stack tells you what problems they’ve already solved and what gaps remain. A company running Salesforce without a sequencing tool has a specific gap. Technographic data maps these configurations at the account level.

The Foundation You Need Before Opening Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is a targeting tool. Its output is only as good as the clarity you bring to it. Before touching a single filter, two things need to be established:

Your ICP must be specific enough to build a list against. Not “mid-market SaaS companies” — that describes tens of thousands of companies with wildly different needs, budgets, and buying processes. A workable ICP specifies industry sub-vertical, headcount range, geography, revenue stage, tech stack context, and the specific pain that is live for your buyer persona right now. Market research and TAM analysis does this foundational work properly.

Your buyer persona must specify title, seniority, and pain — not just role. The person who buys is not always the person who uses the product. Know which conversation you are trying to initiate, and filter to the person who owns that conversation.

With those foundations in place, the six-step Sales Navigator process below runs in under two minutes per session — because the work has already been done once, properly, and saved for reuse.

Step 1 — Build Saved Personas: Stop Rebuilding Searches

The problem with most LinkedIn prospecting: every session starts with rebuilding the same filters from scratch. That wastes 15–20 minutes per prospecting session and introduces inconsistency — the filters from Tuesday’s search aren’t quite the same as Thursday’s.

Build saved personas for the two or three buyer profiles you target most often. In Sales Navigator, a saved persona stores your seniority, function, and title filters as a reusable profile. One click applies your full targeting criteria without rebuilding anything.

Example Saved Persona — B2B Outbound Agency

Seniority	Director, VP, CXO, Owner
Function	Sales, Business Development, Revenue Operations
Industry	B2B SaaS, Professional Services
Company headcount	11–200 employees

The persona is the baseline. The intent filters in Steps 3 and 4 are what convert a standard ICP list into a high-intent prospecting queue.

What this eliminates: the generic targeting every competitor is using. Every SDR team has access to the same Apollo exports, the same Crunchbase filters, the same ZoomInfo lists. Saved personas built against a precisely defined ICP, combined with intent signals, produce a list that is structurally different from what competitors are reaching — because most of them aren’t doing this at all.

Step 2 — Dial In Your ICP Using Lead Filters

With your saved persona applied, open the full Lead Filters panel. This is where ICP precision translates into a list that is actually worth working.

Filter	What It Does
Company headcount	Defines buying complexity, budget tier, and decision-making speed. Set based on what existing clients actually look like — not what you think you could sell to.
Geography	Keeps messaging regionally contextualised and SDR focus on a reachable market. Pick regions where you have existing clients, case studies, or market knowledge.
Seniority + function	Ensures you’re reaching decision-makers, not influencers. Know which conversation you’re initiating and filter to the person who owns it.
Years in current role	Underused filter. Filtering for under 18 months surfaces a disproportionate number of prospects still in evaluation mode — still questioning what the previous team set up.
Technologies used	Shows what tools the company currently runs and therefore what gaps exist. If you’re selling something that integrates with or replaces a specific tool, this narrows to accounts where the configuration is correct.
Hiring trends	Surfaces companies actively growing specific functions — a reliable proxy for budget availability and operational investment in the areas you sell to.

Step 3 — Turn On “Changed Jobs”

The Changed Jobs filter is the single highest-ROI toggle in Sales Navigator. Apply it now — on top of the persona and lead filters already in place.

What it does: surfaces contacts who have moved into a new role within the last 90 days. These are the people most likely to be in an active evaluation window for new solutions.

Why the 90-day window matters

Week 3 of new role

Actively evaluating vendors. Questioning existing relationships. Discretionary budget available. Pressure to demonstrate value.

Month 8 of same role

Vendor decisions made. Executing an established plan. New relationships and priorities locked in. Window closed.

The combination that works: Changed Jobs filter + Years in Role under 18 months. The first catches recent movers. The second catches people still in early-tenure evaluation mode even if the LinkedIn signal has aged out. Together, they surface the full population of people likely to be in an open, evaluating mindset.

Step 4 — Add “Posted on LinkedIn” to Surface Active Prospects

Applying the “Posted on LinkedIn” filter — set to activity within the last 30 days — does two things simultaneously.

1. Removes passive accounts

A prospect who hasn’t posted or engaged on LinkedIn in months is unlikely to be actively monitoring their DMs or responding to cold outreach. The filter quietly removes a significant portion of the list who would generate low response rates regardless of message quality.

2. Generates personalisation material

Before messaging any prospect surfaced by this filter, spend 60 seconds reading their last two or three posts. They contain: problems they’re thinking about, goals they’re communicating, market positions they’re taking, and often specific language about current challenges.

A generic opener says “I thought you’d be interested in what we do.” An opener built on their post says “I read what you wrote about pipeline velocity last week and wanted to share something specific to your situation.” These get different response rates because they are different kinds of messages.

Step 5 — Don’t Overlook Warm Connections

Sales Navigator lets you filter results by relationship type — first-degree connections, mutual connections, and past colleagues. These consistently convert at higher rates than cold contacts, and most SDR teams skip them entirely in favour of cold lists.

First-degree connections Lowest Friction

An existing connection lowers friction dramatically. Reach out referencing the prior connection, or if the relationship is stronger, ask directly for a conversation rather than pitching immediately.

Mutual connections Social Proof

A shared connection is social proof before you’ve said a word. Open with the shared context — “I noticed we’re both connected to [Name]” — and let the implied credibility do the first-line work. Consistently outperforms cold openers even when the mutual connection is relatively loose.

Past colleagues Highest Response Rate

Shared professional history eliminates the cold outreach dynamic almost entirely. A short DM referencing your past overlap — at a company, an event, or in a community — gets a response at rates that cold outreach simply doesn’t achieve.

The combined population of warm contacts in your ICP — first-degree connections, mutual connections, past colleagues — is often larger than founders and SDRs expect, and almost always underworked relative to its conversion potential.

Step 6 — Save the Search and Let the Pipeline Refresh Automatically

Once your persona, lead filters, Changed Jobs toggle, and Posted on LinkedIn filter are set, hit Save Search.

Sales Navigator now monitors your exact criteria continuously and notifies you whenever new prospects qualify — new job changes, new companies entering your ICP range, new hires at target accounts, new LinkedIn activity.

Without Saved Search

45–60 minutes per manual search session. Filters rebuilt from memory. Inconsistent criteria. Same contacts surfaced repeatedly. No alerts for new matches.

With Saved Search

10–15 minutes per weekly review. Pre-filtered, intent-signalled leads ready to action. Consistent criteria. New matches automatically surfaced. Pipeline refreshes without manual effort.

Set it up properly once. The pipeline refreshes without you. Every week, more new people enter the “recently changed jobs” pool. More companies announce funding. More hiring signals emerge. The saved search captures all of it automatically.

Step 7 — What to Do With the Leads You Find

Finding high-intent leads is half the system. The other half is reaching them effectively and tracking what happens.

Verify contact details before outreach

LinkedIn’s InMail is one option, but for cold outreach at volume the primary channel is email — which requires a verified email address matched to the current role. Email finding and verification handles this. For high-priority accounts, phone number finding adds a direct dial layer.

Build the personalisation before the outreach

For every contact surfaced by Changed Jobs or Posted on LinkedIn, there is specific material available. AI-powered lead research enriches each account with signal data systematically, so the first-line hook for every outreach is grounded in something real.

Run a coordinated multi-channel sequence

LinkedIn connection request (with a short, relevant note) + direct email sequence + LinkedIn DM after connection is accepted. Cold email and LinkedIn outreach runs this coordinated sequence as a managed function.

Track everything in your CRM

Contacts who engage but don’t immediately convert need to stay in your pipeline. CRM data enrichment keeps records current. CRM cleaning removes the stale records that create noise.

For a deep breakdown of what makes outreach convert, see our guides on why cold email gets replies and the Day 1 cold email cadence framework.

Beyond Sales Navigator: Supplementing With Additional Signal Sources

Sales Navigator is one of the best single sources of high-intent LinkedIn signals. It is not the only signal source — and relying on it exclusively misses intent data that doesn’t live inside LinkedIn’s ecosystem.

Job posting data beyond LinkedIn

LinkedIn shows a company is hiring. But job postings across Indeed, Glassdoor, and company career pages often contain more detail about exactly what gap they’re filling. Web and LinkedIn data scraping aggregates this across sources systematically.

Funding and company news

A funding announcement doesn’t always appear in Sales Navigator alerts before the 90-day window is closing. Monitoring funding databases (Crunchbase, PitchBook) and company news feeds in real time keeps outreach inside the most actionable part of the buying window.

Third-party intent data

Behavioural signals showing which companies are actively researching specific topics — product categories, competitor names, problem statements — give you buying signal that LinkedIn’s professional profile data doesn’t contain. When stacked with a job change or hiring trigger, this becomes a strong prioritisation input.

Technographic signals

Sales Navigator’s “Technologies Used” filter approximates but doesn’t fully cover a company’s technology environment. Technographic data append maps the full stack at the account level, including tools LinkedIn’s data doesn’t track.

The combination of Sales Navigator signals and external intent data is what separates a list of “recently changed jobs” contacts from a prioritised queue of accounts where multiple signals are pointing in the same direction simultaneously.

Scaling This System Beyond One Person

The six-step process above is designed to be run by one person, and it works well at that level. Scaling it — to an SDR team, to a larger ICP, to higher weekly lead volumes — requires thinking differently about each layer.

The data layer Scales through automation

A single SDR reviewing Sales Navigator alerts can process 50–100 leads per week. Above that threshold, manual review becomes the bottleneck. Contact list building and AI-powered lead research scale the data layer without a proportional increase in research time.

The outreach layer Scales through infrastructure

At 50 leads per week, manual outreach is manageable. At 500, you need sequencing software, secondary sending domains, warmed inboxes, and a rotation schedule. See our cold email infrastructure guide and domain rotation guide for the full breakdown.

The ICP layer Scales through precision

More leads processed against a vague ICP produces more wasted outreach. As you scale, the ICP definition needs to become more specific, not broader — so that a larger team working larger volumes is still reaching the right people.

When to bring in managed support Full-stack operation

Most founders and small B2B teams hit the ceiling of this system within 90–120 days of running it consistently. End-to-end B2B lead generation manages the full stack as a system that runs independently of the founder’s available hours.

For context on how signal-based LinkedIn prospecting fits into the broader AI prospecting landscape, see our AI prospecting guide for 2026.

FAQ: High-Intent LinkedIn Lead Generation Answered

What is a high-intent lead in B2B sales?
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A high-intent lead is a prospect showing active buying signals — a recent job change, new funding, a surge in hiring into relevant roles, or public engagement around a problem your product solves. High-intent is not a static characteristic of a company; it is a moment. The same company that would ignore your outreach one quarter can be your fastest-ever close the next — because something changed. Identifying what changed and reaching them inside that window is what high-intent prospecting is.

Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth it for B2B prospecting?
+

For most B2B companies selling to companies with 10–500 employees, yes. Sales Navigator combines professional identity data with real-time intent signals — job changes, hiring activity, LinkedIn engagement — that static databases cannot match. The saved search and alert features alone pay for the subscription if your team prospects weekly, by eliminating the manual rebuild of searches that otherwise consumes 15–20 minutes per session.

How many leads should I target per week on LinkedIn?
+

Most B2B outbound teams see better results from 50–100 tightly signal-filtered prospects per week than from 1,000 generic ICP matches. Reply rates, meeting rates, and conversion rates all improve when targeting is narrow enough that personalisation is possible. The 2-minute workflow described in this guide typically surfaces 50–100 new signal-qualified leads per week from saved search alerts alone, without additional prospecting time.

Why do job changes predict buying intent so reliably?
+

New leaders enter roles under pressure to deliver results quickly, with a mandate to evaluate what the previous team put in place. They typically have discretionary budget available early, before the next planning cycle locks in. Research on B2B buyer behaviour consistently shows that new executives make the majority of their vendor decisions within the first 90 days of a new role. After that window, vendor relationships are established and attention shifts to execution.

Can I use Sales Navigator to find warm leads rather than cold contacts?
+

Yes. Sales Navigator’s relationship filters let you isolate first-degree connections, mutual connections, and past colleagues. These leads consistently convert at significantly higher rates than cold contacts because existing trust reduces the friction in the initial conversation. Most SDR teams skip these filters in favour of cold lists — which is why the warm connection pool in most sales organisations is systematically underworked relative to its conversion potential.

What is the best Sales Navigator filter combination for high-intent leads?
+

The highest-performing combination: your saved persona (seniority + function + industry + headcount) combined with the Changed Jobs filter (last 90 days), the Posted on LinkedIn filter (last 30 days), and the Years in Role filter (under 18 months). This combination surfaces contacts who are professionally active, recently in motion, and in a tenure phase where evaluation is most likely. Stack a technology filter on top for accounts where the tech stack context is relevant to your offer.

What should I do after finding leads on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
+

Find their verified email address and any additional contact data. Enrich each account with signal detail — the specific trigger that made them appear in your search — to build a first-line that references something real about their situation. Run a coordinated multi-channel sequence that combines a LinkedIn connection and DM with a cold email sequence. Track all engagement in your CRM. Follow up consistently across 4–6 touches over 15–21 days.

How do I personalise outreach to LinkedIn leads at scale?
+

Through segment-level personalisation for most accounts, and account-level personalisation for the highest-priority signals. For the Changed Jobs segment, every person who recently took a new role shares the same contextual opening: the pressure, the evaluation window, the budget availability. One well-crafted first-line framework applies to the whole segment. For the Posted on LinkedIn segment, 60 seconds of reading their recent posts produces a genuinely specific first line.

How does LinkedIn prospecting fit with cold email outreach?
+

LinkedIn and cold email are complementary channels, not alternatives. LinkedIn prospecting surfaces the right accounts and contacts and provides the signal data that informs personalisation. Cold email at scale — through verified email addresses, secondary domains, warmed inboxes, and automated sequences — reaches those contacts with a consistent multi-touch outreach programme. A prospect who sees your LinkedIn connection request and then receives a relevant email is getting reinforcement across two channels, which consistently outperforms either channel alone.

What does it cost to run a LinkedIn-based prospecting system?
+

LinkedIn Sales Navigator runs approximately $100 per user per month at team pricing. Additional tools for contact verification, sequencing, and CRM integration typically add $200–$500 per month. A manually run system for one person — Sales Navigator plus email finding and sequencing tools — is achievable at $400–$700 per month in tooling. Managed prospecting programmes that handle the full stack vary based on scope and volume.

Build the System Once. Work Warm Leads Every Week.

The insight behind the 2-minute claim is this: the two minutes are the weekly session, not the setup. The setup — persona building, filter configuration, ICP alignment, saved search creation — takes two or three hours the first time. After that, reviewing the fresh leads Sales Navigator surfaces takes under two minutes per session.

The compounding value is in the automation. Every week, more new people enter the “recently changed jobs” pool. More companies announce funding. More hiring signals emerge. More prospects post about problems you solve. The saved search captures all of it automatically and delivers it to you pre-filtered.

You don’t need 10,000 contacts. You need the right 100, at the right moment, reached with something specific to their situation. That’s what this system builds.

Need a Consistent Pipeline of High-Intent Leads from LinkedIn?

Konnektys builds and operates outbound revenue engines — from LinkedIn prospecting and AI-powered lead research to verified contact lists, email infrastructure, and fully managed cold email and LinkedIn outreach.

We’ll build and manage the entire system for you →

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