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Eric is in charge of content and SEO at La Growth Machine. A specialist in Outreach topics for over 8 years, Eric has written for numerous French and English blogs, sharing his experiences, hacks, and other use-cases. A trainer and speaker in his spare time, he is a reference for all topics related to B2B prospecting and automation.

Targeting companies for B2B prospecting purposes instead of leads directly has proven its effectiveness these last years. Indeed, this approach is called Account Based Marketing, and it’s killing it.

There are many ways to lead ABM strategies. In B2B, LinkedIn ABM is working great. We’ve already talked about LinkedIn ABM in a previous post, but today, we will focus on a broader question that you might be answering if you’re prospecting on LinkedIn.

How to search for companies on LinkedIn? Why search for companies on LinkedIn? And how to create a company targeting process using LinkedIn and LaGrowthMachine?

In this post, we’ll answer all these questions and provide tips on using LinkedIn to search for companies and how you can use LaGrowthMachine for your B2B prospecting strategy!

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We've crafted a very detailed guide in which you'll find all the information and tips about using LinkedIn Boolean Search to boost your lead generation efforts.
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What is LinkedIn company search?

Even if it’s pretty obvious, let’s start with the basics.

Linkedin Company Search is the process of searching companies through the platform – which is the largest B2B database worldwide – using LinkedIn search features.

If you’re new to LinkedIn prospecting, the first thing you should know is that LinkedIn provides their user with different search features:

  • Basic search feature: this is the classic search bar at the top of your LinkedIn homepage. You can directly type the name of the company in the bar.
  • Advanced search feature: this is the advanced search engine that allows you to narrow down the companies according to different criteria (location, industry, function, seniority, etc…).
  • Sales navigator search feature: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the premium plan of LinkedIn for salespeople. This formula allows sales to access LinkedIn most accurate search feature. When using Sales Nav, you’re no longer limited to your search results, and you get much more filters to search for companies for your targeting.

Quick Tip 💡

If you’re using LaGrowthMachine, you can search for companies on LinkedIn directly within our tool and import the results in the lead management section. The next step would be to outreach them through LinkedIn and Email (and if necessary, Twitter) using our sales sequence builder.

However, LaGrowthMachine always needs a qualified lead associated with an email and/or a LinkedIn personal account to work. For this reason, we suggest that you drive a LinkedIn ABM campaign and get the leads from the companies you’ve searched with LinkedIn before outreaching them with LaGrowthMachine.

There are many ways to search for companies with LinkedIn, but we’ll go down to this a bit later in this post.

First, let’s jump to the benefits of searching for companies with LinkedIn.

Why search for companies on LinkedIn?

Searching for companies on LinkedIn can be done for a variety of reasons: whether you’re trying to apply for a job or outreach to potential customers, targeting companies is the way to go.

As a sales automation tool, the prospecting component stands out to us. That’s what we’re going to focus on here in this post.

As a growth marketer or a salesperson on LinkedIn, there are many benefits to searching for companies on the platform. Indeed, this can help you to:

  • lead LinkedIn Account Based Marketing strategies;
  • lead market studies;
  • identify your ideal customer profiles and personas;
  • improve lead segmentation to increase your ROI;
  • etc…

All these actions are serving the same purpose: improving your LinkedIn lead generation.

But to achieve this goal, you need to be very accurate when searching for companies on LinkedIn.

In the next part of this post, we’ll learn how to search for companies on LinkedIn.

How to search for companies on LinkedIn?

As written above, searching for companies on LinkedIn requires a methodology and some knowledge, but it’s definitely interesting if you’re prospecting on LinkedIn.

Our very best advice would be that you go for LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this matter, as this tool really is a game changer for B2B prospecting. But we know that some of you aren’t using it yet, so we’ll give our step-by-step methods using the three search features LinkedIn is proposing currently.

LinkedIn Basic Search

Searching companies with LinkedIn Basic search is the easiest thing ever.

You just need to go to the nav bar at the top of your screen, type the name of the company you’re searching for, and it will display some results.

This feature is only interesting for picking prospecting if you don’t need accurate data.

LinkedIn Advanced Search

LinkedIn Advanced Search is a much wiser feature to use, as it provides you with much more filters than the basic search.

To access LinkedIn Advanced search, start by typing a query (a company name i.e.) in the basic search field just like written above.

Then, you need to click on “all filters”.

From here, set the “Filter only” with “Companies”, and add as many filters as you need to cluster your search.

Just hit “Show Results” and you should be good to go.

This feature will already give you good insights compared to the basic search feature.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Search

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is working a bit differently. To search for companies, you need to go to the account tab.

From there, you’ll notice that you get many more filters to play with. Also, you won’t be limited to LinkedIn’s restricted database, such as with LinkedIn’s free plan. This means that you’ll get access to much more data, and much more accuracy.

The only thing you have to do is to think about how you want to cluster your targeting using the different filters.

Example 🔍

If I’m selling accounting software, I want to search for companies that are getting +20% growth and that are staffing their accounting service with more than +10% year to year.

How to search for Linkedin companies on Google?

Sometimes, you won’t be able to find companies from LinkedIn itself, or maybe the process will be too long for what you need.

Another trick is to search for companies registered on LinkedIn using Google.

To do it, first, you need to go to Google.

From the Google search bar, type this command: [name of your companies] + site:linkedin.com

This means that you’ll search for the exact name of your specific company from LinkedIn’s domain name, on Google.

If you want to automate this process, you could use a scraping bot or a Google Sheet query, for example… be creative 😁

How to outreach to the companies with LaGrowthMachine?

If you’ve read everything from here, you must have understood how powerful this is when talking about B2B prospecting. But searching for companies is just the first step. Now, what you want to do is outreach to leads inside those companies.

To do this, you first need to choose a technique to find the leads that you’re interested in, inside the company.

Example 🔍

If you’re an SEO agency, you’ll want to target the Head of Marketing or SEOs from the job title of the people working in the companies you’ve captured.

An efficient way to do this is to lead an ABM strategy: with Sales Navigator, you can easily extract leads with very specific filters (such as job title, seniority, etc…) from your already filtered companies list.

When this job is done, you’ll have a list of very qualified leads.

Next is the outreach part.

With LaGrowthMachine, automate your outreach with a simple drag & drop!

Two solutions:

  • you can go manually: this method works, but it’s very time-consuming and quite ineffective because you’ll be limited with the channels you’ll be using. Also, your flow might become messy: you might miss follow-ups and therefore opportunities.
  • you can use automation: this method requires an automation tool like LaGrowthMachine, which is an investment, but also a huge help when it comes to B2B prospecting matters.

How does it work? 🤔

As a sales automation tool, LaGrowthMachine allows you to automate your sales outreach. The process goes like this:

First, add some lead data into LaGrowthMachine. You can do this by importing your leads directly from LinkedIn, by uploading a CSV file, or manually.

Then, create an audience with our lead management feature.

Finally, create your campaign from scratch, using LinkedIn, but also emails to outreach to your leads, as multichannel campaigns have better conversion rates. You can find more info on this in our multi-channel selling software guide.

Conclusion

To sum up, when you’re looking to search for companies on LinkedIn, keep in mind that you have three main options: using the basic search feature, the advanced search feature, or using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Both options can provide helpful insights, but Sales Navigator gives you access to much more data and filters to help refine your searches. You can also use Google by typing in the company name and “site:linkedin.com” to search for companies registered on LinkedIn.

Once you have your list of companies, you can use our LaGrowthMachine automation tool to outreach and follow up with leads inside those companies with automated campaigns. This will help you save time and increase conversion rates by using multiple channels such as LinkedIn and email.

With this guide, you now know how to search for companies on LinkedIn and use LaGrowthMachine to maximize your outreach efforts.

Get 3.5X more leads!

Do you want to improve the efficiency of your sales department? With La Growth Machine you can generate on average 3.5x more leads while saving an incredible amount of time on all your processes.

By signing up today, you’ll get a free 14-day trial to test our tool!

Try now for free!

Happy LinkedIn search! 🙂