Yesterday I ran another six discovery calls. Honestly, most of them were not very interesting or useful. I found myself wondering why I was still ending up on calls with so many self-employed people.

At our product’s current stage, calls with solopreneurs are almost useless. What we really need are companies with enough leads in their pipeline to benefit from improving their closing rate. The biggest problem for many self-employed people is usually getting more leads in the first place, not boosting their conversion rate.

So I dug into why this was happening. The culprit turned out to be our initial targeting in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

When we set up the search, we used the dropdown filters to select companies with 11–50 employees and other criteria. But we also added the keyword "SaaS." That was the mistake.

Here’s why:
The keyword search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator scans all fields of a user’s profile. In practice, it often overrules or muddies the company size filter. That meant our results included a ton of solo consultants who just happened to have “SaaS” somewhere in their profile.

On top of that, if someone does not keep their LinkedIn profile updated, LinkedIn might still show them as part of a larger company even if they are now self-employed.

What I’m Changing Moving Forward:

- I’m no longer using the keyword search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator at all.

- Instead of automatically running a campaign on the entire exported list, I’m now manually reviewing all leads and removing anyone who doesn’t clearly fit our ideal customer profile.

These changes will slow us down a little in the short term, but they should save us hours of wasted calls with the wrong people.

Just sharing this for anyone else using Sales Navigator for outbound—if you’re getting poor-fit leads, it’s worth double-checking your search setup.

Happy customer hunting, everyone!