How We Used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Grow Our ABM List

Below is a new article I wrote today on how we used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to expand our ABM lead list with 160,000 SaaS CEOs and Founders.

We hope you get a lot of value out of this article!

If you love killer growth content like this, be sure to join our weekly SaasRise mastermind group for CEOs/Founders with $1M to $100M in ARR. In these forum-style masterminds, we help each other with all the challenges we face including growth, scaling, and exit prep. It's like an EO, YPO, or Vistage just for SaaS CEOs/founders.

Enjoy the article below!

Ryan Allis, CEO
SaasRise & GrowthRise
Austin, TX

When it comes to B2B prospecting, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the most comprehensive tools out there. Why? Because when someone changes jobs or gets promoted, one of the first things they update is LinkedIn. That means you’re getting real-time insight into where people work and what they do—something you just won’t get with more static databases.

But there’s a catch.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator (which costs $99/mo for their Core edition) doesn't let you export leads directly. You’re going to need to use a data broker with a solid scraping tool (two recommendations below) or use the Chrome Extensions from Evaboot, Findymail, or Wiza to download the leads. These tools act as the export mechanism, allowing you to extract 2,500 leads at a time from your saved searches.

You can see below that there are 160,000 SaaS CEOs/Founders on LinkedIn in globally with 11-1000 employees.

How to Actually Export the Leads from LinkedIn

Here’s the nuance: LinkedIn will only show you 100 pages of 25 results each, which maxes out at 2,500 leads. If you want to extract more leads than that, you have to manually change the filters—narrow by geography, job title, or company size—to generate additional unique batches of 2,500 people.

For example, when I searched for U.S.-based CEOs and founders of software companies with 11–1,000 employees, I got about 53,000 results. To export all of that, I had to go state by state—Florida, Texas, Georgia—and create segmented searches to extract all of them in ~2,500-record chunks.

FindyMail, EvaBoot, and Wiza all charge around $2000 per 100,000 exports from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Save Time With a LinkedIn Data Broker

If you only need a small list of < 2,500 contacts, you can do it in a few minutes. But if you're building a list of 100,000+, you're talking about at least 40 exports and a couple days of work playing with the filters to get it right.

So if you’re building a large ABM lead list, you may want to use a data broker to save yourself a lot of time.

We recommend using data brokers like Christian from GetKen or Amin who have teams that can do the data exports from LinkedIn for you. They tend to charge around $6000 per 100,000 records exported (more expensive, but saves you a lot of time).

We’ve used LinkedIn Sales Navigator to expand our ABM lead list to additional accounts that we might have missed when using other ABM tools like Apollo, ListKit, Clay, and Instantly.

Once you’ve gone through the lower cost and easier to access leads on Apollo, ListKit, and Instantly, we recommend moving to LinkedIn for additional coverage and fresher data. Think of it as moving from the lowest-hanging fruit to the more refined crops.

How To Your Your ABM List: Ads + AI Outbound

Once your ABM list is built and verified, it becomes one of your most powerful assets. It’s not just a static file—it’s an engine that powers outbound, advertising, and AI-based personalization.

Here’s the flow we use and recommend:

1. Start with Outbound: Using tools like Instantly or Smartlead, you can send personalized cold emails to these verified leads. We send about 160,000 AI personalized outbound emails per month, averaging 4,000–5,000 per day.
   
   
2. Layer on Matched Audience Ads: Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn let you upload custom audiences. You’ll need 3,000+ leads to get decent match rates (~30–50%) and create a viable ad audience. We’ll show you in future sessions how to use tools like Primer to match emails with personal addresses for better ad targeting.
   
   
3. Run AI-Personalized Campaigns: This is the future. Tools like Clay can feed leads directly into ChatGPT or Claude to generate custom cold email copy based on each lead’s LinkedIn bio, company, or recent activity. This has tripled our click-through rates—from 2% with standard emails to 6% with AI personalization.
   
   
4. Retarget and Nurture: Once a prospect clicks, we move them to a warmer sequence. Those who continue engaging get routed into our CRM and are subscribed to our weekly content and newsletter system.
   
   
5. Use for Existing Customers: Don’t forget—you can use these lists for upsells and expansion. Target current customers with product upgrades, add-on services, or account expansion opportunities using the same outbound and ad tactics.

Your ABM list is your fuel. Once you have it, your outbound engine can run on near autopilot, with AI personalization, matched ad audiences, and multichannel engagement—all triggered by a beautiful spreadsheet.

I hope this article was helpful.

Join Our CEO/Founder Weekly Masterminds

Please join us for our next SaaS CEOs/Founder Mastermind on Wednesdays (we have four time slots available) or our upcoming GrowthRise B2B Marketer Mastermind on Tuesday at 2pm ET.

We’re building the next generation of growth-first SaaS companies.

See you in one of our weekly masterminds!

— Ryan Allis

About the Author:

Ryan Allis built iContact as CEO/Co-Founder from startup to $50M in ARR, 70,000 paying customers, #81 on the INC 500 list, and an exit for $169M to a publicly traded company. At iContact, he raised over $50M in venture capital (including $15M in secondary capital), and $5M in debt-capital. Today, Ryan is the CEO of SaasRise, the #1 community for experienced SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M to $100m in ARR. Ryan is also a top SaaS Growth & Exit Coach, and has coached the CEOs of of Instantly, Seamless.ai, Tatango, Pipeline, Revenue Accelerator, RNL, Retreaver, Clearstream, YouCanBookMe, Noteefy, RXNT, and many more growing SaaS firms ranging in size from $5M to $160M in annual revenue. He is passionate about helping SaaS firms have successful exits. Ryan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Join the weekly masterminds Ryan leads at SaasRise and GrowthRise.