How to Find Decision Makers on LinkedIn: A 6-Step Method

Here is how to find decision makers on LinkedIn: open the target company's page, go to the People tab, and search the titles that own your kind of purchase at a company of that size. Then confirm the role is current, check that the person describes owning the budget rather than supporting it, and note who else would weigh in. A free account is enough for one company at a time; Sales Navigator pays off at dozens of accounts a week. The exact strings, filters and checks follow.

What you need to find decision makers on LinkedIn

• A LinkedIn account. Free works for this guide. Sales Navigator adds the Seniority Level, Function and Changed Jobs filters and saved searches, which matter from roughly 30 target accounts a week upward.
• A list of target companies, even ten. If you do not have one yet, the LinkedIn lead generation guide shows how to find companies from the posts their people write.
• One sentence describing what you sell and which team's budget pays for it. "Payroll software for 50 to 300 person companies, paid by finance" is enough.
• A spreadsheet with six columns: company, name, title, role in the decision, last activity date, note. About 15 minutes per account the first week, under ten once the strings are set.

Step 1: Decide which titles own your deal at each company size

Write down the title that signs for your product at three company sizes before you search anything. The same purchase sits with different people as a company grows, and most searches fail because they use a mid-market title on a 20-person company or a founder title on a 2,000-person one.

Fill in your function. For a sales tool: Sales, Revenue, Growth, Business Development, Revenue Operations. For an HR product: People, Talent, HR, People Operations. Keep the table; it becomes the search strings in Step 2.

Procurement belongs on the list earlier than most sellers expect. Forrester's January 2026 buyer research found procurement professionals act as decision makers in 53% of business buying cycles, and that the typical buying decision now includes 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers (Forrester, 21 January 2026). You do not need all 13 names. You need the one who owns the budget and the one or two who can block.

Step 2: Search the company's People tab with title strings

For one company at a time, the People tab beats the global search because every result already works there. The clicks:

1. Search the company name in the LinkedIn search bar and pick the result marked "Company".
2. Open the "People" tab under the cover image. The count next to it is the number of employees with profiles that list this company as current.
3. Type a title into the box labelled "Search employees by title, keyword or school".
4. Narrow with the facets below the box: "Where they live" for the region you sell into and "What they do" for the function.

Paste one string per search. LinkedIn applies the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT in uppercase, quotation marks for exact phrases and parentheses for grouping. These three cover most deals once you swap the function word:

("VP Sales" OR "VP of Sales" OR "Head of Sales" OR "Sales Director" OR "Director of Sales" OR CRO)
("Revenue Operations" OR RevOps OR "Sales Operations") AND (Head OR Director OR Lead OR Manager)
(Founder OR "Co-Founder" OR CEO OR "Managing Director") NOT (Assistant OR Intern OR Former)

If the People tab shows more than 50 results for one string, the string is too broad or the company is big enough that you should add a region. If it shows zero, the company uses a different word for the function: open the two or three most senior people listed under "What they do" and copy the title they actually use.

Step 3: Find decision makers across many companies with LinkedIn People search

When you have more than ten target companies, run the search once for all of them instead of company by company. Use the People search with "All filters":

1. Type your title string in the search bar, press Enter, and choose "People".
2. Open "All filters". Under "Current company" add every target company one by one; the filter accepts dozens.
3. Set "Locations" to your territory and, if your product fits one sector, "Industry".
4. Under "Keywords", put the title string in the "Title" field rather than the general box, so it matches current titles only.

Free accounts have a monthly commercial use limit on people searches. Hit it and results stop until the limit resets, so run the broad searches early in the month and save the results to your sheet as you go.

Sales Navigator turns the same query into reusable filters. Its lead search lists "Title", "Function", "Seniority Level", "Changed Jobs" and "Company Headcount" among more than 50 filters (LinkedIn Sales Navigator filter list). The combination that finds owners rather than their teams is Function set to your buyer's department, Seniority Level set to Director, VP, CXO and Owner, and Company Headcount set to the band from Step 1. Save the search and set a weekly alert so new matches arrive without re-running it.

Step 4: Verify the person actually owns the decision

A title is a claim. Open each profile and run five checks before the name goes on the list. Each check takes under a minute.

1. Current role. The experience entry for the target company says "Present". People keep old titles in headlines for months after leaving.
2. Ownership verbs. The About section or the role description says "own", "lead", "run", "responsible for" or "manage a budget of". "Support", "assist", "partner with" and "help drive" describe someone one level down.
3. Team size matches the title. A "Head of Sales" at a 40-person company with two reports owns the decision. A "Head of Sales" at a 3,000-person company may run one region; check the headcount from Step 1 against the role.
4. Tenure. Someone in the role under 90 days is more likely to change tools and more likely to answer. LinkedIn's Sales Navigator community reports that people who changed jobs in the last 90 days are 62% more likely to respond to InMails (LinkedIn Sales Navigator community, August 2025). On a free account, read the start month in the experience entry.
5. Peers with the same title. Search the People tab for the exact title you found. Three "Director of Sales" results mean regions or segments; pick the one whose region matches your territory, or go one level up.

Mark each name as one of four roles: owner (signs), blocker (can say no: procurement, security, IT, legal), user (lives with it daily) and champion (wants it fixed and will carry it internally). An account with an owner and a champion is ready for outreach. An account with only users is not.

Step 5: Map the two or three others who decide with them

Decision makers rarely decide alone, and messaging only the top name leaves you with no reply and no idea why. From the owner's profile:

1. Open the "People" tab again and search the blocker titles for your product: "Procurement", "IT", "Security", "Legal", "Finance", "Controller".
2. Read the owner's recent activity. People they tag, reply to or congratulate on promotions are usually the peers who sit in the same meetings.
3. Add one user: the most senior person who would use your product every day, found with the function word from Step 1 at manager level.

Two or three names per account is the target. The time this saves shows up later: when the owner forwards your message to "the team", you already know who the team is.

Step 6: Rank the list by activity, not by title

You now have, say, 40 companies and 100 names. Message them in the order of who is active on LinkedIn, because an owner who has not posted or commented in six months will not see a connection request this month either.

For each owner and champion, open "Activity" on their profile (under "Show all activity") and record the date of their last post or comment in your sheet. Then sort:

1. Posted or commented in the last 30 days about the problem you solve, or about a competitor: message this week.
2. Active in the last 30 days on anything: message this week with a note that refers to what they posted.
3. Active in the last 90 days: message next month, or go through a champion.
4. No activity in 90 days: find their email instead and leave LinkedIn out of it.

Doing this by hand for 100 names takes about two hours a month. Intentsly does this part automatically for LinkedIn: it tracks who engages with your competitors' posts, who posts about the problem you solve and who follows competitor pages, scores each person against your ideal customer profile and surfaces them with a verified email, so your list starts sorted by the first group above (LinkedIn intent signals). The lesson on what a buying signal is explains which kinds of activity are worth acting on and which are noise.

A worked example: Harbor Ledger's first ten accounts

Harbor Ledger is a hypothetical company used to make the steps concrete. It sells expense management software to companies of 80 to 400 people and has a list of ten target firms in the Netherlands.

Step 1 gave two titles: "Head of Finance" or "Finance Director" for the owner, "Controller" and "Office Manager" as users, procurement absent at this size. Step 2, on the first company (210 employees), returned four people for the finance string: a CFO, a Finance Director, a Controller and a Finance Business Partner. Step 4 ruled out the CFO (About section describes investor relations and fundraising, no mention of tooling) and the Business Partner ("supporting the commercial teams"). The Finance Director's role description said "responsible for the finance team, systems and reporting", started seven months ago. Owner.

Step 5 found the IT Manager as a likely blocker (the firm had posted about a security certification) and the Controller as the user. Step 6 showed the Finance Director had commented twice in the last month on posts about month-end close, the Controller had posted once about receipt chasing, and the CFO had no activity since spring. Harbor Ledger's first message went to the Controller, quoting her receipt post, with the Finance Director added two days later as the owner. Across all ten companies the sheet held 23 names after two hours, sorted into seven to message now, nine next month and seven to email.

Where this goes wrong

Searching the biggest title. The CEO of a 500-person company does not pick a tool for one department. Use the ladder in Step 1 and start one level below the top for anything that is not a company-wide decision. The exception is companies under 50 people, where the founder owns almost everything.

Trusting the headline. Headlines are marketing. "Fractional CMO | Advisor | Speaker" at a company with no marketing team is not a decision maker there. Only the "Present" experience entry and the role description count in Step 4.

Messaging one name per company. When the one owner ignores you, the account is dead and you learn nothing. Two or three mapped names let you reach the champion, who often answers faster than the owner and tells you how the decision really gets made.

What to do with the list

Send the first message to the most active name per account, and make it about what they posted rather than about you. One template for a champion or owner who posted about the problem:

Hi {first name}, your comment on {topic} last week matched what we hear from finance leads at {company size} companies. We built {product} for exactly that step. If it is useful, I can send a two-minute walkthrough; if not, no follow-up from me.

Keep the volume low. We cap our own platform at 30 messages and 30 connection requests per LinkedIn account per day and recommend 15, because every name on your list was expensive to verify and a restricted account wastes all of them. Send a note with every request; the people in Step 6's first group get a note that quotes their post.

When we ran this on our own product, we chose who to message by what they had posted, founders complaining about cold outreach burnout, rather than by title. That run booked 14 qualified demos in 14 days with zero manual outreach and a reply rate 4x our previous cold campaigns, and most leads came from signals caught in real time, not from a static list. If you would rather see your matching buyers before building the sheet by hand, try the AI shows them for your product with no account, and the rest of the guides cover the outreach that follows.

FAQ

Can you find decision makers on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator?

Yes. The company People tab with a title string and the People search with the Current company, Title and Locations filters find the same names for one account at a time. Sales Navigator adds Seniority Level, Function and Changed Jobs filters and saved-search alerts, which save real time once you work around 30 or more target accounts a week.

Who counts as a decision maker for a B2B purchase?

The person who can approve the spend and sign the agreement, plus the people who can stop it. For a departmental tool that is usually the function's leader at mid-size companies and the founder at small ones. Procurement, IT, security and legal are decision makers too when they can block, which is why the buying committee map in Step 5 includes them.

How do you know if someone on LinkedIn is really the decision maker?

Check that the role is marked Present, that the role description uses ownership language such as "lead", "own" or "responsible for" rather than "support", that the team size fits the title at that company's headcount, and that no peers hold the same title for your territory. If two of the four checks fail, the real owner is one level up or sideways.

Should you contact the CEO or someone lower on LinkedIn?

Contact the CEO only at companies under about 50 people, where founders own most decisions. Above that, start with the leader of the function that pays for your product and add one champion at manager level who feels the problem daily. The champion usually answers first and tells you how the decision moves inside the company.

How many decision makers should you map per account?

Two or three: the owner, one potential blocker and one user or champion. Forrester's 2026 research counts 13 internal stakeholders in a typical business buying decision, but you cannot message 13 strangers well. Map the two or three who matter most, message the most active one first, and let that conversation reveal the rest of the group.