You can find B2B leads on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator, the paid search add-on, by using the free search bar with title, location and company filters, then reading company pages, alumni lists and recent posts to decide who is worth contacting. The free tools are limited. They're enough to build a list of 50 good names, and then the real conversation usually moves to email or the phone.
Tasha is a fractional finance lead for small e-commerce brands. Her ideal client is the founder or head of operations at a company doing a few million dollars in sales, with no full-time finance person. She doesn't want to pay for a premium tool before she knows if LinkedIn works for her. Here's how she'd proceed.
What the free search can do
A free account lets you search people and companies and filter by connection level, location, current company and, for people, some title and industry options. It also shows a limited number of results, and heavy searching can trigger a notice that you've reached a commercial use limit for the month. That limit is the main reason people buy Sales Navigator. You can work within it by searching on purpose instead of browsing endlessly.
Use LinkedIn mostly to confirm a name, a title and an interest, not as the place where you'll do all your selling. Many buyers rarely open their LinkedIn messages. They check email and answer the phone. That doesn't make LinkedIn useless. It makes it a research tool first and a channel second. LinkedIn outreach versus email compares the two in more depth.
Search by title and location
Type the title you want in the search bar, then filter to People and add a location. Tasha searches "founder ecommerce" and "head of operations ecommerce" in three metro areas. She opens each profile and checks three things in under a minute: does their company sell products online, is the company the right size (the company page shows a headcount range), and do they appear to run the finance side themselves.
Write down name, title, company, location and profile link in a sheet. Don't go past 30 or 40 per session. Searching in short bursts keeps you under the limits and keeps your list tight. If you do it right you'll have about 25 qualified names after an hour. For ways to turn a list like that into something you can contact, see build a list without buying one.
Use company pages and alumni lists
Company pages list employees who have LinkedIn profiles, along with job openings and recent posts. Search for a company, click "People", and read the titles. This is the quickest way to find who works there and who holds the role you want. Job openings tell you what the company is about to spend money on: a brand posting for a "bookkeeper" is probably drowning in invoices.
Alumni lists are also worth a look. Search a college or a former employer, and filter to people in your target role and city. Shared history makes a first message warmer. "I saw we both worked at the same logistics company early in our careers" is more honest and more interesting than a generic opener. Keep it true. If there's no actual connection, don't invent one.
Posts and comments as signals
What people post tells you what's on their mind this month. A founder who writes about a messy inventory count, a surprise tax bill or a new warehouse is giving you a reason to write. Look at recent posts for the people on your list, and note one line you can reference.
Commenting thoughtfully on a few of their posts, before you ever message, makes you a familiar name. Keep comments real and brief: add a useful point, not "great post!" That's slow but low-risk, and fits with personalisation at low volume, which argues for one true, specific line over a template with a merged first name.
Move to email or phone
Once you know a name, find a business email and use it. A cold connection request with a note may be seen in a week, if at all, and free accounts get a limited number of personalized notes each month. Email gets read the same day. Tasha finds the company's domain from the company page, works out the address pattern, and verifies it before she writes. How to find a business owner's email address covers that step.
Her note: "Hi Jordan, I saw your post about the inventory count taking three weekends. I help small e-commerce brands close their books monthly without hiring full-time. If a 15-minute call would be useful, I have Thursday at 2. Tasha Greene, 33 Pearl Street, Boston. Reply 'no' and I won't write again." Include a physical address and an opt-out for CAN-SPAM, and keep sends to 20 to 50 a day.
If you'd rather not hand-build the list at all, Rocketship's AI worker does the same job from a plain-English description: "founders and operations leads at e-commerce brands with 10 to 50 employees in the Northeast". It finds them by name with verified contact details, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting.
Stay within LinkedIn's rules
LinkedIn's terms of use don't allow automated scraping or bots that send connection requests and messages for you, and accounts using them get restricted. That applies to browser extensions that collect profile data in bulk, too. Stay manual. Don't use fake profiles. Don't pretend to know someone. And don't export other people's contact details in ways the platform forbids. Check the current User Agreement before relying on any tool.
Treat what you collect as business contact information. Use a person's work details to contact them about their work, and keep a note of where each came from. If someone tells you to stop, stop.
When LinkedIn is the wrong channel
LinkedIn works best for roles that live there: consultants, marketers, finance and tech professionals, executives at mid-size companies. It works poorly for owners of trades, restaurants, retail shops and clinics, who may not have a profile at all. For those buyers, the map, the business registry and the phone are better places to look. How to find B2B leads without paying for a database covers those sources, and how to find the decision maker at a company helps once you have the company.
Try LinkedIn for two weeks with a clear target of 50 names and 25 emails. A reasonable week for Tasha: 25 names on Monday, verified emails by Wednesday, 10 sent Thursday and 15 Friday, then one follow-up the next Tuesday. If three people reply and one takes a call, that's a working channel at a very small cost. If nobody does, change the first line before you blame the platform. If you get replies, you've found a channel. If you don't, you've spent a few hours and learned where your buyers are not. Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and both Launch and Frontier start with a 7-day free trial, card required. Answering your existing number is included; a dedicated line is $5 a month.