You're here because LinkedIn searches or even Sales Navigator isn't cutting it anymore, and you're looking for alternative ways to build lead lists from LinkedIn.
I've been working adjacent to sales and marketing teams for over 3 years now (I'm a senior RevOps consultant). I've seen sales reps spend hours every week going through LinkedIn Sales Nav, Apollo and Zoominfo trying to find the perfect filters that will give them the leads to fill their pipeline this quarter.
No matter how many filters you add, these platforms will never give you real buying-intent signal. And so, more often than not, the vast majority of leads you reach out to end up being either dead, or worse, not at all interested.
What you're missing is an ability to filter by high intent, and timing.
What if you could stop searching for titles and start listening for people on social media who are facing the problems your product solves? This is the key to lead generation on LinkedIn in 2025—identifying buying signals in real time.
This guide will walk you through the exact process of monitoring LinkedIn for high-intent keywords, identifying qualified leads, and exporting them into a ready-to-use list for your sales outreach and CRM.
What Are "High-Intent" Keywords on LinkedIn?
"High-intent keywords" are the specific phrases people use when they are actively seeking a solution to a problem your product solves. Here are a couple of examples:
Problem-Based Keywords
Phrases like:
- "looking for a tool that..."
- "any recommendations for..."
- "how do you solve [problem]?"
Competitor-Based Keywords
Phrases mentioning competitors, especially complaints.
- "Tired of [Competitor Name]"
- "alternatives to [Competitor Name]
Solution-Seeking Keywords
Phrases related to your product category.
- "best crm for startups"
- "help desk software recommendations"
Now that you know what high-intent keywords are, let's look at how we can use them to our advantage.
4-Step Workflow for High-Intent Lead Generation
This is where the strategy turns into action. I’ll walk you through this repeatable playbook that takes you from monitoring keywords to having a fresh, qualified lead list ready for outreach—every single day of the week.
Step 1: Set Up Your "Intent Listener" with SnitchFeed
Manually searching LinkedIn for these buying signals every day is inefficient and impossible to scale. It'll take at least an hour or two every single day.
The first step is to automate the monitoring process. This is where you put SnitchFeed to work as your 24/7 prospecting assistant.
Setting it up is simple:
- Log in to your SnitchFeed account and create a new Listener.
- Under "Platforms," make sure LinkedIn is selected. This tells SnitchFeed to listen on the world's largest professional network for these high-intent keywords. (You can listen on other platforms too, like Twitter, Reddit and Bluesky)
- In the "Keywords" box, enter the keywords you want to track. This will need a bit of brainstorming.
- "Whole word" checkbox: If you're listening for the word "apple", you will get results that include words like "pineapple", "applesauce", etc. Check this box if you want to avoid that (but only if you need to)!
- "Case Sensitive" checkbox: If you're listening for the word "Apple" (the company) and have this box checked, your results will have the following matches:
- “I bought an apple” ❌ (fruit)
- “Just got the new Apple Watch” ✅ (the company)
- AI Relevance Settings: This is where you define in detail what kind of posts you're looking to catch ((your buy-intent signals) and what kind of posts are irrelevant to you. Our AI will automatically filter out irrelevant posts based on what you define here, so use as much detail as possible!
- Give your Listener a name and hit "Create"!
That’s it. You’ve now deployed a digital scout that will constantly scan LinkedIn posts and comments for your defined buying signals.
Step 2: Let the High-Intent Mentions Come to You
Instead of hunting for leads, they will now be delivered directly to your SnitchFeed feed. As the tool finds new posts or comments matching your keywords, they will appear in real-time.
You can even have these delivered to your inbox or Slack or even Zapier/n8n/Make.com via webhooks!
SnitchFeed does the heavy lifting of pre-qualifying each lead (mention) in your feed based on the intent signals you defined in the previous step!
- Relevance Score: See at a glance how relevant the mention is to your intent-signal, helping you instantly separate the signal from the noise.
- Sentiment Analysis: Instantly gauge if the mention is positive, negative, or neutral. A negative mention about a competitor is one of the strongest buying signals you can find.
This allows you to quickly scan your feed and identify the most promising leads without having to click through to every single post.
Step 3: The Payoff - Export Your Lead List to CSV
This is the magic moment where your social listening efforts transform into a tangible asset. Once you have a feed populated with high-intent mentions, you can export the people who made them into an organized list with a single click.
Simply click the "Export to CSV" button.
SnitchFeed will generate a spreadsheet that contains a list of all your mentions, including:
- The person's full name.
- A direct link to their LinkedIn profile.
- Relevance score for how strong the intent-signal is in the post.
- Sentiment score for how happy/unhappy they are in case of a competitor mention.
- The exact text of their comment or post (the context for your outreach).
- The date the mention was found.
You no longer have a list of mentions; you have a structured lead list of individuals who have raised their hands and expressed a need.
Step 4: Engage and Enroll
With your high-intent lead list exported, you're ready for the final, revenue-driving step. Here are the two most effective ways to use your new list:
- Personalized Manual Outreach: Use the "Profile URL" column to visit each lead's LinkedIn page. You can now send a connection request or InMail that is exceptionally relevant. Instead of a generic template, you can say:
- "Hi [Name], I saw your comment on LinkedIn looking for alternatives to [Competitor Name]. My company specializes in [Your Solution], which helps solve [Problem they mentioned]. Worth a brief chat?" The response rates for this type of contextual outreach are dramatically higher (as high as 49% on day 1!) than cold outreach.
- Scaled Outreach via Sales Tools: For maximum efficiency, import your CSV directly into your CRM or sales engagement platform (like Salesloft, Outreach, Apollo, etc.). You can then enroll these high-intent leads into a dedicated sequence tailored to the problem they expressed, scaling your personalized outreach efforts.
Why This is a Game-Changer for Social Selling on LinkedIn
Switching your approach from actively searching for job titles to passively listening for intent fundamentally changes the sales equation. This workflow, powered by automated listening, moves you from a prospector to a problem-solver, giving you a powerful advantage in a crowded market. Here’s why this method is so effective:
Timing is Everything
Traditional prospecting is a numbers game based on a hope that you find the right person at the right time.
But more often than not, your perfectly crafted message that you spent at least 10 minutes doing research for lands in the inbox of someone who isn't looking for a solution.
With intent listening, you flip the odds in your favor. You engage leads at the precise moment they are publicly expressing a need or a pain point. It's the difference between knocking on every door in a neighborhood versus only knocking on the doors with a "For Sale" sign on the lawn.
Your timing is always perfect because the prospect provides the signal.
Hyper-Personalization Becomes Effortless
Every sales guru preaches personalization, but a truly personalized message goes beyond using {{first_name}} and {{company_name}}.
This method provides the ultimate hook for your outreach. Your first sentence is no longer a guess, it's a direct reference to their problem, in their own words. Starting a conversation with, "I saw you were looking for recommendations on..." or "I read your post about the challenges with [Competitor Tool]..." immediately shows you've listened and done your research. It builds instant rapport and proves your relevance before you even mention your product.
Uncover the Hidden Pipeline
Relying solely on titles and company size means you miss a massive, untapped segment of your market.
The person experiencing the most pain from a problem might be a manager or a senior user, not necessarily the C-level executive your Sales Navigator filter is set for. These are the people who become powerful internal champions for your solution. By listening for the problem itself, you uncover a hidden pipeline of motivated leads that your competitors.
Sales repos who are still just searching for VPs of Marketing will never find these folks.
Radical Efficiency and Scalability
The brutal truth is that the most time-consuming part of prospecting is the manual grind of finding the right people.
This workflow automates that entire discovery phase. Instead of spending hours each day scrolling through feeds, you can start your morning with a pre-qualified, high-intent lead list waiting for you in a CSV file. It allows you to shift your valuable time away from mind-numbing searching and refocus it on what you do best: building relationships and closing deals.
It's simple: less time prospecting, more time selling.
Ready to Build Your First High-Intent Lead List?
You’ve seen the playbook.
The old way of prospecting on LinkedIn: endlessly scrolling and sending cold, generic messages, is inefficient and yields low returns. The future of effective social selling lies in identifying intent and engaging prospects with timely, relevant outreach.
Why hope the leads you're reaching out to have a problem your product solves? You can go to them the moment they express a need. You can stop guessing and start building a pipeline fueled by real, active buying signals.
Now it's time to put this guide into action.
For a limited time, you can try SnitchFeed completely free for 14 days. This isn't a stripped-down version; you get full access to every feature of our Pro plan. That means you can use the AI-powered relevance score, sentiment analysis, and advanced filtering to execute the exact workflow you learned today.
There's no risk. In the next 10 minutes, you can set up your first listener and start populating your first high-intent lead list from LinkedIn before the end of the day.
Start Your Free 14-Day Pro Trial Today and Find Your First Leads
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How is this different from just using LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
A: That's the most important question. Think of it this way: Sales Navigator is for finding people based on who they are (their title, company, industry). SnitchFeed is for finding opportunities based on what they need right now. Sales Navigator helps you build a static list of potential accounts. Our method helps you find active buying signals within those accounts—or from people you would have otherwise missed. The two tools are incredibly powerful when used together: build your target list with Sales Nav, and monitor it for real-time intent signals with SnitchFeed.
Q: Can this track comments as well as original posts?
A: At the time of writing this article, listening for comments is unfortunately not possible. That might change in the near future, but listening to posts on LinkedIn already gives you a massive unfair advantage.
Q: How do I get the leads from SnitchFeed into my CRM or sales outreach tool?
A: Easily. The workflow is built around a simple CSV export. With one click, you download a lead list containing the prospect's name, a direct link to their LinkedIn profile, and the text of their high-intent mention. This CSV file can be directly imported into any modern CRM (like Salesforce, HubSpot) or sales engagement platform (like Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo) to enroll leads into your sequences.
We also integrate with Zapier, Make and n8n to automatically route leads to your CRM or outreach tool via webhooks!
Q: How quickly can I actually get this set up and find my first leads?
A: You can be up and running in under 10 minutes. The process is as simple as:
- Signing up for the free trial.
- Creating a new listener.
- Typing in your high-intent keywords and selecting "LinkedIn."
- SnitchFeed will begin finding mentions immediately. Most users identify their first actionable leads within the first day of their trial.
Q: What kind of keywords work best for finding buying signals?
A: We have a full guide on how to come up with keywords to track. The best keywords fall into three categories:
- Problem-Aware Keywords: "how to fix...", "looking for a tool that...", "recommendations for..."
- Competitor Complaints: "alternatives to [competitor]", "frustrated with [competitor]", "switching from [competitor]"
- Solution-Seeking Keywords: "best project management software", "does anyone use [your product category]?"
The key is to think less about your brand and more about the specific language your ideal customer uses when they're actively looking for a solution.