LinkedIn prospecting: how to find the right people, read them, and message them without getting ignored.

What LinkedIn prospecting is

LinkedIn prospecting is the practice of finding potential buyers on LinkedIn, reading enough about each one to write something specific, and starting a conversation that leads to a meeting.

It is prospecting in the ordinary sales sense, done on the one platform where buyers describe themselves. Their role, their company, what they have written and what they care about this month are on the profile.

Most B2B prospect lists are built on LinkedIn for that reason, even when the first touch goes out by email.

What makes LinkedIn prospecting different from cold email is that research and outreach happen in the same place, and the prospect can see you back.

A connection request arrives with your name, your headline and your photo; a message after acceptance sits in a thread the prospect can scroll; an InMail carries a subject line and a credit.

That visibility is the advantage, because a prospect who has seen your comments on their posts accepts more often, and it is the constraint, because a prospect who sees a script recognizes it faster than they would in an inbox.

Why sales teams prospect on LinkedIn

For a B2B sales team, LinkedIn is the largest directory of potential customers that describes itself and keeps itself current. Every prospect lists their role and company; most list what they work on; many post about the problems they are trying to solve this quarter.

That makes it the place where sales prospecting starts even when the outreach goes out by email or phone. The target list is built from LinkedIn search, and the research that finds the first line is done on the profile.

Sales Navigator adds the alerts that tell a sales rep which leads changed jobs or posted this week.

The time a rep spends on LinkedIn is mostly research time, and it is the research that turns a cold list into leads who reply.

The tools reflect that.

Sales Navigator is a search and alerting product before it is a messaging product; the sales tools that plug into LinkedIn, enrichment extensions, sequencing platforms, CRM connectors, exist to move what the rep finds on LinkedIn into the rest of the outbound process.

A sales team that uses LinkedIn only to send messages is using the least valuable part of it.

LinkedIn prospecting vs LinkedIn networking vs cold email

In practice the three run together in a sales team's outreach. The list is built on LinkedIn, the first email goes out with an observation found there, the connection request follows, and the message after acceptance continues the thread the email started.

LinkedIn prospecting is the name for the LinkedIn half of that cadence, and it works best when the email half exists.

The LinkedIn prospecting process, step by step

1. Define who you are looking for

   Role, seniority, company size, industry, region, from the ideal customer profile. Search filters only work when the profile is written down.

2. Search and build the list

   LinkedIn search with filters, or Sales Navigator with saved searches and lead lists. Boolean terms for the title, exclusions for the noise. Tens of prospects a week, not hundreds.

3. Sort by signal

   Who posted recently, who changed jobs, whose company is hiring or raised money, who viewed your profile. Signals decide the order, not the alphabet.

4. Read the profile and the last three posts

   Two minutes per person. The About section, the current role, what they wrote or commented on. The observation for the first line comes from here.

5. Choose the route by degree

   1st: message free. 2nd or 3rd: connection request with a note. Open Profile: message free. 3rd+ and no reply: InMail, once.

6. Send the connection note

   Under 200 characters: where you saw them and why you want to connect, no pitch. The note is the first touch, and it has to stand alone.

7. Message after acceptance, on the reason

   Continue the reason from the note, offer one useful thing, ask one question. Not a thank-you, not a deck.

8. Follow up in the cadence, then stop

   One or two follow-ups across LinkedIn and email over ten days, each adding something. Stop at the first reply, or after the last touch.

Finding prospects: LinkedIn search and Sales Navigator

To find prospects, a basic LinkedIn account searches people by title, company, location, industry, school and connection degree, and accepts boolean operators in the title and keyword fields: quotes for exact phrases, AND, OR and NOT for combinations. The school filter is also how you find alumni on LinkedIn inside your target accounts.

That is enough to build a list of a few hundred matching people at a time, and the search results show the degree next to each name so the route is visible before the click.

Sales Navigator adds what daily prospecting needs: more filters, including seniority, function, company headcount and years in role; saved searches that surface new matches; lead and account lists; alerts when a saved lead changes jobs or posts; and InMail credits.

The search is where the profile becomes a list; the alerts are where the list gets its signals.

The three messages of LinkedIn prospecting

LinkedIn prospecting tools, and what each one is for

Sales teams use four kinds of tools around LinkedIn prospecting, and the free account covers more than most reps expect.

LinkedIn search and Sales Navigator find the prospects and surface the signals; Sales Navigator's saved searches and alerts are the part worth paying for when a rep prospects daily.

Enrichment extensions pull verified emails and phone numbers for a prospect into the CRM, so that the LinkedIn touches and the email touches reach the same person.

Sequencing platforms run the email side of the cadence and remind the rep when the LinkedIn touch is due; the ones that send LinkedIn messages automatically are the ones that get accounts restricted.

And the CRM logs every touch and every reply, which is where the reply rate per list and per note comes from. The time saved by the tools goes back into reading profiles, which is the part of LinkedIn prospecting that produces leads.

The limits LinkedIn enforces

Sales prospecting on LinkedIn runs inside limits LinkedIn sets. LinkedIn caps the invitations an account can send per week and does not publish the number.

It shows a warning as the account approaches the cap, and it lowers the cap for accounts whose invitations sit unanswered or are marked by recipients as coming from someone they do not know.

Withdrawn invitations and blank invitations to strangers are the two habits that get an account restricted fastest.

Automation tools that send invitations and messages are restricted by LinkedIn's user agreement, and an account that sends faster than a person could is the account that gets limited; the parts of prospecting worth automating, saved searches, alerts, reminders, are the parts LinkedIn provides.

InMail is limited by credits on a paid plan, and messages to 1st-degree connections are free and unlimited in practice, which is the reason the connection request comes first.

Prospecting several people at the same account

B2B sales decisions are made by a group, and LinkedIn shows the group, which is why sales prospecting on LinkedIn should target several potential buyers at each account. The company page lists employees by role; a search filtered to the company surfaces the user, the evaluator, the person who signs and the person who blocks.

Prospecting two or three of them at once, each with a message for their role, converts more accounts than one contact hit five times, and it makes the messages stronger, because the note to the second person can mention that you wrote to the first.

The rule is that the messages have to agree with each other: an account where two people compare notes and find two different pitches is an account lost.

Targets, lists and where the time goes

A LinkedIn prospecting target is a number of qualified conversations, not a number of messages.

Working back from it: meetings needed this month, divided by the share of positive replies that book, gives the replies needed; divided by the reply rate per hundred prospects, gives the list size; divided by working days, gives how many new prospects a sales rep has to find, read and write to each day.

For most B2B sales teams that is ten to twenty prospects a day, and the time goes roughly a third to search and list building, a third to reading profiles and posts, and a third to the connection notes, messages and logging.

Sales Navigator and the enrichment tools shrink the first third; nothing shrinks the second, and reps who try to skip it produce outreach that looks like everyone else's.

The leads that come out of the process are the potential buyers who replied, and the list is where they came from, so the list is rebuilt weekly from the signals rather than worked alphabetically to the end.

How to measure LinkedIn prospecting

Sales tool vendors publish benchmarks for acceptance and reply rates that measure their own users on their own lists. Compare note versions and message versions against each other on your list; that comparison is the only one that tells you what to change.

Mistakes that get LinkedIn prospecting ignored

The mistakes below are the ones that get LinkedIn sales prospecting ignored, and most are visible to the prospect before they read a word of the message.

• A profile that does not say what you do, so the prospect who checks it before accepting finds nothing.
• Blank invitations.
• A note that pitches.
• A first message that is a deck.
• Sending to everyone with a title instead of the people with a signal.
• Three follow-ups in the same thread.
• InMail to people who could have been messaged free.
• Automation that sends faster than a person.
• Treating LinkedIn as the whole cadence, when the prospect who ignores LinkedIn often answers the email.

In a sequence

In the 10-day sales cadence, LinkedIn carries touch 2, the connection request after the first email, and touch 4, the message after acceptance. The message below is touch 4: it quotes something the prospect wrote, connects it to a problem the rep can help with, offers one thing, and asks one question.

Thanks for connecting, {{firstName}}.

Your comment on the thread about SDR ramp time, the one about week two being where new reps stall, matched what we see in onboarding almost exactly.

We wrote the week-two follow-ups down as a one-page cadence. Want it, or is that already solved on your team?

{{senderName}}

Frequently asked questions