everything i've learnt about getting leads on linkedin... (XXX generated)

we've gotten replies and booked calls out of morgan stanley, salesforce, comcast, and linkedin themselves.

most of what i believed at the start of learning all this turned out to be wrong.

the parts that survived come down to four decisions, and they happen in a fixed order...

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decision one, who you point it at:

the market you choose caps the result BEFORE you write a word.

i spent a long time thinking outbound performance came from the message. it comes from the match between the offer and the desk it lands on.

the filters that decide whether a company belongs on the list:

• revenue floor, meaning $10k+ per month, since anyone below that treats your fee as an existential decision
• a total addressable market above 3,000 companies, so the campaign does not exhaust itself in six weeks
• a proven offer already selling, because outbound multiplies an offer that works and exposes one that does not
• a buying signal inside the last 90 days, meaning a raise, a hire, a contract, a launch, a filing

then the disqualifications, which matter as much as the filters.

lending, insurance, and b2c come off the list.

so does any company that needs the outbound to work in order to survive the quarter.

we run the whole list through a model that reads every profile and company against those criteria, then tags each one keep or drop with a written reason.

the reasons are the useful part.

when 4,000 records get dropped for the same cause, the icp definition was too loose, and you fix it before spending a single send.

a tight list of 5,000 outperforms a loose list of 50,000 in every industry i have tested it in.

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decision two, the surface you deliver on:

a decision maker's work email carries 200+ cold approaches a month, and they have stopped opening it.

the same person's linkedin inbox holds a handful of messages, and they read it themselves on their phone.

the routes into that inbox, and what each one costs:

• open profiles, which accept an inmail with no connection request and no credit spent
• inmail credits, which refund whenever the recipient replies inside 90 days
• event attendees, messageable for free once you register for the same event
• event invites, running on a separate weekly allowance of around 1,000
• connection requests, capped near 100 a week, which is why they carry the least of the load

the refund rule reshapes the economics of everything above it.

a message that earns a reply costs NOTHING, which makes reply rate the metric the entire operation optimizes toward.

open profiles are the reason company size stops mattering.

a large share of senior people leave the setting on without realising, and their inbox is quiet.

that is how a message from a faceless outbound team reaches a morgan stanley VP and gets answered in UNDER 4 hours.

underneath all of it sits account health, which is an ops discipline.

aged profiles, a four week warmup ramp, one clean ip each, activity dripped across working hours, volume spread across a fleet rather than concentrated on one profile.

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decision three, what the message does:

the copy carries less weight than the list, and it still has to clear a bar.

what testing across 30 industries settled:

• under 400 characters, since these get read on a phone between meetings
• open on their situation, using the signal you found during qualification
• describe the problem in the words they use internally, not the category you sell
• make one small ask, meaning an opinion, a teardown, or a document you can send
• one question per message, so the reply requires a single decision
• keep links out of the first message, since they are the strongest spam signal available

the size of the ask changed our numbers more than any rewrite ever did.

asking for 20 minutes of a senior person's calendar asks for the scarcest thing they own.

asking what they think about something costs them one line of typing.

the call comes out of the conversation that follows the reply.

then variation, because the same idea goes out thousands of times and linkedin pattern matches identical bodies:

• three to five versions of every line, rotated across the send
• name, company, role and signal pulled in as variables from enrichment
• sentence order shifted between versions
• the ask itself rotated across the campaign

a tightly targeted campaign in one narrow vertical came back at 46.88% reply rate for us, on a message that was completely ordinary.

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decision four, what happens after they reply:

this is where most campaigns quietly fail, and it took me too a long time to see it.

across 140+ companies, the ones that got no return were RARELY short of conversations.

they were losing the conversations they already had.

what breaks after the reply arrives:

• the lead sits for two days before anyone answers
• a positive reply gets a generic pitch instead of a question
• nobody follows up after the first exchange goes quiet
• the qualification happens on the call rather than in the thread
• no single person owns the inbox, so threads fall between people

the rules we run now:

• every reply gets worked inside the hour during working days
• positive replies go to a human immediately
• qualification happens in the dms, meaning revenue, current setup, timeline, decision maker
• the ask escalates gradually, from opinion to resource to call
• two follow ups maximum on a silent thread, spaced three to four days and then seven to ten, each carrying something new

then the thread closes and the lead returns to the list for a later quarter.

a system producing 30 conversations a month into a business that cannot work them produces nothing at all.

the lead flow is the half most people obsess over. the response discipline is the half that decides what the flow is worth.

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- din

we run cold outbound systems (linkedin + email) for B2B businesses making $10k/month or more...

worked with over 140 companies across 30 different industries (most get ROI within 60-90 days)

DM me and we'll talk

also read this article for more value:

https://x.com/DinScales26/status/2062960719247643068