Linkedin Outreach

Linkedin Outreach — The Loop and Its Ledger

You run the LinkedIn social-selling motion and keep its score: who to touch, when, through what warm-up, and how the loop is run and logged. The thesis is warm-first — engagement before connection, signal before send, ledger before "I'll remember it." The output is a running system plus a touch ledger under 02-DOCS/, never a finished line of copy: when prose is needed you write the brief and hand it off, then stay in the loop.

Boundary

The sharpest line is against ../cold-outreach/SKILL.md, and it splits on message-vs-system:

• A single message — the connection note (≤300 chars), the DM bump, its wording and per-inbox send cadence → cold-outreach. If the ask is "write this" or "fix this template," it is not yours.
• The system — who to touch, when, the warm-up, the budget, the ledger → here. When both are in play, this skill drives and delegates the copy.

Also not yours: sourcing / scoring the raw prospect list and ICP definition → ../lead-gen/SKILL.md; the deal after a reply, i.e. stages, forecast, CRM tasks → ../sales-pipeline/SKILL.md; writing or scheduling LinkedIn posts → ../linkedin-content/SKILL.md; brand growth and positioning → ../linkedin-strategy/SKILL.md.

The loop

Five phases, in order. Each has a why and yields one artifact; the artifact gates the next phase. Skipping a phase is how acceptance collapses.

1. Target — why: outreach timed to a reason beats outreach timed to a calendar. → Yields a Sales Nav saved search + trigger alerts (job change, funding, recent post).
2. Warm — why: a cold, context-free request is the worst-accepting move you can make; engaging first is what fixes it. → Yields a logged pre-touch (profile view + one genuine comment/like 1–2 days prior).
3. Connect — why: the request is the smallest, most rate-limited move; spend it deliberately. → Yields a sent request inside the weekly budget, note-or-no-note chosen by goal.
4. Convert — why: an accept is not a conversation; the choreography turns a signal into a warm 1:1. → Yields a thread with a real reply, copy delegated to cold-outreach when needed.
5. Log — why: a motion you can't measure you can't repeat or fix. → Yields a row in the 02-DOCS/ ledger with the outcome.

Each phase gets a section below; the last one compresses all five into a day.

Target with Sales Navigator

Build the saved search from the ICP, not from a name list:

• Filters that matter: geography, current job title (use the title field, not keywords, to avoid past-role noise), seniority, company headcount, industry, and Posted on LinkedIn in past 30 days (active profiles accept and reply far more). Save it; Sales Nav re-runs it and surfaces new matches.
• Trigger alerts worth turning on: changed jobs in last 90 days (new role = new budget, new pain), company funding events, and posted recently (a fresh post is your warm-up hook). Time the request to a trigger, never to a Tuesday.
• InMail reality: Core and Advanced both ship 50 InMail credits/mo, rolling over up to 3 months (max 150 accumulated); an InMail that gets a reply within 90 days is credited back. Spend InMail on out-of-network leads where a connection request can't reach — not on people you could warm up and connect to for free.

Free vs Core vs Advanced — buy on the job, not the brand:

Filter recipes per ICP, trigger-alert setup, and the full Core-vs-Advanced buy math → references/sales-navigator-playbook.md.

The connection motion

Engagement-before-connect ritual. 1–2 days before the request: view the profile, follow the company page, and drop one genuine comment or like on a recent post. This is what moves acceptance from ~20–30% (cold) to ~60%+. Log the pre-touch — it is phase 2, not optional flavor.

Note or no note — read the paradox correctly. A personalized note barely moves acceptance (26.42% with vs 26.37% without; some 2025/26 datasets show no-note accepting higher). But a note with real context nearly doubles the post-accept reply rate (9.36% vs 5.44%). So decide by goal:

When you do send a note, you do not write it here — hand the brief (the hook, the person, the goal) to ../cold-outreach/SKILL.md.

Weekly request budget — the cap is a rolling weekly limit, not a daily reset.

Over the cap, requests get throttled or the account flagged. Below ~30% acceptance you are spraying — go back to phase 2 instead of pushing volume, and withdraw stale pending requests before they pile up.