LinkedIn outreach finds prospects on LinkedIn, introduces yourself, pitches your product, and converts good fits into sales.
LinkedIn outreach is all about finding and reaching out to new prospects on LinkedIn who might be interested in your products and services.
The high-level LinkedIn outreach overview is simple: find people, introduce yourself, pitch your product. Good fit? Sell them. Bad fit? Move on.
A good LinkedIn outreach strategy means lots of introductions to lots of great prospects. Having a well-crafted LinkedIn cold outreach message template can significantly streamline and enhance this process.
Table of Contents
- Why Is LinkedIn So Effective for Outreach?
- What Are the 6 Steps of LinkedIn Outreach?
- Step 1: How Do You Identify Your LinkedIn Outreach Target Audience?
- Step 2: How Do You Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for Outreach?
- Step 3: How Do You Find Email Addresses From LinkedIn?
- Step 4: How Do You Send LinkedIn Outreach Messages?
- Step 5: How Do You Monitor LinkedIn Outreach Responses?
- Step 6: How Do You Conduct Email Outreach From LinkedIn?
- What Are the Best LinkedIn Email Finder Tools?
- What Are the Best LinkedIn Outreach Automation Tools?
- What Are the 7 Pro Tips for LinkedIn Outreach Success?
- What Makes a LinkedIn Outreach Message Effective?
- Frequently Asked Questions About LinkedIn Outreach
- What is LinkedIn outreach?
- How many users does LinkedIn have?
- What is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
- What are the best LinkedIn email finder tools?
- What are the best LinkedIn automation tools?
- How many LinkedIn connections can you send per day?
- Should you automate LinkedIn outreach?
- What makes a good LinkedIn connection message?
- Is quality or quantity more important in LinkedIn outreach?
- Why should you follow up in LinkedIn outreach?
- Related posts:
- Cold Email Compliance 101: CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL Requirements
- 16 Best B2B Lead Gen Agencies
- Master Sales Discovery: 21 Game-Changing Questions That Turn Prospects Into Customers
Why Is LinkedIn So Effective for Outreach?
LinkedIn has 760+ million professionals with powerful search filters for targeting by industry, company size, and seniority.
What We’ve Found
In our experience testing LinkedIn outreach strategies, the platform’s flexibility makes it suitable for both aggressive prospect-churning campaigns and calmer, warmer relationship-building approaches. Everything works on LinkedIn.
How Many Users Does LinkedIn Have?
LinkedIn has more than 760 million users—adult professionals who care about their careers.
If you can only sell to 1 in a million people, there are still 760 people ready to buy from you on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn audience consists of professionals focused on their careers, making it a goldmine for B2B LinkedIn outreach.
What Makes LinkedIn’s Search Tools So Powerful?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator filters by company size, industry, years of experience, seniority level, and dozens more criteria.
On LinkedIn, it’s easy to search for people who meet your exact criteria—especially with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
What Are the 6 Steps of LinkedIn Outreach?
The 6 steps: identify audience, search Sales Navigator, connect/find emails, send messages, monitor responses, conduct email outreach.
Step 1: How Do You Identify Your LinkedIn Outreach Target Audience?
Define your ideal customer profile before starting LinkedIn outreach—know who you’re looking for.
First, figure out who your target audience is. This includes industry, company size, job title, seniority level, and geographic location. Your LinkedIn outreach success depends on targeting the right prospects.
Use Sales Navigator’s advanced filters to search by location, connection degree, company size, seniority, and keywords.
How We Search
In our LinkedIn outreach campaigns, we create searches for people in the USA, who are 2nd degree connections, with a company headcount of 1-200, a seniority level of “VP” and a match for keywords like “VP sales.” Sales Navigator makes this hyper-targeting possible.
If you don’t have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account yet, set one up—it’s worth it for serious LinkedIn outreach. Then conduct a search using advanced parameters to hyper-target your right audience.
Step 3: How Do You Find Email Addresses From LinkedIn?
Send connection requests, then view email addresses in profiles, or use LinkedIn email finder apps to automate collection.
Send connection requests to each prospect from your search results. After they accept, you can usually view their email address by visiting their profile and clicking “Contact info.”
You can collect email addresses manually, but you can also automate the process using a LinkedIn email finder app. Tools like Apollo can scrape LinkedIn search results and find email addresses automatically.
Step 4: How Do You Send LinkedIn Outreach Messages?
Customize connection request messages—default messages get ignored as spam. Send automated sequences after connecting.
When you send a connection request, customize your request message. Default messages are often ignored as spam. Keep it simple and friendly.
If you want to automate, send a sequence of messages to new connections after you connect with them, each spaced a few days apart.
Step 5: How Do You Monitor LinkedIn Outreach Responses?
When someone responds to automated messages, switch to manual responses. Be friendly, polite, and respectful.
If someone responds to a message from your automated messaging sequence, respond to them manually. This is where LinkedIn outreach transitions from automation to personal relationship building.
Step 6: How Do You Conduct Email Outreach From LinkedIn?
Use the email list from Step 3 for cold email outreach campaigns—a separate channel from LinkedIn messaging.
In step 3, you created a list of email addresses from your LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results. Now, conduct cold email outreach to those addresses. Cold email outreach complements your LinkedIn outreach strategy.
What Are the Best LinkedIn Email Finder Tools?
Top LinkedIn email finders include Apollo ($50/mo unlimited), Wiza (pay-as-you-go), and LeadLeaper ($29/mo for 3,000 credits).
Tools We’ve Tested
We’ve tested about a dozen LinkedIn email finder tools and ranked the top ones. Personally, we use Apollo for LinkedIn outreach because it offers unlimited email credits at $50/month—the best value available.
Why Is Apollo the Top LinkedIn Email Finder?
Apollo provides a Chrome plugin plus a huge database with unlimited email credits for $50/month.
Apollo gives you two super-weapons: a Chrome browser plugin that scrapes LinkedIn search results and finds email addresses, plus access to a huge database of professionals. What sets it above the rest is the unlimited email credits at $50/month.
What Makes Wiza a Good LinkedIn Email Finder?
Wiza creates email lists from LinkedIn searches with clean, verified emails ready for outreach campaigns.
Wiza lets you conduct a LinkedIn Sales Navigator search, then convert it into a list of verified emails ready for your drip campaign. It offers pay-as-you-go pricing where you only pay for emails you actually scrape.
Why Choose LeadLeaper for LinkedIn Outreach?
LeadLeaper scrapes 10 pages of LinkedIn results at once for $29/month with 3,000 email credits.
LeadLeaper gives you a Chrome extension that automatically scrapes up to 10 pages of LinkedIn search results, finds email addresses, and exports them to CSV. It’s the simplest, most lightweight, and cheapest option at $29/month.
What Are the Best LinkedIn Outreach Automation Tools?
Top LinkedIn automation tools: MeetAlfred (multi-channel), LeadConnect (HubSpot sync), and Zopto (enterprise features).
If you can reduce LinkedIn outreach time while maintaining or improving results, your strategy’s value multiplies. Automation makes things happen automatically instead of depending on manual effort.
Why Is MeetAlfred the Best LinkedIn Automation Tool?
MeetAlfred automates connections, message sequences, email follow-ups, and Twitter engagements in one platform.
MeetAlfred automates the process of connecting with people on LinkedIn from a pre-defined Sales Navigator search URL. It enables message sequences after successful connections and integrates email and Twitter for multi-channel LinkedIn outreach.
What Does LeadConnect Offer for LinkedIn Outreach?
LeadConnect works similarly to MeetAlfred but is cheaper and syncs contacts to platforms like HubSpot.
LeadConnect works similarly to MeetAlfred but is more affordable with fewer features. It can sync your new LinkedIn contacts to CRM platforms like HubSpot for integrated LinkedIn outreach management.
When Should You Use Zopto for LinkedIn Outreach?
Zopto offers similar features but is more expensive—best for enterprise LinkedIn outreach campaigns.
Zopto offers many of the same features as MeetAlfred and LeadConnect but is more expensive. All these LinkedIn outreach automation tools require LinkedIn Sales Navigator to work.
What Are the 7 Pro Tips for LinkedIn Outreach Success?
Pro tips: find right prospects, use automation wisely, respect daily limits, consider time zones, follow up, clean old requests.
Why Is Prospect Quality More Important Than Quantity?
A dozen high-quality prospects who fit your target customer exactly outperform thousands who barely fit.
LinkedIn outreach isn’t necessarily a numbers game. It’s about quality, not quantity. You’re better off finding prospects who fit your target customer model exactly than coming up with thousands who barely fit.
How Should You Use LinkedIn Automation Wisely?
Too much automation creates blind spots and makes messages seem cold, impersonal, or robotic.
Automation simplifies work and reduces manual effort, but it’s not foolproof. Too much LinkedIn outreach automation can leave blind spots in your prospect search strategy and make messages seem impersonal.
What Are LinkedIn’s Daily Connection Limits?
Connect with too many people at once—especially with a new account—and you could get flagged as spam.
Be careful with LinkedIn outreach volume. Paid plans limit InMail messages. Free accounts have pseudo-limits on connections and messages. If you connect with too many people at once, your account could be suspended.
Why Do Time Zones Matter in LinkedIn Outreach?
Message timing is important—use LinkedIn’s built-in tools to schedule messages for optimal delivery times.
Not all your prospects will be in the same time zone. Consider time zones carefully when scheduling LinkedIn outreach messages, or use LinkedIn’s built-in tools to schedule messages in advance.
Why Is Follow-Up Critical for LinkedIn Outreach?
Most people don’t say “yes” right away. Your LinkedIn outreach strategy needs a follow-up model in place.
You have to follow up if you want a chance to land the sale. That’s why your LinkedIn outreach strategy needs a follow-up model in place. Some people automate this part with personalized, correctly-timed messages.
Why Should You Revoke Old LinkedIn Connection Requests?
Delete failed connection requests and dead message threads to keep your LinkedIn account organized.
Over time, your account gets clogged with failed connection requests and message threads that never panned out. Delete these periodically to keep your LinkedIn outreach organized. MeetAlfred has a feature that does this automatically.
What Makes a LinkedIn Outreach Message Effective?
Effective LinkedIn messages are concise, direct, personalized, original, and include a tease to spark curiosity.
Why Should LinkedIn Messages Be Concise?
Professionals don’t have time for long, fluffy messages. Keep LinkedIn outreach messages short.
These are professionals. They don’t have a lot of time, so don’t waste it with a long, fluffy message. Keep your LinkedIn outreach messages short. You can always elaborate once you start a real conversation.
How Direct Should LinkedIn Outreach Messages Be?
Say “I can boost your lead generation by 20%” instead of “I’d like to talk about your business.”
For the most part, it’s better to be direct than beat around the bush. Instead of saying “I’d like to talk to you about your business,” say something like “I think I can boost your lead generation by 20 percent. Would you be interested in hearing more?”
Why Does Personalization Matter in LinkedIn Outreach?
Don’t spam the same message to hundreds of prospects. Personalized LinkedIn messages get more responses.
Don’t spam the same message to each of the hundreds of prospects you come across. Use technology or take time to personalize LinkedIn outreach messages. With more relevant, targeted messages, your prospects will be much more likely to respond.
How Can You Make LinkedIn Messages Stand Out?
We’ve all seen the boring introductions. If your LinkedIn message isn’t original, it’s white noise.
Everyone on LinkedIn has received thousands of sales messages. We’ve seen all the tricks and heard all the boring introductions. If your LinkedIn outreach message isn’t original, it blends in as white noise.
Try to slip a tease into your message. For example, “we’ve got a secret that has helped 24 businesses increase profitability by 8 percent” makes prospects want to learn more. Entice your prospects with curiosity-building LinkedIn outreach messages.
Frequently Asked Questions About LinkedIn Outreach
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics and OutreachBloom.
