143: Our 2026 LinkedIn Outbound Strategy

Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!

In today’s newsletter I’m going to share our end-to-end process for how we’ve averaged a 30% reply rate on LinkedIn in 2026, across 25 clients.

You’ll see the messaging, strategy, and tools we use. And you’ll even get access to my free GPT for building your own LinkedIn messaging (based on our exact frameworks).

Agenda:

• The Results

• Our Process

• Our Messaging Approach

• Follow Up Strategy (The Most Important Part)

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by Kondo!

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The Results

Here are our 2026 LinkedIn metrics:

This is 2 months of data across ~25 clients, all in drastically different industries (healthcare, SaaS, landscaping, IT services, and more).

I used to think that only SaaS marketers and sales leaders responded consistently to LinkedIn messages.

I was wrong…

Our clients work with almost every persona you can imagine, and we see consistent reply rates anywhere from 15-45% across all of them.

It is our highest converting channel by far. Because there’s far less competition on LinkedIn. And you don’t have to worry about the hurdle of avoiding the spam filter like with email.

The only downside, of course, is volume. We send only 30 messages per day per person to avoid being blocked by LinkedIn.

And for anyone who’s curious, we’ve been doing LinkedIn automation for roughly a year and half now, on behalf of dozens of clients. Only once have we seen a LinkedIn profile get suspended (temporarily). So keep in mind, there IS a very small chance of that happening.

Our Process

The fact that LinkedIn outreach is so low volume (again, 30 messages per day, per sender), means for most people, you’ll never be able to reach your full TAM in a short period of time in the same way you can with email.

So for that reason, we only pick the “warmest” leads for our LinkedIn campaigns.

There are a few ways we do this:

#1 - Highest Intent Signal-Based Leads

If a client has a very high intent signal (website visitors, job changers, people attending relevant events, etc.), we always choose those leads.

I’ve talked about this in previous newsletters, but the issue with “signal-based” campaigns is that they’re usually not scalable with cold email because the volume is so low.

But that’s exactly why they’re the perfect leads for LinkedIn.

#2 — High Engagement Leads

Specifically leads who engage with our emails the most, such as opens/clicks (when we do track those metrics… which is rare).

Or when we get low-intent replies. Such as people asking for more information (but not necessarily asking for a meeting).

#3 — Highest Converting Segments/Personas

A lot of our clients sell to many different ICP's. But they usually have one specific niche or persona that they have the highest close rate with.

#4 — Leads With High LinkedIn Activity

If our list is still too big, we’ll enrich the list to rank each lead based on:

• Their network size

• When the last time they posted was

The leads who post more often and have a bigger network, are naturally more likely to be active on LinkedIn, and therefore respond more.

Quick Tip:

Smartlead now lets you integrate with HeyReach. So when an email is opened, clicked, or replied to, you can have it automatically send a connection request or message to that lead.

Here’s an example:

Our Messaging Approach

The biggest issue I see with automated LinkedIn messages is they’re WAY. TOO. LONG.

They read like an email.

Instead, we try to make ours feel like a quick text:

• Short sentences (1-2 max)

• Casual writing (lowercase letters and intentional typos)

• Custom fields for personalization (when it makes sense)

Here’s a breakdown of our actual LinkedIn outreach sequence framework:

Step 1: Blank connection request

This is personal preference. Over the years, I’ve noticed that no message in your connection request tends to get the highest acceptance rate.

Our goal here is to simply get connected so we can start sending messages. Otherwise, that channel is completely cut off.

Step 2: 1–2 sentence open-ended question

After the connect, we send a short, relevant question related to the pain point we solve.

Example:

• “hey how do you track field equipment issues before they become a problem? I’ve been talking to a few other [Industry] teams like yourself and wanted to get your feedback.”

Step 3: Offer a helpful resource

Whether they reply or not, our next step is to send something useful related to that problem.

A short guide, template, checklist… whatever fits the problem from Step 2.

This makes it feel more like a conversation rather than a sales funnel.

Step 4: Short bump + CTA

Finally, we follow up with a soft nudge.

Something like:

• “Wasn’t sure if this was relevant for you, but let me know if you want to chat in the coming weeks about how we help other teams solve this. I sent you an email with more information too. [Insert Their Email], right?”

Quick Tips:

• You can automate things like profile views and liking their most recent posts. We’ll often do that right before/after a message goes out

• Sometimes we’ll send a message saying we’re going to send a resource, then intentionally don’t send that resource, but have the automation follow up a couple hours later saying “Just realized I forgot to send it, here you go!”

• I built a completely free GPT you can use to quickly create LinkedIn messaging using our exact framework. You can check out the GPT here.

Follow Up Strategy (The Most Important Part)

While LinkedIn is the highest converting channel in terms of replies and positive replies, it’s one of the tougher channels when it comes to converting those replies into meetings.

And it makes sense, LinkedIn is more of a conversational/consumption platform. Fewer people want to take action.

But just like with email, there are a few golden rules for converting more replies into meetings.

Here they are:

#1 — Speed to Lead

Treat it like an inbound lead. Aim to respond in under 10-minutes.

#2 — Go for the Meeting ASAP

Once you have a bit of interest, always go for the meeting. And share your calendar link so it’s as frictionless as possible.

Too many people go back and forth over DM waiting for the perfect time to ask for a meeting. The perfect time is right away.

#3 — Multi-Channel & Follow Up

If they ghost after the first reply, call them ASAP. And email them. Keep following up across all channels at least 4 or 5 times.

For our clients, we hook up HeyReach to Slack so that anytime a lead replies, they get an instant Slack notification (with their phone number) so they can reach out ASAP.

I’ve been using Kondo to help with all three of these.

LinkedIn is notorious for having messy inbox UI. It’s way harder to manage vs email.

Kondo helps us by…

• Auto-syncing every lead and reply message back to the CRM

• Giving us text short cuts, snippets, and templates to make responding way faster

• Reminders so we get notified to follow up on leads if they haven’t booked a meeting yet or replied back

Here’s a visual:

If you start doing LinkedIn automation (or even if your not), Kondo really is a must have. Click here to try it for free.

Thanks for reading,

Jed