How to do cold outreach on LinkedIn without getting banned
LinkedIn cold outreach is one of the most effective channels for founders at all stages. In the beginning, it is likely the #1 channel to find your first paying customer. At later stages, it is a channel to consistently acquire high-intent leads as in the B2B space no outreach channel really beats LinkedIn. Now the question is how to do it effectively?
One option is using one of the many LinkedIn messaging automation tools out there and sending mass messages in a "spray-and-pray" approach. The people you're reaching out to with this approach are typically chosen based on their job title or another static criteria. There are two problems with this approach: 1) It is against LinkedIn's terms of service to use message automation, which means you're risking your account getting permanently banned. 2) You will generate very few, if any, positive replies because your targeting is not sharp enough given you can only approach 20-30 people per day. How to solve this? Become much sharper in filtering for the people who really have a reason to talk to you.
Put a 2nd filter on top of filtering for job title and static ICP criteria. This 2nd filter is intent. Identify those people among your ICP who have recently left a signal that they are active in your niche and interested in new stuff in their space. You can do this manually through going on LinkedIn and looking for people and companies in your niche. Then you go to their posts and identify the people who liked and commented on those posts. Those people have shown engagement; they have left a signal. They are either already looking for a solution or very engaged in your niche and hence much more likely to try out new stuff. If you now send 20-30 messages to these sharply-defined people your positive replies will go up steeply (like 3x, 5x, or in some cases even 8x). If you do this manually you're also not risking your account getting banned.
And if you want to have the best of both worlds (i.e., lots of high-intent leads but also not searching for those leads manually), give IbexAI a shot. We're a Harvard-backed company dedicated to finding those high-intent leads on autopilot. We're not using your LinkedIn account to identify those leads, so your account stays 100% safe. This distinguishes us from basically all LinkedIn automation tools out there.
Try it out and let me know how it goes!
The LinkedIn cold outreach problem is real. We just started cold prospecting Shopify merchants and hit the wall immediately. Free accounts get 3 personalized invitation notes per month. That's it. And merchants don't post about their problems on LinkedIn so there's nothing to reply to organically.
What's working better for us right now: commenting value on posts in adjacent topics (CRO, page speed, DTC growth) and letting the profile do the selling. No pitch in the comment. The connection requests come to you instead.
Curious what your hit rate is on actually getting through without a ban. Even on the "founder-friendly" subs the unwritten rules vary wildly — some want 30+ days of unrelated comments first, others let you post day one if the title isn't pitchy. Did you find any pattern on what separates the ones with effectively-zero gatekeeping from the ones that nuke first-time posters?
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this is the part most people miss, it’s not about sending more messages, it’s about catching people already thinking about the problem. Otherwise you’re just interrupting them. curious- how do you actually detect that intent at scale? feels like that’s the hardest piece here
We use our own tool for that: IbexAI (www.getibex.com)
the discount timer is actually the least interesting part. finding people already wrestling with the problem is the real signal. what data are you pulling to identify that intent?
finding intent before they know they’re searching - that’s the whole game. what signal sources are you using? linkedin activity, job changes, something proprietary?
How is this different from GojiBerry .ai?
We're not syncing your LinkedIn account so you don't risk getting permanently banned
Hello,
Could you please help me understand how it would work differently than Sales Navigator as well.
On Sales Navigator you can only filter for static elements (such as job title, industry and so on). With IbexAI you can (on top of static filters) search for intent-signals, i.e., people that have left a signal that they are engaged and interested in the topics you define.
good idea
Ngl, I hope this works.
I agree with your 1st point its true like by using automation we are puting our account in danger , i am saying this because i actually expereinced this , then only i am here to comment because linkedin banned my account due to this automation
Impressive build 👏
This looks like a product with real growth potential.
We help promising digital products reach the right users through targeted campaigns and creator networks 🚀
Would be great to connect.
As someone doing cold outreach for a travel app, I found that personalizing by destination intent works better than generic messages. Curious how you handle that.”
Seems like a really useful tool! I've used other tools previously to find the right people to reach out to on LinkedIn or email, but often there's not much signal behind each lead.
Give it a try! We have a 30-day money back guarantee. If you don't like it (and you would be the first one to not like it) you get your money back, no questions asked.
This is actually a solid breakdown.
Most people fail at cold outreach because they skip the intent layer and just spam job titles.
Thank you for this write-up. Using LinkedIn to reach out and get potential future client's attention has been a challenge for me.
Good idea
I would say wouldn't it be better to just thoroughly read through the person who you are reaching out to's profile? understand who they are, and who they might respond to? Just be more human!
nice take