LinkedIn Outreach for Lead Gen Agencies: How to Scale Without Burning Leads

The pressure on lead generation agencies is real. Your reps must deliver consistent meetings to clients despite long sales cycles, crowded markets, and complex buying journeys.

To overcome these obstacles, many agencies turn to LinkedIn. With over 1 billion members, it’s understandably a top channel for attracting and nurturing leads, and setting up meetings through tightly coordinated, omnichannel outreach.

But, in the rush to hit volume goals, it’s easy to fall into the trap of mass messaging low-intent prospects — only to burn through your pipeline and get ignored. This leads to:

• Low response rates. Spray-and-pray campaigns might reach higher numbers of leads, but success rates plummet.  
• Damaged sender reputation. Poor engagement results lead to spam complaints and even LinkedIn restrictions.  
• Client churn. If clients don’t see consistent results, they won’t stick around. 

Volume for volume’s sake doesn’t work when it comes to LinkedIn prospecting for lead generation agencies. 

Instead, you must scale smarter — that means using LinkedIn outreach strategies rooted in personalization, intent, and meaningful engagement.

Let’s dig into why most cold outreach strategies fail and how to structure high-response LinkedIn campaigns that won’t burn through your lead list. 

Hear what’s working on the front lines of sales, according to Dana Kosychenko, Senior Sales Development Representative at leading outbound lead gen agency Belkins.

The 4 biggest mistakes agencies make in LinkedIn outreach

The challenge of constantly navigating new industries, personas and marketing strategies  leads many agencies to use ineffective and outdated outreach tactics that do more harm than good. 

Let’s review the four biggest mistakes lead gen agencies make in LinkedIn outreach and how to overcome them.

1. Relying on lead volume instead of targeting 

Every lead gen agency wants higher conversion rates. But instead of working to target the right leads, many react to the pressure by chasing more volume.

Generating a higher number of the wrong leads is counterproductive — it doesn’t help your clients and it harms your agency’s credibility. You’ll burn through your lead pipeline, tank reply rates, and frustrate leads. 

“One of the biggest mistakes is reaching out randomly to a lot of people within one company, without tracking the most precise ideal customer profile,” explains Kosychenko. “You can’t share a clear value proposition and articulate how they’ll benefit from meeting with you if you aren’t targeting the right ICP. They have no reason to take a meeting.”

Need another reason to avoid this high-volume, low-targeting approach? It puts your LinkedIn account at risk of being banned.

Solution: Connect strategically with targeted leads 

Instead of blasting generic messages to anyone and everyone, target specific lead segments with intent-centered, automated campaigns. Expandi can help. 

Import lead lists into Expandi from:

• Your CRM or marketing automation platform. 
• A targeted Excel list. 
• An advanced LinkedIn search that combines dozens of filters like industry, job title, geography, connections, and more. 
• People who view your profile.
• Comments or Likes on your posts or posts from popular influencers, competitors, or industry peers. 
• LinkedIn Live attendees, events, or webinars. 

A shorter, better-targeted list makes it easier to warm up leads, personalize outreach based on how you found them, and follow up in a more genuine, human way.

2. Not warming up leads before outreach 

You can’t afford not to warm up your leads. 

Today, many people aren’t inclined to open — let alone respond to — cold outreach from someone they don’t know, whether it’s an email, text message, or direct message. The same is true on LinkedIn. 

If you skip warming up LinkedIn prospects before you send a connection request or DM, you’ll get lower response rates and you’ll end up chasing even more leads to hit your quota. 

It’s a snowball effect of more work, more outreach, poor results, and unhappy clients.

Solution: Nurture targeted  leads 

Instead of sending an out-of-the-blue message to someone who’s never heard your name, build familiarity and rapport with prospects over time. 

This process can help leads recognize you, make your outreach feel more relevant, and increase the likelihood of a response.

“Prior to reaching out to a lead and trying to sell them something, you start engaging them,” says Kosychenko. “When they open LinkedIn and notice our client visited their profile or liked their recent posts, it shows there’s a real, interested person behind the screen, not just a sales robot.”

You can nurture leads by:

• Visiting their profile.
• Liking their LinkedIn posts.
• Endorsing them for a skill on their LinkedIn profile.
• Commenting on their posts.
• Joining their comment section conversations on other people’s posts. 
• Sending targeted emails.

These actions help you go from an unknown sales rep to a recognizable peer in their industry. 

Expandi Builder Campaigns automate key nurture activities: visiting profiles, liking posts, endorsing skills, and other passive engagement tasks. 

Need proof these work? Expandi Builder Campaigns typically see a 22% connection approval rate and a 7.22% reply rate — far exceeding cold outreach benchmarks.

3. Failing to personalize outreach messages

At all times, your buyers are asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?”

The leads you want to connect with ignore irrelevant messages, and, more often than not, a generic outreach that starts with “Hello sir/madam” or “I hope this message finds you well” ends up in the trash folder. 

Messages that dive right into the sales pitch also often get ignored, especially if the lead has shown no previous interest in the solution or business. 

To your buyer, these irrelevant messages show you haven’t put in the time and effort to understand what they need — so why should they give you the time of day? 

Solution: Personalize messages to answer “what’s in it for me?”

Give your buyers immediate value through relevant and timely messages that speak to their challenges, offer industry resources, or prove you understand their world. Show that you’ve done your homework by connecting the dots between how you found them, your reason for reaching out, and why they should give you their time. 

 “Sometimes I’ll spend just a minute looking at their profile to find something to personalize — maybe a recent promotion or a long tenure. It’s small, but it makes the message feel human,” explains Kosychenko.

Personalize your outreach to explain:

• The reason you are reaching out or how you found them.
• Your expertise, value, or offer. 
• Pain points you solve in their industry or for their role. 
• What’s in it for them.

For example, you might send personalized messages to attendees from a LinkedIn Live event. Mention your favorite takeaway, and ask what they found most valuable to initiate a genuine conversation. 

These types of personalized Expandi Messenger campaigns get 16.86% reply rates, nearly double that of cold outreach. 

4. No follow-up sequences 

A buyer might miss your first message for a variety of reasons. Maybe they’re busy and juggling a ton of competing priorities. Maybe they’re on vacation, under the weather, or on deadline. Or maybe they saw it and meant to respond, but got distracted. 

None of those situations inherently disqualifies them — they might need a reminder about your initial outreach. But too many sales reps give up after sending one message. In doing so, they leave high-intent leads on the table.

Solution: Follow up with your leads 

Well-timed follow-up messages go a long way to show you value the connection and seek a more meaningful relationship. They’re an opportunity to recapture lost attention and stay top-of-mind.

Leads are more likely to respond after the second touchpoint, not the first. Make follow-up messages complementary and valuable. Don’t be pushy — aggressive follow-ups can turn off customers. 

Expandi enables you to automate follow-ups to ensure you’re appropriately engaging leads on behalf of your clients, without relying on spammy tactics. 

Expandi users who follow up at least twice see a 4.05% higher reply rate than those that send only one message.

How to Scale LinkedIn Outreach Without Burning Leads: Our Proven LinkedIn Lead Generation Framework

“I find LinkedIn to be one of the best-performing channels for lead generation, so it’s important to run it efficiently,” says Kosychenko. 

“There’s a huge pool of professionals there to set up highly targeted and profitable meetings for clients.” 

Our proven six-step framework outlines how to run LinkedIn outreach for clients, grow connections, and engage the right people without burning through leads. 

Step 1: Prioritize warm leads over cold prospects

First things first:  Your LinkedIn strategy should prioritize outreach to people who are already engaging with your client. 

Using intent and behavioral data captured by LinkedIn, you can create hyper-targeted campaign lists and messaging that is relevant to engaged leads. 

Here are a few of our favorite warm Expandi campaigns. 

1. Inbound Profile Visitors Campaigns

A LinkedIn Premium account tells you exactly who views your profile. Visitors showed interest in your service or professional experience and will be more willing to reply. 

Expandi’s Inbound Campaign enables you to reach out to these warm leads at scale,  averaging a 13.4% reply rate. 

After you create an Inbound Campaign, Expandi automatically adds people who view your profile every time your connections sync, whether the campaign is active or inactive. 

You now have a pool of interested leads ready to be sent through a personalized and genuine outreach flow. 

Keep your message friendly and open-ended to apply to searchers’ different intent, while opening the door to a more meaningful conversation. 

Sample message:

Hey [first name]! I noticed you took a look at my profile. Anything I can help you with? 

2. Event Attendees Campaigns

Industry events offer a chance to create memorable connections with peers over shared learning and professional experiences. Mimic the same connections by joining topical LinkedIn Live events and following up with other registrants. 

You can sign up to attend a LinkedIn event and then add the event URL to Expandi’s Event Search to import the attendee list to your campaign — Event Participant campaigns have a 14.21% reply rate.  Personalize your message to reference the event and share how it’s relevant to your business or the takeaway you found most interesting. 

Sample message:

Hey [first name]! I noticed you attended the [LinkedIn Live event name]. I talk with CMOs regularly that share the same [pain point]. How are you handling it? 

Note: Due to recent LinkedIn changes, you can only message users who have a Message button within the participant list (not users whose button says Follow or Connect).

3. Post Comments, Poll Engagers, and Group Members Campaigns

Social listening on LinkedIn helps you learn what your ICP cares about based on the groups they join, posts they comment on, or polls they vote in.

These engagement activities create a breadcrumb trail leading you to the trends, solutions, and conversation starters you can use to connect with leads via DM. 

Using Expandi Search, you can import a list of users who:

• Comment on posts from you, a competitor, or an industry peer. Send a follow-up message that references the post topic.

Sample message:

Hey, saw your comment on [influencers’] post. Our solution solves that exact problem by… 

• Engage with your poll. Filter leads according to how they voted to send an ultra-personalized message based on their response. (You can only retrieve responses to polls that you author.) 

Sample message:

Hi [first name]. Saw your response that [topic] is a huge  challenge. I’d love to share how we help clients with that same issue.  

• Follow your Business page or a Competitor. Send a targeted message to see if they’re in-market for your solution or interested in more personalized information. You can retrieve all the leads (1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-degree connections; up to 1000 leads) if you own the company page, or any 1st-degree connections from pages you don’t own. 

Sample message:  

Hi [First Name]! I noticed you follow [Competitors’ page]. We offer a similar solution, but clients prefer our [targeted capabilities or lower price]. Can I share a little more info?

Lead generation agencies use these campaign types and targeted search capabilities to focus on warm, intent-based outreach instead of mass messaging.

Step 2: Automate multi-touch outreach

You’ve made a plan to target warm prospects. Next, automate a multi-touch outreach flow to prime and nurture leads, improving your odds for better response rates and positive engagement. 

Your goal here is to automate manual engagement tasks like viewing a lead’s profile or liking one of their posts to become recognizable to the lead. 

You will continue to automate initial outreach, and then take over the automation to reply manually once the lead responds to your messages. 

Kosychenko echoes this strategy:

“A lot of the workflow is automated. We step in manually with positive leads, who are more likely to convert, so we’re not wasting time on every single reply.”

Option 1: Choose a campaign template 

Expandi offers a wide range of campaign types and templates to leverage proven logic and speed up the process of building a campaign.

Expandi templates and the larger Marketplace (templates added by Expandi users and team members) are organized around common use cases, like: 

• Generate more leads. 
• Grow your network.
• Boost marketing efforts.
• Get more clients.
• Develop a personal brand. 
• Get more demos or appointments.

Clicking each use case returns a selection of pre-defined but customizable user flows to use as a starting point for your campaign. 

Option 2: Build a campaign flow from scratch 

Alternatively, you can create your own custom flow using a Builder Campaign.

From the Builder Campaign dashboard, drag and drop desired Actions to build targeted steps into your campaign, like:

• Visit Profile.
• Follow profile.
• Follow company.
• Invite to follow company.
• Send mobile connection request.
• Endorse for skill. 
• Send connection request.
• Send follow-up message.
• Email.
• Open InMail.
• Like post.
• Trigger webhooks.
• Add tags.

Additionally, you’ll find Conditions — a list of “If/then” statements that define how a user flows through the steps or activities.

For example:

• If connected.
• If email opened.
• If visited your profile.
• If email exists.
• If post liked. 

You’ll drag and drop actions and conditions, defining properties as you go, like wait times between steps, body messages, personalization placeholders, and other action-specific variables. 

Builder Campaigns simplify automating soft engagement actions — like visiting someone’s profile or liking their post — to help leads recognize your name or business and pique their curiosity. 

From there, add steps to automatically send connection requests or valuable messages, freeing your time to focus on more meaningful aspects of conversing with your lead.

Step 3: Personalize outreach to cement a genuine connection

The key to fast-tracking lead responses? Outreach personalization. 

Boost response rates by keeping initial messages non-salesy and centered on mutual interests, activities, industry insights, or connections.

Nail personalization basics 

Reference past engagement to create familiarity and connection:

• How you found them: Noticed you’re also a member of [Group]. Have you attended their working hours?
• How you help clients like them: Saw your post about [topic]. Thought I’d share this one-page case study on how we helped our client overcome [challenge]. 
• What you have to offer them: Saw your comment on [Influencer’s] post. Thought you might enjoy our recent Trends Report on that topic. 

Engage naturally before pitching, so your message feels natural, not intrusive.

Uplevel personalization with video

Video is still an underrated outreach tool, even though 88% of marketers say video helps them generate leads. 

With Expandi’s Sendspark integration, lead gen agency reps can send custom video messages in LinkedIn DMs to show their investment in getting the lead’s attention.  

For example, a BDR sends a DM and recorded video to a lead with, “Hi [First Name], saw your recent post about [topic] — really insightful. I recorded this short video to share a few strategies we’ve seen work with teams like yours.”

Sendspark makes this video outreach easy. Try the Video Script Generator to quickly write an effective script and their AI feature to clone your voice and dynamically greet every lead by name. 

Stitch the personalized video greeting to a pre-recorded demo and link to a custom-branded landing page for an attention-grabbing, one-to-one conversation starter with your ICP leads at scale. 

Step 4: Follow up (without overdoing it)

Here’s a hard truth SDRs know all too well: Most leads won’t respond to your first message — not because they’re not interested, but because they’re busy, distracted, or simply forgot. That’s why you have to master the follow-up.

“Don’t give up too easily — but also don’t be too pushy. Our rule of thumb is that every reply should be handled within 24 hours and that everyone gets at least three or four follow-ups,” shares Kosychenko. “Once the lead has expressed interest, you should work on it as much as you can. ”

Keep your follow-ups short, relevant, and rooted in value. Skip generic messages like “Just following up” — instead, reference previous interactions, shared interests, or a fresh angle.

Offer something they might value, like a resource, an offer, or a video message. 

Plus, tap into Expandi’s capabilities and AI features help you optimize follow-ups: 

• Tags to prioritize. In your DM inbox, filter by Interaction (awaiting reply/replied, etc.) to respond to engaged leads or by Status (new contact, connection requested, etc.) 
• AI-optimized timing and messaging. Expandi analyzes reply trends to optimize timing and messaging for each follow-up, based on past engagement trends — no more guesswork.
• Sentiment-based adjustments. Expandi’s AI Analyzer scores replies and categorizes responses (positive, neutral, negative), so you can prioritize follow-up accordingly.
• Trigger-based outreach. If a lead engaged (e.g., viewed your profile or liked your post), but hasn’t replied, Expandi can automatically initiate a timely follow-up message.

Still no response? Extend the follow-up campaign, but add extra time between each step so you’re reaching out occasionally over time. Or update your Builder campaign with additional passive action steps, like reacting to posts, to stay familiar until the lead is more receptive to outreach.  

Most importantly, know when to switch to a human touch. Automation should enhance, not replace, meaningful conversations. 

Step 5: Ensure compliance 

Much like the data privacy regulations that impact email marketing, LinkedIn outreach must remain within the platform’s strict rules and evolving policies to protect your clients’ reputation and your agency’s long-term success.

Expandi is your dedicated partner in staying compliant with LinkedIn’s latest limitations, connection request caps, and platform best practices. 

For example, if LinkedIn reduces daily connection limits, Expandi will recommend adjustments to keep your outreach safe and compliant. You can then adjust your campaign settings to ensure you’re sending within platform standards. 

Implement these best practices for staying compliant:

• Monitor connection invite volume. Don’t let pending requests pile up. Use Expandi to regularly and automatically withdraw pending requests. 
• Review each account’s status. Ensure there are no pending warnings and optimize your campaign strategy to improve tactics over time. 
• Mix it up with Expandi’s mobile connector campaign. Maximize connection requests by extending your daily outreach limit.
• Track prospect feedback. Use Expandi tags to flag individuals who specify they don’t want to hear from your team to avoid future engagement.

An agile compliance approach protects your clients and preserves your ability to reach the right people.

Step 6: Provide transparent client reporting

Your clients expect regular updates on performance and tangible results. 

Expandi’s analytics tracks every campaign action and response rates, and generates automated reports with easy-to-digest charts and performance breakdowns. 

Within Expandi, you can share monthly or weekly reports with your clients that highlight key outcomes, like: 

• Number of connection requests sent.
• Acceptance rates.
• Message reply rates.
• Meetings booked.
• Engagement trends and sentiment (positive vs. negative responses).
• Anecdotal insights or objections from prospects.

Tie metrics to goals to ensure clients understand how KPIs impact outcomes. For example, track the lead-to-meeting pipeline by measuring connection acceptance rates, message reply rates, and conversion rates. 

The numbers never lie, even if you don’t like what you see. Be transparent to gain trust and commit to testing different optimization strategies to improve performance. 

Make LinkedIn outreach work for your clients

Ready for some good news? You can scale lead gen on LinkedIn without sacrificing relevance or results. 

The most successful agencies warm up leads before outreach, automate routine tasks to maximize efficiency, and step in with a human touch when it matters most. 

With the right balance of personalization, process, and persistence — plus automation tools like Expandi — you’ll keep pipelines full, clients happy, and leads engaged.