How to Get Customers from LinkedIn (I Sent 285K Messages - Here's What Worked)

My team and I spent more than 10,000 plus hours last year to build a LinkedIn system. System that got our businesses more than 6,000 plus high value customers from LinkedIn messaging. Our businesses generated a massive 4.9 million dollars in total pipeline value in less than 12 months with this 7 simple frameworks. Using this exact framework every single time, we sent about 300,000 messages on LinkedIn and got 56,000 replies from potential buyers in just one year. Hi, this is Shubham, CEO at SBL Orso. Over the last three years, I have sent about a half a million cold messages to get customers, tested every single strategy and generated millions in pipeline value for my clients. I've failed with hundreds of campaigns, spent thousands of hours optimizing every single word in our messaging. So you don't have to make the same mistake after this video. Today in this video, I'm giving away my complete $5 million LinkedIn Playbook built over the last three years on how to get customers from LinkedIn for absolutely free. Regardless of how many connections or followers you have on your LinkedIn, this exact system is what we use to turn LinkedIn into a primary source to get quality customers for any business. If you're serious about your business and selling on LinkedIn, this is the video you should watch till the end. Chapter 0 which businesses can get customers from linkedin now linkedin has more than 500 million monthly active users on its platform and who are these people these are professionals job seekers hrs leaders decision makers students freelancers and almost all the major high-valued earning population in the world. So, can any business get customers from LinkedIn? Yes, unless your market is either offline or it's too small or niched, you will definitely find massive ideal market on LinkedIn for your business. Be it B2B business looking for other startups or be it any edtech business looking to sell its course to, say, students or a business targeting creators, you can find all groups of people on LinkedIn with the right strategy. You can get leads from comments of some of the LinkedIn posts. You can get your buyers from say likes of some of the posts or maybe from groups. There are various and massive ways and hacks to find your buyers on LinkedIn and reach out to them. You should just know how to best reach them. So if you have your potential market and buyers on LinkedIn, let us sell to them and make them actual customers. Chapter one, the offering. I wanted to sell one of my own offerings on LinkedIn last week. And before me, directly starting to message people all around and sell, I spent two full weeks just crafting my core offer. Not deciding messages, not worrying about getting contacts to message. Just the offer. And how can we make someone understand it? Clearly, that's where 80% of people fail to get customers from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a professional platform and there are millions of people who want good services and are actively looking for offerings that you sell. Most people fail because they don't have a clear offer to present and sell. What do I mean? Just think about it. For example, you open your own LinkedIn DM and somebody is reaching out to you like, hey, I help your business in digital marketing. That's it. Now, what does that even mean? Nothing. this person is selling you may have good offering but how you're presenting it matters the most your offer needs to be crystal clear in 10 words or less because linkedin is a busy platform as you know and your prospects has literally no time here's what we finalized on before selling anything instead of writing something very generic that potentially won't get any result, we spent time writing our offering in simple, specific and result-focused words. So we wrote, we add 50 qualified leads to your pipeline in 30 days. Now, this one sentence changed everything because it told our prospects exactly what they would get and exactly when they would get it. Now, if you are not clear about how you write your clear offer, just question these three things what do my customer get from my service how fast my customer gets their benefits from using my service and third why should they believe me that my service is the best for me it was my customers get 50 leads in 30 days and why me because i made my clients 5 million dollar in pipeline a perfect clear offering that worked for us and got us customers i've also seen people write and cover 10 different services in their offering we do a b c and don't forget d but honestly if you are also the one having similar offerings made just work on it seriously your offer needs to solve one specific problem first not 10 problems all at a time just one to start and maybe then you can upsell anytime in the future for us we do not say we do marketing sales branding and strategy what we said instead we get you qualified leads that's it when your offer is sharp your messaging becomes easy but when your offer is vague and it's not clear at all nothing else matter regardless how quality leads you have how well you reach out how well you craft your message so before you send a single message just nail your offer write it down show it to five people if they can't repeat it back to you in your own words it's too complicated now let's talk about who you are actually sending this offer to chapter 2 quality leads here's the painful truth i learned after sending 50 000 messages in our first year sending great messages to the wrong people is worse than sending average messages to the right people now in 2025 we sent more than 300 000 messages but we only reached out to people who matched our exact customer profile that's why we got 18 reply rate instead of two percent in cold outreach so how do you find quality leads on linkedin step one define your dream customer with precision do not just say ceos or founders or hrs that's too broad what we did instead is made our target very specific niche and quality We said instead B2B SaaS founders in USA with 10 to 50 employees having 1 million to 10 million revenue. who posted about lead generation in the last 60 days. Now, see the difference? While the first example might have millions of leads, second one had a specific 500 to 1000 high-quality niched audience, which gets better reply when you message them and probably a higher chance of them becoming your customer. Step 2. Use LinkedIn filters like a sniper. We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator. One of the best LinkedIn tool to get LinkedIn leads and it's worth every single penny. We applied filters like job title, company size, industry, geography and others. narrow down and get high quality leads from linkedin sales navigator i'll not go deep into sales navigator because i have already made a dedicated video on how we used linkedin sales navigator alone to add 1 million dollar in pipeline for our clients if you want to learn more about it you can just see somewhere here and watch that video too after this now finding leads sorry let me rephrase finding high quality leads is one of the most important part for making your outreach successful and get customers most people waste hours of the time every single day manually finding these buyers on linkedin making a list and maybe filtering the data etc we use a much better and most effective approach to get high quality leads on linkedin remember when we talked about having a clear messaging on our offering and team customers so come to this tool svl and you will find an option of leads by svl over here whatever messaging that we have decided let's just paste it over here find me b2b sas startups in usa target all their decision makers like founders ceos vps their team size should be 10 to 50 having 1 million to 10 million in revenue and who posted about lead gen in the last 30 days now this is our clear offering because we now have a clear idea of who we are targeting we'll just send this and in some time it will come with some clarifying questions so i could just write like target all cxos private startups who's active on linkedin and post it in the last 30 days and after clarifying my target audience a little further it has extracted some leads for us and i can just click on extract leads and you will see the magic that it is searching the web and also the linkedin cs navigator to get very high quality leads from whatever input I have provided here and it took me less than 10 minutes and this is my favorite and most powerful way to get quality leads from LinkedIn in one of my best performing campaigns we loaded exact 541 highly targeted leads into SPL in under 10 minutes this campaign got me 20 replies in under one day of reach out and that's a 22% reply rate and from those 20 replies we closed around two deals which was worth more than three thousand dollars and that's all because we focused on quality over quantity step three and important build list of only 500 prospects at a time don't try to message thousands of people at a time that's a spam instead when you are starting just create a tight list of just 500 highly targeted buyers first start sending your message to 50 people in say four or five unique batches each in a week. AB test multiple messages, refine your offering on what gets more interest. If something does not work, just top that. Whatever seems working, scale it gradually. For example, for our own campaigns, we first test multiple messaging variations with set of 500 leads at a time. Whatever works, we add more leads into the same campaign and just scale it, maintaining proper results throughout. Now that you have the right people, let's talk about what to actually say to them. This is where the magic happens. You can have the perfect offer and the perfect leads. But if your messaging sucks, you get nothing. Here's what I saw most people writing their opening message. Like, Hi John, I noticed you are a CEO at ABC company. We help companies like yours grow. Would love to connect and see if this can help you. Delete that. Never send that message again. Here's what we send in Steve, which gets result. John, saw your post about struggling to fill your pipeline. We added 50 plus qualified leads to someone X's company's CRM in the last 20 days. Thought it made sense to connect. Won the same system. Now, this is exact 31 words message. No fluff and pure value. Let me break it down why this works. First, personalization in the first five words. We reference something they actually did. Second, proof point. We don't say we can help. We show what we have done. Third, specific result. 50 leads, 28 days and real numbers. And fourth, clear question for ease of decision making. Want it or no. In order to make your message work, what we have seen is that your message needs four key elements to get attention and reply. Grab attention in the first line. Show you have done this before. Tell them exactly what they get. Make it easy to say yes for them. Here's some other persuasion secret we typically use to get better replies on LinkedIn. We pattern interrupt plus social proof plus an easy yes. Now here are some more 100 best performing disruptive opening messages which we have found to be working. I'll also share this in the description for you to access this. Now here's the problem into this. If you plan to message just 50 or 60 people in a month, you can just do it manually. But I'm talking about scale here. How can you personalize every single message when you want to message a lot of people? That's where you can use tools like SPL. The platform uses AI to personalize the lines of each prospect based on their recent LinkedIn post or profile information. Even you're not manually writing tens of thousands of individual messages, but every single message looks handwritten. For example, this is a prospect. that our system reached out to now you can see over here is the message it has written is so you liked yamani's ceo at hubspot post on signal prospecting i built the infrastructure to automate exactly that actually my ai flagged you like and send this message since i got your attention want to test the engine for free. In a highest performing campaign, SBL generated personalized hooks for almost 4000 business owners. We got 14% reply rate because every message felt personal. But we did not spend 40 hours writing them. Keep all your messages under 50 words. Use their first name, break some pattern, sew some social proof and ask something tiny to get a small guess from them. But what happens when they actually reply? That's where most people drop. Now you sent a great message. They replied. Now what? This is where we see most people fail. They get excited when they see a reply and send a 500 word essay and the conversation dies. Here's how my working system looks like that turned 51,000 replies into 5,000 qualified leads. Let me show you an actual conversation from February 2026 that booked a call in just six messages. Message one, the opener which was sent by SPL. Saw you liked Yagami's. a CEO at HubSpot post on signal prospecting. I built the infra to automate exactly that. Actually, my AI flagged you like and sent this message since it got your attention. Want to test the engine for free? This is signal-based messaging. We're not guessing. We saw them engage with the relevant content and message the person exactly what they want to hear. That's a buying signal. Now, we got a reply. Yes, I would thank you. Now, most people would jump straight to great. Here's my calendar link. Now that's a huge mistake. You need to qualify first. And that's why we have sent this second message, which is reply from SPL. And we are trying to qualify without selling. Great to hear. Are you looking to track specific competitors or broader industry topics? See what we did. We are delivering on the promise. But before that, we are understanding their core use case. This tells us if they are a good fit to be our customer. So they reply like. broader industry topics for now at least so now we know their pain point and they want to monitor industry trends not just competitors perfect reply 4 here we build value and give options not just directly sharing our agenda so what we wrote is that's a high converting signal you have two options the builder route for a do-it-yourself test drive or the guarded route for a quick 10 minute setup call which one would you prefer now this is key we are not forcing a call we're giving them control both options moving them forward reply five they choose let's do a call first they are ready and even they volunteered their time zone now that's a qualified leads and reply six is what we share our link and we booked a call in just six messages in under 24 hours here's the formula we used first hook with relevance we reference their specific action and they commented on a post Two, qualify naturally. We asked about the use case without being pushy. Third, give options. Let them choose their path forward. And fourth, make it easy for them to say a yes. So we send them a calendar with a clear next step. Notice what we did not do. We did not pitch features. We did not send a 500 word explanation. We did not either rush to a calendar link. Each message had one purpose. And each message moved them closer to the call. What we realized is, of course, when you... message just 50 to 80 people, management of the replies are fine. But what if you do it at a scale and use more than one LinkedIn account to reach out to more people? And there comes the chaos most people deal with, that the replies scattered across multiple LinkedIn inboxes, no proper tracking system, conversion gets lost, and qualified leads basically slips through the cracks in your system. Inside SBL, every conversation is centralized in one dashboard. You can see we have 40 plus LinkedIn accounts for our messaging and we manage it very easily. When somebody replies, the platform also notifies you. You can even take over the chat from the AI or manually assign it to somebody in your team. Without SPL, tracking all of these tens and thousands of leads would be an absolute kiosk. We made the system that organizes and scales it. Also what I learned doing massive LinkedIn outreach is never send more than three messages before asking for a call. If someone is engaged after 3 messages, they are definitely interested. Move them forward. If they're not responding after 3 messages, they're not interested. Just move on. In almost all our 2025 campaign, our average conversation was 5 messages before booking a call. We never went more than 10 messages in total. But here's what most people forget. Not everyone responds right away. And that's why you need follow-up. Chapter 5. Setting up follow-ups Here is a stat that changed everything for us. 47% of our total replies came from follow-up messages and not from our first message. Let me say that again. Almost half of our 4.9 million dollar pipeline came from people who did not respond the first time. Most people send one message and then just give up. That's leaving money on the table. Here's our exact follow-up sequence. Day 1, send message. Day 4, if they don't reply, send the first follow-up. Day 8, if they again don't reply, send follow up too. Day 15, if they are not at all responding, then just make the final follow up. That's it. Four touches total. But here's the critical part. each follow-up adds new value. We never say something like hey just checking in or hi there just following up. That's really a lazy work and does not really pushes anyone to reply to you. Let me share some of our experimental follow-up messages that has really worked for us. Follow-up 1. Share some kind of case study or result in your follow-up message. For example, hey John just closed a deal with a company in your industry. They were struggling with the same pipeline issue. Here's what we did and we added a link. Thought you would find it useful. Follow-up 2. Ask a different question. For example, John, quick question. Are you handling outbound, in-house or working with an agency? Just curious. Follow-up 3. The breakup. John, I'll stop bothering you after this. If lead generation isn't a priority right now, totally get it. If it becomes one, you know where to find me. And the last breakup follow-up really had 9% reply rate for us. People respond because you are giving them... with a polite exit it feels respectful for them now let me also show you some of the best example of follow-ups from our own campaigns selling insurance on linkedin is kind of a very tough job and we have really also cracked on this industry we messaged something like hi happy new year because this was something like a start of the month how are you doing thanks for connecting and we share like a value of what they would get if they talk to us and we just mentioned something like given dot cons alphas grows figure this might be irrelevant for you worth a quick chat and the person did not reply back so we sent another follow-up some hours later and we are just giving some more social proof here that we work with 400 companies in bangalore a lot in quantitative trading how much amount they can save and our clinics are you know 24 7 and access to 12 locations and in the second one we are just sharing another thing which is how they can save 30 to 40 percent on premiums while getting better coverage in the third follow-up again we are talking about unlimited opd consultation so basically this is an insurance which is also covering consultations so we're giving one more offering over here and probably like a breakup follow-up that i totally understand you're busy right now can i reach out in some weeks instead meanwhile if i can just get your email or number i'll send cost comparison roi breakdown and three case studies now over here if you see uh this message is the breakup follow-up but it is just trying to be very respectful that hey just trying to be helpful not pushy costs you nothing share your email and phone number and then you can just see over here that after one two three four messages and possibly one initial message and three follow-ups the person replied back that hey uh hi sachin thanks for reaching out i've noted your service and will connect with you soon and then it is asking for emails and the person shares the email and we are then just taking over contacting the person and selling our insurance and this person literally converted after that and if i just show you another follow-up over here that hey dr sridhar again the same time and similar kind of messaging but kind of personalized with that company's name and some other similar triggers about that particular person and you see like even you know after the breakup follow-up again we see like a usual trend that the person reply however the person is not currently interested in the solution but we see a validation here that after three follow-ups and possibly after a break of follow-up that hey i know you are busy and this is my last follow-up that i can do to you and i can reach you out in some weeks instead if you are busy right now so this is clearly giving them a space and not being so selly and this is totally respectful super polite for the prospects and we get a reply however the person is not interested right now but the person shares that will reach out when we need and that's how smart follow-ups literally work to get replies from people who have not responded to a first message so you can see like consistent follow-up first follow-up was done some hours later and then some days later and then some two days later and we really got reply from a potential prospect in the insurance business now if you're managing just 30 40 prospects a month manual follow-ups are very much possible But imagine managing these follow-up sequences manually for 1,000 or 10,000 people. You'd literally need spreadsheets tracking who got which message and what to follow up on what day. You'll set reminders everywhere and that's technically impossible to scale, right? So use our system to solve this exact challenge when you plan to reach more people. With SBL, you just set up your follow-up sequence once and rest is just taken care by the system. So in order to set up follow-up sequences at SBL, we can just go on the campaign and the first type of follow-up is when the person is not replying to a first message for example here this is the first message we are sending it to the prospect and if they do not reply after three hours this is a follow-up we are sending to the person and after one day if the person again does not reply we are sending this follow-up and again after two days this follow-up and again after two days the last breakup follow-up which has really worked for us now there's another type of follow-ups which is also super helpful when you actually launch a campaign at scale now what happens most of the times the first type of follow-up is when the person does not reply to the first initial message but there are also instances where you message the person the first time they reply and then you message back to the person then the person kind of gets cold and does not reply you back to solve that particular issue we are also setting smart follow-ups and the smart follow-up triggers when your prospect do not reply or remain inactive for a given time period for example the person replied to our message that nice to connect and then we just shared a message that good to connect and uh would you be open for a brief chat to discuss this further and the person did not reply this is also equally important that when we do not nudge the person when they reply we obviously need to follow up to them now here the system has sent them follow up uh if they are not replying for example the reply was sent on 25 feb at 3 7 am if the person is not replying we are again sending the message at 8 am in the morning just following up on the same context and again the person does not reply back so we are again sending a follow-up and again a follow-up so in most of the cases what happens is when we keep on nudging the person they tend to reply so over here in smart follow-ups you can just set up how many number of follow-ups we actually want to send it to them if they do not reply to our message for example the first follow-up after five hours then one day one day two days and then after two days so you can set up reasoning to the smart follow-ups for example if your prospect has replied you in a relation for example they already have an insurance now when we message back and they do not reply back so this is a follow-up that will be sent to them now you can even send the smart follow-ups at sbl which ensures that none of your prospects slips from your system and whenever they get cold sbl make sure to nudge them in a timely manner in a consistent manner so that you don't churn your prospect the sbl system schedules and sends all the follow-ups automatically and stops when somebody replies the system respects linkedin rate limits and never forget any of your lead to nudge our own follow-up messages have generated 24 000 replies in 2025 without automation we would have lost 2.3 million in pipeline because there's no way we could literally have managed this all manually and put a track manually and send all those messages manually also here's what we learned follow-up is not annoying if you are adding value each time set up your follow-up before you start sending your message you may automate them if you are at a scale make every follow-up message valuable and watch your results double for sure now let's talk about the limits most people hit and how to break when you actually get them chapter six setting up scale here's the wall everyone hits with linkedin outreach now linkedin limits you to around just 800 connection requests per month per account and if you do the math it just 26 requests per day at a 30 acceptance rate you are just looking at maybe 240 new connections monthly that's not a scale and most people don't know how to scale beyond that limit. So how did we send 285,000 messages in 2025 without getting banned? Short answer is our fractional SDR accounts. Here's how it works. Instead of using one LinkedIn account, you get multiple sender accounts inside SPL. These are real affiliates and fractional SDRs who have the interest to work with you on your outreach as an affiliate. Each account gets its own 800 monthly limit. You can add 5 accounts and that's a 4000 connection request limit a month. accounts and you get 8,000 a month. In 2025, we ran our own SVL campaigns adding 23 sender accounts. Each account was sending 50 to 100 messages a day with the proper safety limits that keeps every profile healthy. Here's what this looked like for us. In January, we had three sender accounts and we were sending 2500 messages by march we added eight more accounts and we were sending 6500 messages by june we added 15 sender accounts and by december we added 23 accounts and we were literally sending near about 20 000 messages on linkedin and the best advantage was that the entire system runs from just one sb dashboard and i could see all my campaigns replies and all metrics across every single sender account in just one workspace with this system one team can manage outreach to even 50 000 people per month with this setup you just work on your offer get leads set up your chat and follow-up flows and optimize the overall campaign once and just add your sender accounts and the system orchestrates everything automatically staying within linkedin's limit while reaching massive scale that's how we turned linkedin into a 4.9 million dollar pipeline machine but scale means nothing if you're not monitoring what's working chapter seven monitoring and evolving you can't improve what you don't measure most people launch a campaign send thousands of messages and get 20 replies and then think that this is not working for them maybe it is and maybe it is not working actually you don't actually know until you track the right matrix we monitor five stats every single week first messages sent second reply rate and we aim for more than 15 replies third is positive reply rate fourth the calls booked and five pipeline value created inside sbl all of this is tracked automatically you can just log in check your dashboard every single day see exactly what's performing and what's scaling every monday morning we open the dashboard and just short our campaigns by reply rate if a campaign is below say 12 after 500 messages then obviously something is wrong we dig into the data we read all the real conversations look into patterns and then we make one change maybe rewrite the message maybe adjust the audience maybe tweak the follow-up timing and test that change on 200 more messages if reply rate improves we scale it across all the sender accounts if it does not we just kill it and try something else in 2025 we ran more than 43 different campaign variations for a fintech brand we killed 17 of them because the numbers did not work but we found four campaigns that was crushing it 22% reply rate, 38% conversion to call rate. And those four campaigns generated more than $200,000 for the client in just 30 days. When something works, we just duplicate it inside SPL and just scale it across more SDR accounts. Here's the launch playbook we personally follow. In week one and two, we launch multiple campaigns with different variations and test with 500 messages each. In week three, we review the dashboard matrix. Week four, we kill underperformers and scale all the winners. The hard growth, what worked in January might be dead by June. So we keep on updating the funnel at scale and EB test. multiple offerings multiple messaging follow-ups etc as well gives you real-time visibility into every single matrix so it helps you to be smarter in your game every single day and get customers from linkedin stay obsessed with your numbers read replies ask why people engaged use that feedback to improve and that's how we went from eight percent reply rate in 2023 to 18 in 2025 monitor obsessively evolve constantly and win constantly so that's what happens when you combine the right offer quality leads persuasive messaging solid chat flows smart follow-ups scalable systems and consistent monitoring most people over complicate linkedin outreach they think they need fancy tricks or secret hacks but you don't you just need clear offer right people messages that add value follow-ups that persist systems that scale and data that tells you what's working that's the playbook and that's how we turned linkedin into our own and our customers primary source of business that gets them high quality customers at the lowest cost per lead from linkedin and here's the reality you can try to build all of this manually track replies in spreadsheet manage multiple accounts yourself or schedule follow-ups with calendar reminders or you can use systems like sbl and have the entire system ready to launch if you want access to sbl it is completely free to try i'll add the link in the description and i'll also share some more videos like this so do subscribe

Most Cold LinkedIn outreach gets 5% reply rate. Mine gets 18%.
I sent 285,584 messages in 2025 and generated $4.9M in pipeline. Here's the complete system.

In this video, I'm breaking down my complete LinkedIn customer acquisition playbook:

→ How to craft offers that get replies (not ignored)
→ Finding quality leads using signal-based prospecting
→ Message formulas that convert at 18%+ (real examples included)
→ Chat flow that books calls in 6 messages or less
→ Follow-up sequences (47% of our replies came from follow-ups)
→ Scaling past LinkedIn's 800 connection limit
→ The 7 metrics to track for continuous optimization

THE NUMBERS:
✓ 285,584 cold messages sent
✓ 51,226 replies received (18% reply rate)
✓ 4,972 qualified leads generated
✓ $4.9M total pipeline value created

This isn't theory. These are real conversations, real metrics, real results from 2025.

I'm Shubham Kumar, CEO at SBL.so. I've spent 3 years testing LinkedIn outreach strategies, sent over 500,000 messages, and built the automation platform that powers this entire system.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
0:00 - Introduction and High-Level Results: Overview of sending 285k messages and generating $4.9M in pipeline.
1:19 - Target Audience Selection: Identifying which businesses can successfully leverage LinkedIn for leads.
2:27 - Crafting a High-Converting Offer: How to define a clear, result-focused offer in 10 words or less (e.g., 50 leads in 30 days).
5:22 - Finding Quality Leads (Prospecting): Utilizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pinpoint a specific target market.
10:12 - Persuasive Messaging Formulas: Creating messages that grab attention and provide social proof.
13:05 - Managing Chat Flows: How to move a prospect from initial reply to a booked call in 6 messages or less.
17:16 - Strategic Follow-Up Sequences: Using the "breakup" message technique; 47% of replies come from follow-ups.
21:59 - Scaling Beyond LinkedIn Limits: Using multiple sender accounts to bypass restrictions and increase outreach volume.
26:01 - Monitoring and Optimization: Tracking key metrics to refine messaging and kill underperforming campaigns.


FREE RESOURCES:
🔗 Try SBL.so (LinkedIn automation platform): https://sbl.so
📥 Download complete playbook & templates: email me and i will share 

If you want LinkedIn to become your primary customer acquisition channel at the lowest cost - this is your roadmap.

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