The Before State
The client is an Australian B2B SaaS company with a mid-market focus. Their product serves operations managers and COOs in companies with 50-200 employees. They have a sales team of three SDRs and a Head of Sales.
Before engaging Prospect Growth Lab, the team's outbound activity was entirely manual. Each SDR was expected to send 20-30 LinkedIn connection requests per week and follow up with connections as time allowed. In practice, outbound was the first thing to drop when the team was busy with demos, follow-ups, and admin. Pipeline was inconsistent. Month one might produce 12 qualified meetings. Month two, six. Month three, fifteen. No predictability.
The SDR team was also spending approximately 40% of their prospecting time just building lists. Finding the right contacts, manually filtering through Sales Navigator, and entering data into the CRM consumed hours every week that could have been spent on conversations.
The Setup: Defining the ICP
The first step was to precisely define the ideal client profile. This sounds obvious, but most teams have a vague sense of their ICP rather than a tightly defined set of parameters.
For this client, we landed on: operations manager or COO title, company size 50-200 employees, industries including professional services, logistics, and property management, based in Australia, and active on LinkedIn within the past 30 days.
We excluded companies with fewer than 20 employees (too small), companies in highly regulated industries where the product was not a fit, and individuals who had changed jobs in the past 30 days (likely too distracted to engage meaningfully).
This ICP definition produced an initial target audience of approximately 3,200 contacts in Sales Navigator.
The Targeting Parameters
Rather than building one large campaign, we segmented the audience into three smaller campaigns targeting different sub-personas within the ICP.
Campaign 1: COOs and operations leaders at professional services firms. Campaign 2: Head of Operations at logistics and supply chain companies. Campaign 3: Operations managers at property management firms.
Each campaign had its own connection request copy and follow-up sequence, tailored to the specific language, challenges, and priorities of each sub-persona. This segmented approach typically produces higher acceptance and reply rates than a single broad campaign.
The Message Sequence Structure
Connection request note: 200-250 characters. Referenced the specific industry and a relevant pain point. Ended with a reason to connect that felt genuine rather than salesy.
Follow-up 1 (3 days after connection accepted): Introduced the company briefly, referenced a specific challenge common to operations leaders in their industry, and offered a useful insight without asking for a meeting.
Follow-up 2 (5 days after follow-up 1): Shared a one-sentence description of a relevant result achieved for a similar company, and included a low-commitment call to action: a 15-minute chat if they were open to it.
The sequence was kept to two follow-ups after connection. More than two follow-ups in a sequence typically increases unsubscribes and damages the relationship before it starts.
The Results
Campaign launched in month one. By the end of month two, the results were:
- 400 connection requests sent per month
- 18% connection acceptance rate (72 new connections per month)
- 4.2% reply rate from the follow-up sequence (3 qualified conversations per month)
- Total qualified meetings in month two: 22 (including meetings generated from both LinkedIn campaigns and warm conversations that came through the network as a result of the expanded connection base)
The SDR team's time on manual list building dropped from 40% to under 10%. The hours reclaimed went directly into more calls and demos. Conversion rates from demo to close improved as a result.
The Replicable Playbook
The elements that drove results for this client are replicable across similar B2B SaaS businesses:
- Define the ICP with specific, measurable parameters, not vague descriptions
- Segment the audience into 2-3 sub-personas and run separate campaigns for each
- Write connection request copy that is specific to each sub-persona's world
- Keep follow-up sequences to 2 steps with clear, low-pressure calls to action
- Run 400-500 connection requests per month per profile at 15-20/day
- Review performance monthly and A/B test one variable at a time
- Track everything: acceptance rate, reply rate, meeting booked rate, and pipeline value generated
The businesses that see the strongest results are those that treat LinkedIn outbound as a system to be built and optimised, not a tactic to be tried and abandoned.
Ready to put this into practice? Get in touch for a free strategy conversation.