How to Scale LinkedIn Outreach Without Losing the Personal Touch

LinkedIn outreach can be incredibly effective to grow your network and nurture potential clients, but doing it manually takes time. You can spend hours finding the right people on Sales Navigator, crafting personalized messages, and nurturing leads. If you're doing this all by hand, it's almost impossible to scale.

At Scaling Ventures, we’re all about setting up systems that run on autopilot, freeing you up to work on your business, not just in it. In this newsletter, I will show you how to automate your LinkedIn outreach using tools that can replicate your effort at scale. But before we get started, there’s a crucial disclaimer.

Let’s get started with the tools you can use and how to set them up.

The Tools of the Trade

Several tools allow you to automate LinkedIn outreach—each offering unique features to help you scale. Popular ones include:

• Linked Helper

• PhantomBuster

• Dripify

For this guide, I’ll focus on Dripify—a powerful platform for automating outreach sequences. Once you connect it to your LinkedIn profile, you can set up campaigns that run on autopilot.

Setting Up a Campaign in Dripify

Everything in Dripify is built around campaigns. A campaign could be for newsletter growth, lead generation, or agency outreach—whatever fits your goals. To start a campaign, you need an initial list of leads.

Getting Your Lead List

The easiest way to get leads into Dripify is by using Sales Navigator. Once you’ve created a search in Sales Navigator, you can copy the URL and paste it into Dripify. The system will pull in the leads, but there’s a limit of 2475 leads at a time (make sure you toggle the "max” setting; otherwise, Dripify will only import 100 leads). If your search yields more results, you must narrow it down with filters—like targeting a smaller geographic region.

Designing the Outreach Sequence

Now that you have your leads, you must decide on the sequence. The goal is to simulate natural human interaction so your outreach doesn’t appear robotic or spammy. Here's a sequence I recommend: (we’ve discussed the sequence and message templates before)

• Step 1: Profile View
  Start by viewing the lead’s profile—no immediate contact request. This simulates genuine interest without jumping straight into their inbox.

• Step 2: Wait for an Hour
  Give it some breathing room. The minimum wait time is an hour, but feel free to extend this for a more human approach.

• Step 3: Send a Personalized Contact Request
  After waiting, send a connection request with a personalized message. Dripify will autofill their name and other relevant data from their profile.

• Step 4: Manage Non-Responses
  If someone doesn’t accept your request within 30 days, Dripify can automatically withdraw it. This prevents you from having too many outstanding connection requests, which LinkedIn frowns upon.

Once someone accepts your connection request, the sequence doesn't end. Dripify can be set to wait an hour or a day to follow up with a simple message. Most people won’t respond immediately, so this gentle nudge often gets the conversation going.

Handling Responses: When Automation Stops

Here's where the human touch becomes critical. Once someone replies, Dripify’s automation stops. You don’t want your follow-up messages to feel canned or robotic. This is where delegation comes into play.

I use a virtual assistant (hi Laura!) to monitor responses and manage the conversation flow. My assistant checks the unified inbox in Dripify about once a day for 10 minutes, which only displays messages from leads in my campaign (not my entire LinkedIn inbox). If a lead is interested, she shares my calendar link to schedule a call. If the lead seems unengaged, she archives the message.

I'm not glued to my LinkedIn account in this setup, yet the outreach always happens in the background. I only step in when there's a real opportunity—when a lead is interested and a meeting is scheduled.

The Cost of Automating LinkedIn Outreach

Let's talk numbers. While automating LinkedIn outreach sounds appealing, it's important to understand the investment involved. Here’s the breakdown of the typical costs you'll face: