Hey! Quick reality check on that premise first — I’d be careful with the “LinkedIn is replacing email” framing. It’s not really either/or, and the people getting the best results aren’t picking a winner, they’re running both together. LinkedIn is great for warming someone up and getting on their radar; email is still where the actual booked-call conversion tends to happen. The magic is in the combination, not the swap.
A few things that have worked well for me:
The single biggest one — automation should be your delivery mechanism, not your personalization. The moment LinkedIn becomes spray-and-pray, your reply rate tanks and you risk getting the profile restricted (and unlike email domains, you can’t just spin up a new LinkedIn account, so it’s a real cost). So the play is: automate the sequence, but build it off a genuine signal — a recent post, a funding round, a role change. One good trigger beats ten “I see you’re the CEO of {company}” openers.
On the actual flow, what works is not pitching in the connection request. Connect with no note (or a really light one), then warm them up — like or comment on a recent post first so you’re a familiar name — and only then move into a short, conversational message. No formal email tone, one clear ask, lead with why you’re relevant rather than what you sell.
Voice messages are genuinely underrated and a great differentiator, but they land best a little later in the sequence once there’s a sliver of familiarity — not as the opener. Keep them under ~30 seconds and reference something specific to them in the first line, otherwise it reads as a template with extra steps.
On assets — resist dropping a deck or a gated PDF cold. A lightweight, relevant resource or a short Loom converts way better than “here’s our one-pager.”
Tool-wise, anything multichannel that lets you blend LinkedIn + email in one sequence (HeyReach, Lemlist, La Growth Machine and similar) is the right category — but honestly the tool matters less than the signal + restraint. And keep your daily connection volume conservative, especially without Sales Nav, or you’ll get throttled.
Happy to share the sequence structure I use if that’d be helpful!
