Be ready for a slow first month. LinkedIn works for a service provider whose buyers are professionals who use it, but for most small businesses it is slower than writing directly to named buyers by email. The plan below gives you daily counts for 30 days, and tells you when to take the conversation off LinkedIn and into an inbox.
Tobias Reed sells payroll setup to restaurants with 10 to 40 employees. His buyers are owners and general managers, which is a decent fit for LinkedIn. He has no audience yet and about 30 minutes a weekday. This is the month he follows. Adjust the buyer, the numbers and the wording to yours.
The month at a glance
The weekly counts below assume that about a third of the people you invite accept, which is a guess to replace after week one. Daily work is about 30 minutes on weekdays (10 requests, 5 comments, a few messages), plus roughly an hour a week for posts, so about three and a half hours a week in all.
| Week | Posts | Requests | Comments | First messages | Second messages | Moves to email |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 | 50 | 25 | about 17 | none yet | none yet |
| 2 | 3 | 50 | 25 | about 17 | about 14 | anyone who said yes |
| 3 | 3 | 50 | 25 | about 17 | about 14 | about 14 silent week-1 connections |
| 4 | 3 | 50 | 25 | about 17 | about 14 | about 14 silent week-2 connections |
That is 12 posts, 200 requests and 100 comments in the month. The email column is the step most advice skips, and it is explained further down.
Who buys on LinkedIn and who does not
LinkedIn is strong when your buyer is a business owner, manager or specialist with a professional profile: consultants, agencies, software, financial and legal services, B2B suppliers, recruiting. It is weak for services sold to homeowners, trades with local residential customers, and most food, retail and personal services. A plumber's customers are not on LinkedIn on a Tuesday afternoon. If your buyers are mainly consumers, spend the same 30 minutes on direct outreach or your local listing. Our piece on LinkedIn outreach versus email sets the two side by side.
A profile that says who you help
Spend 90 minutes on day one, because every request you send will send someone to this page. The headline should name the buyer and the result, not your job title. Tobias's reads: "I set up payroll for restaurants with 10 to 40 staff, so paychecks are right and taxes are filed." The About section needs three short paragraphs: the problem your buyer has, what you do about it, and how to reach you. Add a real photo, put a contact method in the featured section, and list two or three examples of work, with permission. Skip buzzwords. A restaurant owner reading the page should know within ten seconds that you handle the thing keeping them up on Sunday night.
Posts: three a week for 30 days
That is twelve posts, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, about 20 minutes each. Don't try to go viral. Write for the one restaurant owner who will read it and nod. Rotate four kinds: a mistake you've seen ("the tip credit setting most payroll systems get wrong by default"), a short how-to, a number with a one-line meaning, and a question to the group. No links to your service in the post. The job of a post is to make the profile look alive when someone you've asked to connect checks it.
Connection requests to named buyers
Ten requests every weekday to people who fit, found by searching your buyer's title and your city. Twenty weekdays is 200 requests. LinkedIn limits how many invitations you can send a week and doesn't publish a fixed number; 50 a week is conservative. Free accounts also have a monthly cap on personalized notes, so plain requests are fine as long as your profile explains you. If you add a note, keep it to one line: "Hi Maria, I work with restaurant owners on payroll. Glad to connect."
Do these by hand. LinkedIn's terms prohibit bots and automation tools for sending requests, and accounts that use them get restricted. Alongside the requests, leave five thoughtful comments a day on posts by your target buyers. Ten minutes. It is the cheapest way to be recognized before you ever send a message. To find buyers without paid tools, see finding B2B leads on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator.
Messages that do not pitch
When someone accepts, you have permission to write once. As a planning guess, say a third accept: 10 requests a day is about 3 new connections. Send a first message the same day, with no pitch:
Thanks for connecting, Maria. I see you run two locations. Is the second still on a separate payroll, or did you merge them?
A week later, if there is no answer, send a second message with something useful: "I put together a one-page checklist for the tip reporting rules restaurants trip over. Want it?" If they say yes, send it and ask one question. Stop there. Two messages, then move on, because a third reads as pressure. That is about three first messages a day and, later in the month, a few second ones.
Moving to email
This is the step most LinkedIn advice leaves out. Email is where most business replies happen, and your messages on LinkedIn sit in a feed that people check weekly. Move to email at one of two points: when the person says yes to something (the checklist, a call), or ten days after a connection who never replied. Find their work address on the company website (the steps are in finding an email address from a LinkedIn profile), verify it, and write a short, honest email that mentions how you connected. Our cold email for beginners guide covers the writing, and finding decision-makers at a company helps when the profile doesn't make the buyer clear.
Rocketship can take over at this step: the email, the follow-up and the booking run on their own, so your LinkedIn hours go into being known. See the AI workers.
What to measure
Keep four numbers, once a week. Requests sent, requests accepted, replies to your first and second messages, and calls booked. Over the month: about 200 requests, perhaps 65 accepted, perhaps 10 conversations, and perhaps 3 or 4 calls. Those are planning guesses to correct with your own counts, not benchmarks. If acceptance is under a quarter, your profile or your targeting is off. If people accept and never reply, your first message is asking too much. If you get conversations and no calls, your offer is vague.
Compare it honestly with the other channel. The same 30 minutes a day spent on email to named buyers usually reaches more people in a week than LinkedIn does in a month, so use LinkedIn if your buyers are there and as a way to warm people up, not as your only channel. Our piece on inbound versus outbound lead generation shows how to combine them.
Rocketship finds the buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, and books the meeting on its own. Plans that get you customers start at $24.99 a month (Launch), and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial, card required.