3,535 connection requests. 1,458 accepted. 553 replies.
Those are the LinkedIn numbers from one advertising agency in Australia. Over 12 months, its LinkedIn outbound program booked 2,582 sales calls.
An advertising agency books more discovery calls on LinkedIn by doing three things in order. It builds the target list from the titles that actually signed its past deals. It fixes the profiles that send, because a marketing director clicks your name first. Then it runs five or more touches that ask for a conversation and save the pitch for the call.
Who to target on LinkedIn when you sell advertising
Start from your own signed deals and skip the persona document. My targeting rule is simple: go after the roles you are 100% sure about. To get sure, check who actually made the decision on your earlier projects.
Pull your last 10 or 15 clients. For each one, write down two titles: the person who took your first call and the person who approved the budget. Sometimes those are different people, and your list has to reach the second one.
If your records are thin, start from this grid and correct it as replies come in:
| Client company size | Titles to test first | What to check in your own deals |
|---|---|---|
| Up to about 50 people | Founder, CEO, owner, managing director | Did the founder decide alone, or bring someone in? |
| Mid-sized, with an in-house marketing team | Head of marketing, marketing director | Who ran the agency search and who signed |
| Large, brand-led companies | CMO, brand director, VP of marketing | Which title took the first meeting |
Sales Navigator filters by job title, industry, company headcount and geography, so each row of that grid becomes its own saved search.
Before anything goes out, exclude generic titles such as assistant, associate and plain "manager". If several people at your agency will send, split the market between them so two of your profiles never message the same prospect.
The profile check a marketing director runs before replying
A prospect checks you out before answering, and that check starts with a click on your name. For an agency that sells creative and strategy work, your profile is the first sample of that work the prospect sees.
Headlines are the weakest spot. By my 2023 estimate, 90% of profiles have a headline that is generic and boring. A headline that says only a job title and the agency name gives a brand director no reason to reply.
Here is what they open, and what to put there:
| What the prospect opens | What makes them close the tab | What to put there instead |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | Title and agency name only | Who you help and the result you are known for |
| About section | Your career history, written like a CV | Who you work with, how you work, and one case with a number |
| Featured section | Empty or broken thumbnails | Two or three campaigns, each with the client's category, the brief and the result |
| Recommendations | None at all, which reads as a warning | A few short ones from past clients, since recommendations are proof |
| Every profile that sends | Only the founder's profile is finished | The same standard for every account running outreach |
The sender carries more weight than the wording. One company I watched got a 2% reply rate on a message, and another got 7.5% with the same text. A decent message from a profile full of proof gets further than a flawless one from an empty profile, which is the argument behind the audit prospects run before they answer.
None of this needs a posting schedule. A title-and-photo profile loses the prospect within seconds, but fixing it is a one-off job. If you only have time for one project, spend it on the outreach before the posting.
The message sequence: sell the conversation first
The first message after someone accepts has one job: start a conversation. Accepting a connection is no invitation to your capabilities deck, your showreel or your service list.
I have said this for years: you sell the meeting. Selling the services in the message usually doesn't work well.
Pitching the agency in message one is the quickest route to being ignored. What goes in instead is small: one line on their category or a recent campaign of theirs, one result from your own work, then a question about a short call.
One or two messages will not be enough. The working minimum is 5 to 6 touch points, ideally across more than one channel.
A sequence built on those rules looks roughly like this:
| Touch | Channel | Its job |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Connection request | Get accepted by the right title |
| 2 | LinkedIn message after acceptance | Open a conversation with one question |
| 3 | Warm email | Same person, second channel, a new angle |
| 4 | One result from a client in a similar category | |
| 5 | Email or LinkedIn | A short, direct question about a call |
| 6 | Email or LinkedIn | A short final note, no pressure, easy to answer later |
Every LinkedIn step in that table uses the free route. A regular message can only go to your connections, which is why the request comes first.
An InMail can reach people outside your network. It needs a Premium subscription and spends one of the credits your plan allots. The note on a connection request is capped at 200 characters on a free account and 300 on Premium (LinkedIn Help).
The email only comes after LinkedIn. I call these warm emails: by the time one lands, the prospect has seen your name and probably your profile. Email is optional, though. The Australian agency in the funnel section below ran on LinkedIn alone.
Space the steps out. In our campaigns, the third follow-up, not the first message, is usually what turns into a booked meeting, and only when real time has passed between the messages. More on that in my notes on pacing follow-ups.
The day and hour of sending are something to test on your own account. Send inside your prospects' working hours, in their time zone, log the day each reply arrives, and after a few weeks shift volume toward the days that answer.
Tools, and LinkedIn's rule on automation
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's paid sales subscription. Over a free account it adds more than 50 advanced search filters and InMail, and its top plan, Advanced Plus, is built around CRM integration (LinkedIn's plan comparison).
Automation is the part to be careful with. LinkedIn's User Agreement (effective November 3, 2025) rules out bots or other unauthorized automated methods to add contacts or send messages, and scripts or browser plugins that scrape profiles.
Its help center warns that accounts using such tools can be restricted or closed (LinkedIn Help).
If a LinkedIn outreach agency will run outreach from your team's profiles, ask them plainly which tools touch those accounts and how that fits LinkedIn's rules. This is not legal advice.
One advertising agency's LinkedIn funnel, row by row
The Australian agency from the top of this page, LinkedIn outbound only, 12 months:
| Stage | Number | Rate, and what it is divided by |
|---|---|---|
| Connection requests sent | 3,535 | |
| Connections accepted | 1,458 | 41.2% of requests sent |
| Replies | 553 | 37.9% of accepted connections |
| Replies against requests sent | 553 | about 15.6% of requests sent (my calculation) |
| Sales calls booked | 2,582 | Program total over 12 months |
How to read the table:
Every rate needs its denominator. The 37.9% reply rate is measured against people who accepted. Against everyone who got a request, the same 553 replies come to about 15.6%. When an agency or vendor quotes a reply rate, ask what it is divided by.
Keep the call total in its own row. The 2,582 calls are the program's 12-month total. The call total is higher than the reply count, so those rows are not the only source of the calls. Do not divide the calls by them or work out calls per request.
It is one agency's result. Per 100 requests sent, it comes to about 41 accepted and about 16 replies (my calculation). Treat it as a reference line. Your market and your first month will look different.
Testing your messages before you add volume
Our builds start with several versions of the sequence. My rule is "test, test, test": the more versions you try, the faster you find a winner.
For an ad agency, the things worth varying are few. The angle of the first message after acceptance, say their category versus one of their recent campaigns. The client result used as proof. The number of steps. And which title row from the targeting grid gets the requests.
Change one of those per version. You can't fix multiple variables at the same time, because you don't even know where exactly the problem is.
Then read the right number. Acceptance per request sent is about the title, the request and your profile. Replies per accepted connection are about the message. Mix those two up and you end up fixing the wrong thing.
Size each test in replies, because replies are what you judge a version on. Pick how many answers a version needs before you trust it, then work back to requests with your own rates.
At that agency's rates, a version sent to a few dozen people would bring a handful of replies and tell you very little. So yes, test, test, test. Just give every version enough volume to actually show you something.
Running too many versions at once backfires for the same reason: none of them collects enough data to mean anything. The version that wins gets the weekly volume. If nothing works at small volume, more sends will not fix it.
How long before the calls come
The first weeks produce nothing to show a partner meeting: profiles get rebuilt, the list gets built and checked, the messages get written. On our side, that takes about 15 days from signed contract to launch.
Then comes the ramp. A US advertising agency we worked with had booked 3 sales calls in the 4 months before we started. Its first four months of outbound went 23, 37, 55, then 113 booked calls.
The Australian advertising agency behind the LinkedIn numbers earlier reached 2,582 sales calls in its 12 months. Different country, different client: keep the two results apart. The full story of the US ramp is in this month-by-month account of a first quarter.
Revenue lags behind the calls. An outbound lead moves through your pitch and proposal process no faster than a referral, so forecast signed work a full sales cycle behind the calls.
A pre-launch check for agency teams
Run this before the first request goes out. Each line closes off a mistake that keeps calendars empty.
| Check | The mistake it prevents |
|---|---|
| Titles come from the people who signed your past deals | Reaching marketers who cannot approve a budget |
| The list is big enough to absorb bad timing | A few dozen "perfect fits" who happen to be busy this quarter |
| Every sending profile has a specific headline, featured work and recommendations | One unfinished team profile dragging down every message it sends |
| Message one asks for a conversation | A capabilities paragraph asking a stranger for a decision |
| At least five touches, with real time between them | Stopping before the third follow-up, the one that usually books |
| Every conversation logged in a CRM | Losing track of who replied and what they said |
The list row is easy to underestimate. I watch B2B teams contact 50 to 100 perfect-fit leads a month and then wonder why nothing moves. Perfect fits can be busy or not ready this quarter, so a list that size is a coin flip. Fix the profiles and the sequence at small volume first. Then scale.
If you run an advertising agency and want a second look at your team's LinkedIn profiles and message sequence before launch, book a call and we can go through them.
Questions advertising agencies ask
Do I need a note on the LinkedIn connection request?
It is optional. Its job is to get accepted by the right title, so keep it short and relevant and leave the pitch for later. The wider picture is on our advertising agencies page.
Is cold email effective for advertising agencies specifically?
It can be, as a second engine next to LinkedIn. One profile can only reach so many people, and cold email adds volume once you know which message works. Warm emails differ: they go to people who have already seen you on LinkedIn.
How long does it take to book discovery calls on LinkedIn?
The first replies and booked calls can arrive within a month of launch. The deals from those calls often close months later, because B2B sales cycles commonly run 6 to 12 months. Judge month one on conversations. Revenue comes a sales cycle later.
Which LinkedIn plan does an advertising agency need to run this?
The sequence above runs on a free account, because it uses only connection requests and regular messages. Sales Navigator is optional: it makes the saved searches from the targeting grid easier to build.