Three brands, two tracks, one exclusion list: the LinkedIn engine that originates our own group's inbound

The group did not have a channel problem. It had the opposite: three brands, overlapping audiences, and one set of human senders, which meant the same prospect could receive a hiring approach from one brand and a growth-marketing approach from another inside the same week. Two good messages arriving that way read as one bad campaign. Underneath that sat a harder constraint: LinkedIn outbound is currently where the group's inbound conversations come from, so an account restriction is not a channel setback, it is the whole quarter. Every rule in this programme was written against one of those two facts.

Three brands, overlapping audiences, one set of senders. Without a routing rule the same person gets approached twice in a week by what reads as two companies with the same writing style.

1. 01

   Routing is a copy problem solved at the list level

   Each brand owns exactly one conversation type: a senior, high-authority front door; a specialised hiring brand; and a growth-marketing brand. Each sender works one primary and one secondary market and no others. Deciding this on the list means the writer never has to make the decision inside the message, which is where it always gets made badly.

2. 02

   The exclusion list is the highest-value asset in the programme

   Recruitment agencies, staffing firms, executive search, RPO providers, job seekers, HR consultants and coaches are excluded outright, and one programme excludes Brazil entirely. These are not low-value prospects, they are wrong-shaped ones: an agency replying to a hiring brand has read the message as a partnership approach, and that is a pleasant conversation that ends nowhere while consuming the same sending capacity as a real one.

3. 03

   Track A is free and Track B is not, which is why Track A is exhausted first

   Track A works first-degree connections only and runs to exhaustion before any InMail is sent. Track B is Sales Navigator InMail, opened only after Track A is spent and only where there is a fresh trigger. Inside Track B, Open Profiles are messaged first because they cost no InMail credit, so the paid sends are reserved for people who cannot be reached any other way.

4. 04

   A trigger has a shelf life, and the rule states it in days

   The person posted about hiring within the last 14 days, or the company announced funding, an acquisition or a new office within the last 30. Without a stated window, trigger-based outreach quietly becomes 'we found something on their profile', which is the same message with a longer preamble.

5. 05

   The copy standard and the pacing standard protect the same thing

   Track A messages run under 60 words, Track B InMails under 400 characters, subject lines are an observation about the recipient and never an offer. Sending is capped at 20 messages a session with 45 to 90 seconds varied between sends, three sessions at least an hour apart or spread across two days, and a full stop on any captcha or limit notice. The published platform benchmark has connection-note reply rates at 3.0% and down 37% year over year, so there is nothing left to gain by sending more of them faster.

Every sender starts from a written routing rule: which brand they send as, which conversation that brand is allowed to open, and which two markets they work. The exclusion list is applied to the list before it reaches the sender, not checked at send time. Track A works first-degree connections with messages under 60 words and no link, and is worked to exhaustion. Only then does Track B open, and only against a dated trigger: a hiring post inside 14 days, or funding, an acquisition or a new office inside 30. Open Profiles are messaged first because they consume no credit. InMail subject lines are observations. The banned-word list covers 'platform', 'dashboard', 'pipeline', 'solution', 'leverage', 'streamline', 'seamless', 'robust', 'unlock' and 'empower', and the two openers that identify a template on sight — 'Hope you're well' and 'I wanted to reach out'. Sending is manual, paced and logged, and stops entirely on any captcha or limit notice.

1. 1

   Week 1

   Routing and exclusions

   Brand-to-conversation map, one primary and one secondary market per sender, written exclusion list

   Owner: OmniFlow

2. 2

   Weeks 1–2

   List build

   First-degree audit per sender, Track A list, Track B holding list with trigger fields

   Owner: OmniFlow

3. 3

   Weeks 2–6

   Track A

   Messages under 60 words, maximum three paced sessions a day, send log per session

   Owner: Sender + OmniFlow

4. 4

   Ongoing

   Trigger monitoring

   Hiring posts inside 14 days; funding, acquisition or new office inside 30 days

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   After Track A is exhausted

   Track B

   Sales Navigator InMail under 400 characters, Open Profiles first, observation subject lines

   Owner: Sender + OmniFlow

6. 6

   Ongoing

   Routing to CRM

   Replies logged by brand, market and track; exclusions fed back into the list build

   Owner: OmniFlow

Publish every rate in this programme with its denominator attached, and publish two of each: acceptance and reply against requests sent, and reply against connections accepted. The published benchmarks for this channel disagree with each other by an order of magnitude for exactly that reason, and a single number with no denominator is not a result. The figure that matters most to the group is not a rate at all: it is the share of inbound conversations whose first touch was this programme, pulled from the CRM by first-touch source.

Measured in LinkedIn, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and the group CRM, window to be confirmed at publication. First-party programme operated by OmniFlow inside Flow Group Ventures; no client data is involved. Cited: Expandi *LinkedIn Outreach Benchmarks 2026*. ---.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

5 of the figures on this engagement are not published yet. Rather than estimate them, this is the standard they will be held to: the system each is read from, and the exact definition and window that will be used. Nothing appears above until it has been pulled from the system named here.

We wrote the exclusion list after the first week of sending rather than before it. The first week produced replies from precisely the audience the list now excludes — recruitment agencies answering the hiring brand because they read it as a partnership approach — and those conversations were friendly, went nowhere, and used the same paced sending capacity as real ones. The exclusion list is now built before the first list is, and Brazil was added to it the same way: after it had already cost us sends.

Real client work. Every figure is measured in a named system and carries the window it was measured over. See all our work