A working roadmap drawn from a season of real onboarding and check-in calls. Use it as your own checklist if you are about to start, or as a self-audit if you started a few weeks ago and the numbers feel off.
The platform is not the hard part. The hard part is the rhythm. Week one is hopeful, week two is busy, week three is quiet, and week four is when the ground starts to move. Customers who quit usually quit on day eighteen, when their connection rate is real but their conversation rate has not had time to surface.
This playbook calls out what should be happening each week, what should not yet be happening, and what to fix when something is genuinely off. It will not replace your strategy session, but it will save you from misreading your own data.
If you are running on fully managed, your team handles many of these steps for you. The point of having the checklist anyway is so you can ask intelligent questions on the next call.
Resist the temptation to do week three's work in week one. The pacing exists for a reason: LinkedIn watches behavior shape, and accounts that look like a human ramping up perform better than accounts that look like a system being pushed to the limit on day one.
Most week-one regret comes from launching a campaign before the profile and audience are ready. Treat this week like prep, not performance. Almost every fix you might have to make later gets cheaper if you make it now.
Run the bridge. Confirm two-factor authentication is set to SMS, not the LinkedIn authenticator app. Verify the connection settles cleanly before going further.
Banner, headline, verification badge, About section. The headline should mention three things, including one that is human. The banner should look like you in real life, not a brochure.
An unlinked employer name signals "incomplete" to anyone reviewing your connection request. A bare-bones company page with a logo and one sentence is enough for week one.
If you have Sales Nav already, great. If not, plan to use our QuickNav loaner seat for week two. Do not skip this decision because it determines how many people you can reach each week.
Existing customers, in-flight pipeline, friends and family, current vendors. Paste the LinkedIn profiles or names into the blacklist before any campaign starts. This single step prevents most awkward surprises.
Send twenty manual connection requests per day for five days. Accept three or four inbound. Like one or two posts. The goal is not to perform. The goal is to look like you decided to take LinkedIn seriously.
Wanting to launch the campaign on day three because the kickoff call felt productive. Resist. The boring work in week one is what makes weeks two through four worth your time.
This is the week the campaign actually goes out. Pick one persona, build one search, ship one opener. Resist running two parallel experiments unless we explicitly recommend it.
One title, one industry, one geography, one company size band. If you cannot decide between two, pick the one with more active LinkedIn presence. You can always run the second next month.
Open the first hundred results and skim. If three out of five look right, ship it. If two out of five look right, the search needs another filter. The audience is the campaign.
No pitch. No offer. Forty to sixty words. The goal is the connection, not the conversion. Ask a low-friction question or note a real reason you would want to be in their network.
Default is 7am to 6pm in your time zone, every eight to twelve minutes. Most clients leave it. If your audience is in another time zone or industry, adjust the window once and then leave it.
Once it is running, stop opening LinkedIn for a few days. Watching the inbox refresh does not change the outcome. Trust the system.
Writing a beautiful long opener that mentions your offer, your award, and the discount you are running this quarter. Connection rate craters. The opener is a handshake, not an elevator pitch.
By now you will have a real connection rate to look at. The temptation will be to react. Almost everything you want to change in week three is better changed in week four. The exception is the profile. If the profile is wrong, fix it now.
Healthy is 20 to 40 percent. Below 20, look at the profile and the opener, not the search. Above 40, you are doing well, ride the wave.
Same band, 20 to 40 percent. Conversation rate lags connection rate by a few days, so do not panic if it is still building. If it is well below 20 by end of week, the second message in the sequence may need work.
Pull five recent replies. Are they on-target leads, off-target leads, or polite acknowledgments? If three of five are off-target, the search is the problem, not the message.
If something is genuinely wrong, change one variable. Either the opener, the banner, or one search filter. Never two. If you change two and the rate moves, you will not know which one mattered.
The search is still feeding new contacts. A premature refresh just adds people you have not earned the right to message yet. Wait until the original list is at least seventy percent through.
Calling us on day eighteen ready to declare the campaign dead. The conversation rate is almost always the metric that has not had time to settle. Give it through end of week three before declaring anything.
By now, the system has its rhythm. Connection rate is real. Conversation rate is real. You have meetings on the calendar or you know exactly why you do not. This is the week to scale, not the week to start over.
Pull in the new profiles LinkedIn has indexed since you built it. If your messaging is working, do not change a thing. Refresh and re-launch into the same campaign.
If the first audience has settled at a healthy rate, a second persona adds new pipeline without cannibalizing the first. If the first is still messy, do not add a second yet.
If you are spending real time on inbound replies and resenting it, move to fully managed. If you are bored and want to be more hands-on, move to assisted. The platform supports either.
How many discovery calls landed this month? Were they fits? Were they on-time? If the lead-to-call gap is more than two days, that is your follow-up speed problem, not the platform's problem.
Month two is when targeting decisions get interesting: new vertical, new geography, second seat for a colleague, a webinar invite layered on top. Book the call before the calendar fills up.
Treating month two like a brand new launch. It is not. Month two compounds month one. The mistake is rebuilding from scratch when you should be doubling down on the working pieces.
We track many things on the dashboard. The truth is that almost every diagnostic conversation we have with a client comes back to one of these three levers. Knowing which one is off saves you from changing the wrong thing.
Are you reaching the right people? Wrong industry, wrong title, wrong geography, wrong company stage. If your inbox is full but no one is a fit, this is the lever. Tighten the search, do not rewrite the message.
Are people accepting? If the connection rate is the problem, look at the first message. Forty to sixty words, low friction, no pitch. If you cannot say it out loud without cringing, your audience cannot read it without cringing either.
Are people clicking accept once they see you? Banner, headline, verification badge. People decide in less than a second. The profile is doing more work than the message, and it is the cheapest fix you can make.
Same items as above, condensed for printing or pasting into a project tool. Hand it to a chief of staff or a junior rep and they can drive most of week one without involving you.
Sync LinkedIn, refresh the profile, build a company page if missing, paste the blacklist, decide on Sales Navigator or QuickNav.
If your account has been quiet, run a manual warmup. Twenty connection requests a day, accept some inbound, like a few posts. No campaign yet.
Pick one persona, build the search, eyeball the first hundred profiles, write a forty to sixty word opener with no pitch.
Launch the campaign. Set the cadence window. Stop opening LinkedIn. Trust the pacing.
Read the connection rate. If under 20 percent, change the opener or the banner. Not both. Not yet.
Read the conversation rate. Audit five inbox replies. Decide whether the search or the message needs work.
Hold steady. Make at most one change. Watch the calendar fill or not fill, and ask yourself which it is.
Refresh the search. Decide whether to layer in a second persona. Decide whether to change tiers. Book the next strategy call.
The fully managed tier means our team handles weeks two through four for you. You stay in your zone of genius. We send you the meetings.
None of these are catastrophic individually. All of them are recoverable. They are listed here because every one of them shows up in our recorded calls multiple times a month, and pointing at the page is faster than retelling the story.
If you have not read the first thirty profiles aloud on the call with your CSM, you have not approved the search. You have approved the idea of a search. By the time you notice the wrong people in the inbox, the campaign has already gone out to a thousand of them. Read the profiles before you launch.
Customers occasionally rewrite the opener to mention their product or pricing. The connection rate drops by ten or fifteen points within forty-eight hours. The opener is a question, not a pitch. There is no version of this rule that is flexible.
If you change the search and the opener in the same week, you cannot tell which change moved the metric. The strategy session has to be done over. Make one change at a time, give it ten days, then make the next.
Moving from assisted to fully managed during a fresh search creates two simultaneous unknowns. Wait until the search is settled before changing tiers. Most tier conversations should happen in week six, not week two.
If you are opening the dashboard daily, you are spending more time on it than you should. The fully-managed motion exists so you can ignore it for a week. Ten minutes once a week is enough. Daily checking signals anxiety, not engagement.
Polite reassurance on a check-in call is the most expensive thing a customer can do. The team cannot fix what they do not know is broken. The strategy session needs the actual sentence: this is not working yet, and here is the part that bothers me most.
One missed check-in is a normal week. Two missed check-ins is a campaign drifting. Three missed is a customer about to suspend. The team will reach for you on the second miss. Take the call.
If only one person on your side has ever opened the dashboard, the campaign cannot survive their vacation. Add one operations person to the loop in week two. Not as a decision-maker. As an extra pair of eyes on the need-assist queue.