Sachin was a product marketer with minimal following on LinkedIn. That was until one of his posts took off, thousands of people commented asking for a resource he'd offered. LinkedIn responded to this engagement by flagging his account as a bot, on the reasonable assumption that no human being replies to 3,000 people.
Sachin was left with a pile of raised hands and no way to reach any of them. So he stopped trying to work the platform and started working the signal it was producing.
Here’s the playbook for how to make LinkedIn work for you even if you don’t have a massive audience.
1. The download is the signal, not the comment
The play runs on comment bait, the posts that ask people to comment a keyword to get a free resource. I found it cringy and refused to run it myself for weeks, and then I looked at the mechanics and gave in.
A comment is worth three to four times a like to the algorithm, and a save counts for more still, so the comment does exactly one job: it buys you reach. When someone raises their hand for the resource you offered, they've told you with an action that they have the problem you solve.
2. Do outbound on inbound
Since he couldn't reply to any of them on LinkedIn, he emailed them instead, with a note that said roughly "couldn't get back to you on LinkedIn, so here's your resource." That workaround became an unexpected growth engine. He now captures everyone who liked, commented, or viewed the profile. He then filters that list against ICP, and reaches out over email, which doesn't have LinkedIn's daily DM cap.
Cold outbound is a guess about who might care, whereas this starts with people who have already raised their hand, know your name, and asked for the thing you’re offering. He calls it inbound-led outbound, and he's since rebuilt it for clients in cyber, pharma, shipping, and a company that sells marble.
3. Give away the thing you think is too trivial
His biggest hit was an Excel sheet, and not a designed lead magnet or a polished diagram either, just the internal spreadsheet his team used to walk clients through their tool stack. He almost didn't post it. Nobody had shared a plain Excel sheet on LinkedIn, which is exactly why it stood out, and now half the feed copies the format.
The resource you find too obvious to share is usually the one your audience has been quietly hunting for, because value beats polish nearly every time.
4. Watch your competitors' threads, not just your own
Your CEO posts something sharp, a dream account comments on it, and the competitor who's been watching that thread reaches out to them before you've even seen the notification. That's your inbound, generated by your post, harvested by whoever was paying closer attention. Right now the warmest accounts in your market are commenting on somebody else's post.
Sachin originally ran all of this across a dozen tools, with signal capture in one place, Clay for enrichment, Smartlead and HeyReach for outreach, and a lot of glue holding the middle together. It worked for him and broke for everyone he tried to hand it to, because a 13-tool chain isn't a playbook. This is exactly what we solve at nRev.
See it on your own account
The signal isn't only in your LinkedIn comments. It's anywhere a buyer tips their hand, whether that's a profile view, a competitor's post, a new role, a hiring spike, or a funding round, and most of it goes to waste because nobody has the time to read it by hand. That's the part we do for you.
Reply to this email or visit this link and we'll run it on your account for free. We'll pull the signal out of your posts and your competitors', show you which of it is actually your ICP, and hand you the warm list you're already sitting on. No pitch, just proof.
Wait for the second signal. Show up in the conversations your competitors think they're alone in.
Wait for the second signal. Show up in the conversations your competitors think they're alone in.