I started using LinkedIn in 2014 as a tech head-hunter. Back then, it was basically a glorified job board, full of hungry recruiters and frazzled candidates trying to escape ‘toxic’ bosses.
Today, LinkedIn has 1bn members, 67m decision-makers and drives 80 per cent of B2B leads from social media – more than Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube combined. And yet most company pages, and most of the money poured into them, return precisely nothing.
In fact, 97 per cent of all social media posts shared by founders and their companies generate zero. Lunacy.
LinkedIn is the simplest place on Earth to find, contact and close with the exact people you want. Your buyers are already there. But between running a business, parenting your kids and attempting to stay vaguely socialised and sane, it can feel overwhelming to work out how you can get anything out of a platform generating more than 15bn impressions a week.
So I built a system to help me get the best out of it. The tech stack below is exactly what I use, how I use it, and how it’s added seven figures to my bottom line – directly from LinkedIn – without using ChatGPT.
My system goes from ‘find’ to ‘warm’ to ‘convert’ to ‘nurture’. Every tool I use has one of these stages. I never automate things that should be done by a human, and I never automate something I, as a human, haven’t already done.
Automation is about automating what you’re already doing – not trying to find a way to do something you haven’t worked out yet. Let’s dig in.
1) LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Stage: Find & Intent
We spend £94.99 a month to run deep, tight searches and build tight Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) lists using Sales Navigator, a paid LinkedIn product. We use it to narrow down searches by job titles, headcount, location, industry – there are 50 filtering options, from who’s hiring to who just raised and who has interacted with you and your brand already. Saved searches do the heavy lifting by automatically adding fresh prospects into your search every week.
The paid tier also shows who viewed your profile – that’s soft intent. If someone’s had a stalk of my profile, Sales Nav flags it, and we follow up the same day with a one-liner intro. It turns a random browse into a warm conversation.
Typical flow: set up a saved search for one ICP → add 50-100 qualified people to a list each week → check “viewed your profile” daily → send a short, useful message:
“Hey [Name] – saw you dropped by. After tips on [topic] or looking for examples? Happy to point you to something helpful.”
It’s simple, fast and focused – exactly what you need to make sure the right people see (and respond to) what you’re doing on LinkedIn.
2) Dripify
Stage: Warm & First Touch
Dripify is a sales automation tool that plugs into your LinkedIn and handles the boring first steps for you – profile views, connection requests and short follow-up sequences – so you’re not spending hours clicking the same three buttons. We use it to warm up people from our Sales Nav lists.
Typical flow: Dripify views their profile (you show up in notifications), sends a connection note (no pitch), then follows with a tiny, useful follow-up. If they’re not interested, it stops. If they are, it routes the reply to us for a real conversation. For example, someone from our “UK founders 2-10 heads” list gets:
Day 0: A profile view from me
Day 2: Connection note that sounds human.
Day 4: A personalised message, specifying something we have in common (I’d have already pre-segmented the people in the list so they ALL had this in common), a short intro into what we do and a light question to invite a reply.
Day 6: A gentle nudge on my previous message and some valuable information related to my expertise.
Day 10: An easy opt-out so there’s no pressure.
These automated sequences keep first touches timely and consistent, protect our time for real chats, and lift accept and reply rates without sounding like a bot. But beware, add guardrails: sensible daily limits, list-level personalisation (industry/recent activity) and never automate mass, impersonal messages (aka spam).
3) Planable
Stage: Attract & Distribute
Planable is where we actually publish and engage with content. We use it to schedule posts across channels, spot gaps in a calendar view and (crucially) pull all comments into one place.
Consistently posting content and replying to the comments I get has taken my average weekly profile views from the low 1,000s to 100,000 views every week. Those views have translated into website traffic and closed deals.
4) Taplio
Stage: Measure & Iterate
Taplio tells us what’s working and what isn’t for our LinkedIn content. We can run reports that will tell us engagement rates, impression counts, follower counts – as well as optimising for time of posting, day of posting and the medium we posted in (video, text, image, etc.). There’s a great little feature that allows you to tag posts so we can see which topics and calls to action (CTAs) lead to booked calls and purchases.
We sync this data using Make (see below), which allows us to build a clear picture of what content we need to share and when to drive the most engagements and therefore the most ROI from posting.
5) ClickFunnels
Stage: Convert (remove friction)
ClickFunnels is a funnel-building tool. We use it to build simple workflows – i.e., link posted on LinkedIn → download → nurture → core offer.
Typical flow: an outcome-led LinkedIn post points to a landing page with one clear headline, proof and a single CTA. The follow-up sequence is five to seven short emails: quick win, case study, mistakes/reframe, offer and guarantee, objections, last call. Buyers get onboarding; non-buyers are nurtured.
I am not a techy person but the dashboard itself is super user-friendly and you don’t need any real experience to start building funnels that automatically turn your views on LinkedIn into paying customers.
6) Ting
Stage: Book
Ting is an AI agent that lives in your email and handles your calendar. I used to spend hours – or pay for someone to spend hours – booking and rescheduling new business calls. Ting cut my meeting scheduling time to near zero.
I copy it into emails with the phrase “Ting, find a time for me and [NAME] to meet” and it replies proposing slots. It respects time zones and reschedules when things move.
It has also just added WhatsApp too, meaning you can arrange meetings directly from your WhatsApp messages. Including midweek drinks with friends. Dreamy.
7) Make
Stage: Nurture & Scale
We use Make to automate everything from lead capture to content distribution and to make two or more systems “speak” to each other. For example, when someone clicks on a link we’ve posted on LinkedIn, and downloads a resource from our site, Make instantly adds them to our CRM, tags them based on their interests and triggers the right email sequence in our email marketing platform, all without any manual labour – which as someone who built a business for freedom but somehow spends 95 per cent of her time doing admin, is a life-changer.
It also connects our internal workflows from syncing new members in our community to updating course access and client records, so nothing slips through the cracks. It’s the glue that connects every system in our business and makes sure our efforts on LinkedIn, and anywhere else for that matter, actually result in ROI.
However, there are guardrails so you don’t torch your business – and your brand.
Automation is terrible for tone of voice. Templates can help, but fake familiarity is how you end up sounding like everyone else. I keep Dripify on a leash – steady volume, never cocky, because consistency gets results, but getting banned because you overdid the connection requests gets you nowhere. Anything sensitive – apologies, disagreements, nuance – gets handled by a human, always.
For context, I post every single day on LinkedIn, making me a credible page to land on when I use these tools.
Automation didn’t make $4m in revenue for my business – consistency and conversations with real human beings did. The tech I used just made those behaviours scalable and manageable by my team.
And while AI and automation are wonderful, if you haven’t worked out how to sell your products and services manually, don’t expect tech to be able to work it out for you.
Full disclosure: I’m an ambassador for Planable and Dripify, and I hold equity in Ting. I’m also a paying customer of all three.
