# Follow-up Sequence Builder

A three-to-four touch sequence with dates, channels, a stop rule, and a capacity check against what your plan can actually send.

- Version 1.0, updated 18 September 2026
- Works with: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any capable assistant
- Source: https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/follow-up-sequence

## Use when

- Your first messages get no reply and you are unsure what to send next, or whether to send anything.
- You are scaling from ten prospects a week to a hundred and the maths has stopped working.
- You want a documented cadence an SDR or an agent can execute without improvising.
- You keep "bumping" threads and it is not working.

## Variables to replace

- `{{OBJECTIVE}}` — Objective. The single outcome this run should produce. One outcome, not three.
  Example: Twelve accepted connections a week from in-ICP finance directors
- `{{ROLE}}` — Your role. Your job title and what you are accountable for.
  Example: Founder, doing my own outbound until the first AE starts
- `{{COMPANY}}` — Your company. Name plus the one line you would use to introduce it.
  Example: Cadence — payroll reconciliation software for multi-entity finance teams
- `{{PRODUCT}}` — What you sell. The thing, the outcome it produces, and who signs for it.
  Example: A reconciliation layer that closes multi-entity payroll in two days instead of nine. Bought by the Finance Director, used by the payroll manager.
- `{{PERSONA}}` — Who you are writing to. Title, what they own, what they are measured on.
  Example: Finance Director. Owns the monthly close. Measured on close time and audit findings, not on software cost.
- `{{OFFER}}` — The ask. What you want them to do next. Be specific about the size of the commitment.
  Example: A 20-minute call to see whether the multi-entity part applies to them
- `{{TONE}}` — Tone. How you actually write. Name a person or a publication if it helps.
  Example: Plain, short sentences, no exclamation marks, no "hope this finds you well"
- `{{SEATS}}` — Seats / people sending. How many profiles will be doing the outreach. Changes every volume number.
  Example: 2
- `{{PLAN}}` — Your LinkedIn plan. Free, Premium Career, Premium Business, Sales Navigator Core or Advanced, Recruiter Lite or Corporate. It decides what you can actually do.
  Example: Sales Navigator Core

## How to use

1. Give it your real seat count and plan. The capacity arithmetic is the part that makes this different from a template, and it is worthless if the inputs are aspirational.
2. Run the capacity check before the copy. If the maths says 18 new prospects a week, a sequence designed for 80 is a fiction.
3. Put the stop rule somewhere your team can see it. The absence of one is why people are still bumping a thread from March.
4. Re-run it when you add a seat — the whole cadence changes, and usually not in the direction people assume.

## Do not

- Seven-touch sequences copied from email playbooks. Email has no invitation ceiling and no account standing to lose; LinkedIn has both.
- Treating InMail as the unlimited channel. The allowance is fixed per month, unused credits expire at 90 days, and they only come back if the recipient replies.
- Adding a touch because the previous ones did not work. If three good touches produced nothing, the targeting is wrong, not the count.

## Context files this expects

- `OUTREACH.md` — https://www.linkediz.com/ai/files/outreach
- `LINKEDIN-LIMITS.md` — https://www.linkediz.com/ai/files/linkedin-limits

## Where this sits

- Previous step: LinkedIn Outreach Personalizer — https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/cold-outreach-personalizer
- Next step: Reply & Objection Handler — https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/reply-handler

---

## The prompt

You are designing an outreach cadence that has to fit inside hard platform limits and inside the recipient's patience.

## Objective
{{OBJECTIVE}}

## Context
Me: {{ROLE}} at {{COMPANY}}. What we sell: {{PRODUCT}}
Target: {{PERSONA}}
The ask: {{OFFER}}
Tone: {{TONE}}
Seats sending: {{SEATS}}
Plan: {{PLAN}}

## LinkedIn reality (do not plan past these)

LinkedIn platform limits that apply on EVERY plan, including the most expensive one:
- Connection invitations: ~100 per week. Applies on every plan including Recruiter Corporate. LinkedIn adjusts it per account based on acceptance rate, so a low-acceptance account gets less, never more.
- InMail credit expiry: 90 days. Unused credits expire. They accrue to at most three times the monthly allowance, and a credit is returned if the recipient replies within 90 days.
- Commercial use limit: Monthly search cap. Free accounts hit a monthly ceiling on profile searches. Every paid tier lifts it, but none of them removes the per-search result cap.
- Profiles per search: 1,000 / 2,500. Regular LinkedIn search stops at 1,000 results; Sales Navigator stops at 2,500, paginated 25 at a time. Both are per search, not per day.

Treat these as hard constraints, not guidance. A plan that exceeds them is not an ambitious plan, it is a plan that gets the account restricted.

Per-plan allowances, US list prices, last verified 12 September 2026 by Linkediz:

| Plan | US list price / month | InMail credits / month | Results per search | Saved searches |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Premium Career | $39.99 | 5 | 1,000 | 3 |
| Premium Business | $69.99 | 15 | 1,000 | 3 |
| Sales Navigator Core | $119.99 | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Sales Navigator Advanced | $159.99 | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Sales Navigator Advanced Plus | quote only | 50 | 2,500 | 15 |
| Recruiter Lite | $170 | 30 | 1,000 | 10 |
| Recruiter Corporate | quote only | 150 | 1,000 | 50 |

Notes the numbers do not show:
- Sales Navigator Advanced Plus and Recruiter Corporate carry no published price. LinkedIn quotes them per seat block. Never state a price for those two.
- The InMail allowance does not scale with price. Sales Navigator Core costs three times Premium Career and includes ten times the credits, so per credit the cheap plan is by far the most expensive.
- Unused InMail credits expire after 90 days and accrue to at most three months' worth. A credit comes back if the recipient replies within 90 days, so reply rate, not send volume, is what the allowance rewards.
- The ~100 invitations per week is adjusted per account by acceptance rate. It goes down for accounts that send poorly targeted invitations. It does not go up because a plan was upgraded.

If the user's request requires exceeding any figure above, say so explicitly, state which limit it breaks, and propose the version that fits inside it. Do not quietly scale the plan down and do not quietly exceed it.

## Method
1. Compute my weekly and monthly capacity first: invitations available, InMail credits available, and therefore how many NEW prospects can enter the sequence each week without the sequence breaking. Show the arithmetic.
2. Design three to four touches. Not seven. Each touch must have a distinct job:
   - Touch 1: earn the reply with a specific observation.
   - Touch 2: add information the first one did not contain — a number, a counter-example, a relevant piece of someone else's work.
   - Touch 3: change the ask. Make it smaller, or make it a question they can answer without a meeting.
   - Touch 4 (optional): the close-the-loop message that explicitly ends it.
3. Space them by business days, never calendar days. Minimum five business days between touches; nothing on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon.
4. Mix channels where available: connection note, direct message after acceptance, InMail, a comment on their post. Spend an InMail credit only where the alternative is nothing, and say when that is.
5. Write the stop rule: what counts as a no, what counts as silence, and what happens to the prospect afterwards — with a re-entry window in months.
6. Flag the exact point where my capacity runs out if I add prospects at the rate implied.

## Constraints
- Never design a touch whose only content is "following up" or "bringing this to the top of your inbox".
- Never exceed the platform limits above. If the objective requires it, say what would have to change: more seats, fewer prospects, or a different channel entirely.
- No more than four touches. Beyond that, the reply rate is not what you are damaging — it is the sender's account standing.
- Do not use false urgency, fake deadlines or "last attempt" framing unless it is literally true.

## Output format

### Capacity check
The arithmetic: sends available per week, prospects that can enter per week, where it breaks.

### The sequence
| Touch | Day | Channel | Purpose | Message | Chars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Full message text in the table, not a description of it.

### Stop rule
What ends the sequence, what happens to the prospect, when they may re-enter.

### What to measure
The two or three numbers that tell you whether to change the copy or the targeting — and which number means which.

### Where this breaks
The specific condition under which this cadence stops fitting the limits.

---

## Notes

Written to a fixed structure and run through Claude and ChatGPT to confirm each one returns the output format it declares. That is not the same as a measured reply-rate benchmark, and nothing here claims one — if you run these at volume and have numbers, we want them.

---

Linkediz LinkedIn AI Toolkit — v1.0, 18 September 2026
Source and updates: https://www.linkediz.com/prompts/follow-up-sequence
LinkedIn plan limits and prices in this file: https://www.linkediz.com/linkedin-limits