LinkedIn Follow-up Sequence Prompt
A three-to-four touch sequence with dates, channels, a stop rule, and a capacity check against what your plan can actually send. Sequence templates on the web assume unlimited sends. LinkedIn does not work that way: roughly 100 invitations a week per account and a fixed monthly InMail allowance. This prompt builds the cadence inside those numbers, makes each touch carry new information, and writes the stop rule most sequences never have.
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.- 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.
- 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.
- Run the capacity check before the copy. If the maths says 18 new prospects a week, a sequence designed for 80 is a fiction.
- Put the stop rule somewhere your team can see it. The absence of one is why people are still bumping a thread from March.
- Re-run it when you add a seat — the whole cadence changes, and usually not in the direction people assume.
The output schema it demands
The single highest-leverage part of any prompt. Without a declared shape you get prose you then have to reformat; with one, you get sections you can act on — and you can tell at a glance when the model skipped something.
### Capacity check (the arithmetic) ### The sequence (table with full message text) ### Stop rule ### What to measure ### Where this breaks
What it looks like filled in
Illustrative, not a promise — this is the shape of a good answer rather than a guarantee of one. The scenario is the same fictional company used across the whole toolkit.
Objective: book calls with finance directors at multi-entity companies. Seats: 1. Plan: Sales Navigator Core.
Capacity check — roughly 100 invitations a week on one seat. At a three-touch sequence spread across two weeks, about 50 new prospects a week keeps the follow-up load inside what one person can personalise.
The sequence — Touch 1 (day 0): connection note with one specific reference. Touch 2 (day 5): adds a number the first touch did not have. Touch 3 (day 10): shrinks the ask to a single yes/no question.
Stop rule — no reply after touch 3 counts as silence. Re-entry allowed after six months, and only with a genuinely new reason.
Where this breaks — above roughly 50 new prospects a week on one seat, touch 2 can no longer be personalised in the time available and degrades into a template — which is the exact failure this sequence exists to avoid.
Do not do these
Each one is a real failure mode, not a disclaimer.
- 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.
Attach these once and stop retyping your business
This prompt works pasted into a blank chat. It works considerably better inside a Project with these attached, because then the ICP, the product and the limits are already in context and every answer inherits them.
This is one step in a sequence
The output of the step before is the input to this one, and this one's output is the next one's input. That is the whole reason these are not independent pages.
Before you run it
How many follow-ups is too many on LinkedIn?
Four touches including the first is the practical ceiling. Unlike email, the cost of over-sending is not only a lower reply rate: invitations that go unaccepted reduce the ceiling LinkedIn applies to your account, and messages reported as spam affect standing directly.
Can I run this with an automation tool?
The cadence is tool-agnostic and will import into any sequencer. What does not change is the ceiling — a tool that offers to send 400 invitations a week is offering to spend your account, not to raise the limit.
The reference behind this prompt
The figures this prompt does its arithmetic with. Worth reading once so you can check its sums.
Why credits expire at 90 days, why they come back on a reply, and what each one costs you on your plan.
Short answer: no. Both Sales Navigator tiers carry the same InMail allowance, and neither raises the invitation ceiling.
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.
Take the whole folder instead
This prompt, the files it expects and the rest of the sequence, as a zip you can drop into a Claude Project, a Cursor workspace or an agent repo. Free, no account.