The LinkedIn prospecting workflow, sized to the week it has to fit in
LinkedIn allows roughly 100 connection invitations a week, on every plan it sells. That figure is the same on a free account and on the two plans LinkedIn quotes rather than prices, and it goes down — never up — for accounts whose invitations are not accepted. So the whole process is sized backwards from it. The 9 steps below are what fits: 11 hours a week, 76 per cent of it in the two steps that happen once per person, 5 points where a person has to decide or approve something before the week moves on, and a LinkedIn seat under it at $119.99 a month. A top of funnel bigger than this is not a faster pipeline. It is a backlog.
- Plan prices and ceilings
- Vendor prices
100 invitations a week is not a target. It is 11 hours of work you have to find.
Read the last two rows before the rest. The steps that happen once — the ICP, the search — cost 33 minutes a quarter and everybody budgets for them. The steps that happen once per person cost 5 minutes each, and at the platform ceiling that is 500 minutes a week, or 76 per cent of the whole thing. Every plan decision on this page is downstream of that ratio.
| Step | How often | One unit | Per week at the ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Write down who is worth an invitation | Once a quarter | 20 min | — (20 min a quarter) |
| 2. Turn the ICP into a search | Once a quarter | 13 min | — (13 min a quarter) |
| 3. Get the list out of the search | Once a week | 20 min | 20 min |
| 4. Enrich what the rows do not carry | Once a week | 15 min | 15 min |
| 5. Research the ones you will write to | Once per prospect | 3 min | 300 min |
| 6. Cut the list to the size of the week | Once a week | 15 min | 15 min |
| 7. Write the touch that fits the field | Once per prospect | 2 min | 200 min |
| 8. Send, at the pace the account has | Once a week | 60 min | 60 min |
| 9. Handle the replies and write it down | Daily, 5 days | 10 min | 50 min |
| The week | Every week | — | 660 min — 11 hours |
The minute figures are this page's own estimate, not a measurement and not a vendor's claim. They are here so the week adds up to a number you can hold against your calendar. What survives replacing them with your own is the shape: 76 per cent of the week sits in two steps, so one minute off the per-prospect figure is worth about 1.7 hours a week — and a more expensive LinkedIn plan is worth none of it, because no tier raises the invitation ceiling.
9 steps, and the artefact each one hands the next
Every step takes the previous step's output as its input, which is what makes this a process rather than a list: nothing has to be re-explained and nothing is lost between tools. The first two are quarterly setup. Steps 3 to 8 are the week. Step 9 is the ten minutes a day that decides whether any of it compounds.
Write down who is worth an invitation20 min, once a quarter
- In
- Your last 10–20 closed deals, won and lost
- Out
- An ICP in LinkedIn’s own filter vocabulary, plus one trigger you can observe
Turn the ICP into a search13 min, once a quarter
- In
- The ICP’s search-ready summary
- Out
- A filter set, the Boolean for the three fields that accept it, and a saved search
Get the list out of the search20 min a week
- In
- The saved search
- Out
- Rows with a name, a title and a company on each
Enrich what the rows do not carry15 min a week
- In
- The rows from the search
- Out
- The same rows with company facts and contact data, and a flag on the ones that could not be resolved
Research the ones you will write to3 min per prospect
- In
- One prospect’s profile and recent activity, pasted
- Out
- A brief that separates what it read from what it inferred, ending in a value hypothesis and an opening line
Cut the list to the size of the week15 min a week
- In
- The enriched list, and last week’s acceptance rate
- Out
- A ranked list no longer than the week’s invitation budget — roughly 100 names
Write the touch that fits the field2 min per prospect
- In
- The brief from step 5
- Out
- A connection note inside the 300-character field, or an InMail written against the monthly allowance
Send, at the pace the account has60 min a week
- In
- The week’s list and the messages written for it
- Out
- Roughly 100 invitations, sent
Handle the replies and write it down10 min a day
- In
- The threads, with dates
- Out
- A classified reply, a calibrated response, a stop rule, and a row in the CRM
The same sequence, as a chain of prompts with the download for each, is From ICP to booked meeting. This page is the operating version of it: the minutes, the gates, the tools and the bill.
5 of the 9 steps need a person. The rest can be handed over.
The approval column is the useful one. A gate sits wherever a step produces something a stranger will receive, or commits the account to something that cannot be taken back — which is not where most outbound tooling puts its confirmation dialogue. The last column is the failure mode, stated as what actually happens rather than as a warning.
| Step | What runs it | A person must approve | What breaks if you skip it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Write down who is worth an invitation | ICP Builder with ICP.md. An assistant, on text you paste. Nothing here touches LinkedIn. | Nothing leaves this step | Every step after it becomes undebuggable. When the search returns 40 people or 2,500, there is no written definition to check it against, so it gets rebuilt from memory a fortnight later. |
| 2. Turn the ICP into a search | Sales Navigator Search Builder, Boolean Search Generator, Saved Search & Alert System with SALES-NAVIGATOR.md. A prompt writes the filters; you set them in the seat. Sales Navigator Core is $119.99 a month. | Nothing leaves this step | A search that returns the 2,500 cap has stopped filtering before it stopped matching, and one that returns 40 cannot be diagnosed without knowing which filter killed it. Both fail quietly and both cost a week. |
| 3. Get the list out of the search | A browser extension in your own session, a vendor cloud, a data vendor with no LinkedIn account behind it, or your own hands. | Which route out of the search you are taking. It is the only decision on this page that cannot be reversed afterwards. | Nothing, except the week shrinks to however many profiles you can open by hand. That is a legitimate answer, and it is the only route with no account exposure at all. |
| 4. Enrich what the rows do not carry | A contact-data vendor. Surfe Essential is $49 per user per month, monthly billing ($39/user/mo billed annually); Clay Launch is $167/mo billed annually, or $185/mo billed monthly. | Nothing leaves this step | You spend step 5 and step 7 — the two expensive steps of the week — on rows that were never reachable in the first place. An unresolvable row is cheaper to drop here than to research later. |
| 5. Research the ones you will write to | LinkedIn Prospect Research, Account Research Brief with RESEARCH.md. An assistant on pasted text, or an MCP server that fetches instead of you pasting. | Nothing leaves this step | Step 7 has nothing to build on and falls back to the company name and the job title, which is the message everyone else in the inbox has already sent. |
| 6. Cut the list to the size of the week | Lead List Qualifier. A prompt ranks and tiers it; a person makes the cut. | Where the line falls. A model will rank the list; it cannot decide how much of next week you are willing to spend in advance. | The step this whole page is about. Skip it and the top of the funnel is 2,500 rows while the bottom is still ~100 a week — which is not a faster pipeline, it is a queue with a six-month wait and a list that goes stale inside it. |
| 7. Write the touch that fits the field | Connection Request Generator, LinkedIn Outreach Personalizer, InMail Writer with BRAND-VOICE.md. An assistant, on the brief you just produced. | Every message, before it goes. An assistant will state a fabricated fact as confidently as a true one, and the person receiving it cannot tell which is which. | Acceptance falls, and LinkedIn adjusts the weekly invitation ceiling per account by acceptance rate. Skipping this step makes step 8 smaller, which is the one consequence on this page that compounds. |
| 8. Send, at the pace the account has | You, in LinkedIn. No self-serve LinkedIn permission sends an invitation or a message to another member. | The sending itself. This is where the week becomes activity on a real account under a real name. | Nothing downstream — this step is the ceiling. What breaks is the account, when the pace is set by software rather than by the ceiling: enforcement lands on the member, not on the vendor. |
| 9. Handle the replies and write it down | Reply & Objection Handler, Follow-up Sequence Builder, Meeting Prep Brief with OBJECTIONS.md. A prompt drafts; you send. The Surfe CRM connector is $29 per month if the writing-down is the part that does not happen. | Anything that goes back to a person, and the decision to stop. A stop rule written in advance is what keeps a four-touch cadence from becoming a seven-touch one. | The pipeline has no memory. Next quarter the same search returns the same people, and you invite the ones who already said no — which spends the scarcest thing in the week on the worst possible name. |
Every prompt named above is free, needs no account and touches nothing — it is text you paste into an assistant. The full library, filed by the job each one does, is the sales prompt sequence.
Every step has a ceiling on it. One of them sizes all the others.
The invitation ceiling at step 8 is the only one that sizes the whole process, because it sits at the bottom of the funnel and everything upstream feeds it. The others cap a single step and can be worked around by doing that step twice.
Nothing. This is the cheapest place in the week to be wrong, because it spends no invitations and no credits.
2,500 results per search and 15 saved searches, identical on all three Sales Navigator tiers.
No published ceiling, and that is the problem with this step rather than a reassurance: it is the one place in the week where the route decides what your account is exposed to.
Credit meters, not LinkedIn limits. Every vendor here sells enrichment by the credit, and the month ends when the credits do rather than when the list does.
Your own reading speed. This is one of the two steps that consume the week, and the only one where a tool changes the figure.
~100 invitations a week, on every plan LinkedIn sells including the two it quotes rather than prices.
300 characters on the note, truncated without warning and raised by no paid plan. 50 InMail credits a month on any Sales Navigator tier if you send the other kind, expiring at 90 days.
~100 a week. This is the ceiling everything upstream is sized against, and it is the same figure on a free account and on the most expensive plan LinkedIn sells.
Nothing platform-side. This is where the hours go once the pipeline is running, and it is the step no tool on this page removes.
Plan allowances read from LinkedIn on 12 September 2026; the invitation ceiling is not published by LinkedIn as an exact figure and is adjusted per account. The full table, with the sources, is on the LinkedIn limits page. A single Sales Navigator search returns at most 2,500 results, which at this ceiling is about 25 weeks of sending for one seat.
Four ways a list leaves a LinkedIn search, and they are not four versions of one thing
This is the step where the week acquires — or does not acquire — account exposure, and it is decided by the route rather than by the product. Read the ceiling on each before comparing features: a route's ceiling is the thing no amount of good engineering lifts. The full directory, sorted by exactly this, is the tool directory.
Nothing is installed and nothing is automated, so there is no route for LinkedIn to act on. The cost is the week: the list is however many profiles one person can open, which for most people is well under the 100 the account would allow.
Sells data about the people on LinkedIn without connecting to your account. The vendor’s own infrastructure does the collecting. No account of yours can be restricted, because no account of yours is used. What it sells is a copy, as current as its last refresh — and nothing behind your login: not your network, not your inbox, not your saved lists.
A browser extension acting inside the session you are already signed in to, on your own machine and your own IP. It reaches whatever the page in front of you shows, and nothing while the browser is closed. LinkedIn’s Prohibited Software and Extensions policy names extensions that automate the site, and enforcement lands on the member account.
The vendor’s own servers drive your LinkedIn account. Your session is held on their infrastructure. The widest reach of any class and the highest exposure. It runs without you, the credential sits with somebody else, and every action is attributable to your account — which is also the thing LinkedIn can restrict.
A fifth route exists for step 5 rather than step 3: an MCP server your assistant calls, so the research is fetched instead of pasted. 4 of the 13 servers in the MCP directory put no LinkedIn account behind them at all, and the read-only ones have no send path of any kind. The sales group names which of them run the research steps above and what each one needs before it will start. Counts read on 20 September 2026.
One line in this stack has a price this site maintains. The rest are the vendors' own figures, in the vendors' own units.
There is no total at the bottom of this table, and that is the finding rather than an evasion: three of the vendor lines are metered in credits or execution hours, and a meter cannot be turned into a monthly number without knowing your volume. 35 of the 42 tools in this site's directory publish a figure at all. Every row below is one product's own page, read on a stated day.
| Line | Covers | Price | What that buys, and where the figure is from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sales Navigator Core | Step 2 | $119.99 a month, or $89.99 effective on an annual term | Per seat. Buys the 2,500-result search, 15 saved searches and 50 InMail credits a month. LinkedIn’s own price, read 12 September 2026. |
| The prompts and the context files | Steps 1, 5, 6, 7, 9 | $0 | No account, no sign-up, no LinkedIn connection. Five of the nine steps are text you paste into an assistant you already pay for. This site. |
| Surfe — Essential | Steps 3, 4 | $49 | per user per month, monthly billing ($39/user/mo billed annually). 150 email + 50 mobile credits/month (1,800 + 600 per year on annual), 1,000 search results/week, unrestricted 1-click Add to CRM, Google Sheets, Surfe for CRM connector Surfe’s pricing page, read 20 September 2026. |
| Clay — Launch | Step 4, instead of the row above | $167/mo billed annually, or $185/mo billed monthly | Two meters that both have to be sized in advance — platform actions and data credits — and no LinkedIn account behind either. Clay’s pricing page, read 20 September 2026. |
| PhantomBuster — Start | Step 3, the vendor-cloud route | $69 USD monthly, or $56 USD per month billed annually | 20 execution hours, 5 slots, 500 email credits, 10,000 AI credits, 1,000 URL Finder credits. Billed in execution hours rather than seats, and it holds your LinkedIn session on its own infrastructure. PhantomBuster’s pricing page, read 20 September 2026. |
| Surfe for CRM connector | Step 9 | $29 | per month, sold as a separate module from the seat above it. Surfe’s pricing page, read 20 September 2026. |
| Sending | Step 8 | $0 | An hour of your week. There is no product in the directory that sends an invitation through a route LinkedIn opened for it. LinkedIn’s published permissions. |
US list prices in USD, excluding tax. LinkedIn bills in local currency in most markets and the converted figure is rarely a straight exchange-rate conversion, so treat this as the US baseline and confirm in your own billing page before committing to an annual term. Vendor prices are third-party figures quoted as each vendor displayed them on 20 September 2026 and are not LinkedIn's; several are billed in euros or per credit. Full records, with the tiers, the limitations and the sources, are in the tool directory.
A cheaper stack buys back minutes. It does not buy fewer invitations.
Worth being precise about, because the upgrade pitch in this category is always framed as reach. Every line you remove below costs you time or filters. None of them changes the number at step 8, which is the only number that decides how much pipeline a week produces.
The search cap falls from 2,500 to 1,000, saved searches from 15 to 3, and InMail from 50 a month to 15 — taking one credit from $2.40 to $4.67. Most of the filters step 2 writes are not on it. The two compared, tier by tier.
You read the profile instead of a resolved row, which adds minutes to the most expensive step in the week rather than removing them. The rows that could not be reached are found at the end of the research rather than at the start.
A free account, a $69.99 plan and a $159.99 plan all send roughly 100 invitations a week. What the paid stack buys is the ability to fill that week with the right 100 rather than with whoever search returned first.
Anything that takes a minute off the 5 minutes per prospect is worth about 1.7 hours a week — more than every plan difference on this page combined. That is a research and drafting problem, not a seat problem.
Plan figures read from LinkedIn on 12 September 2026. What the step between Sales Navigator Core and Sales Navigator Advanced actually buys — and what it does not — is on the Core versus Advanced page, and the tiers themselves are on the Sales Navigator pricing page.
There is no sanctioned route that sends the invitation for you
The last step of the week is the one no product on this site can remove, and the reason is a permission rather than a gap in the market. What follows is what LinkedIn publishes, with the page each clause comes from. It is here because the decision at step 3 and the decision at step 8 are the same decision, and it is usually made without either clause in view.
| What LinkedIn publishes | In detail | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Automated access to LinkedIn is prohibited by the User Agreement, whatever the means. | Section 8.2 bars developing, supporting or using software that scrapes LinkedIn or copies profiles and data, and bars bots and other automated methods of access. It does not distinguish between a slow tool and a fast one, and it carves out nothing for well-paced automation. | linkedin.com ↗ |
| Enforcement lands on the member account, not on the vendor. | The Prohibited Software and Extensions policy names browser extensions and third-party automation services and states that LinkedIn may restrict or permanently restrict accounts that use them. The vendor keeps its subscription revenue either way. | linkedin.com ↗ |
| Your account is yours, and cannot be transferred or shared. | The User Agreement requires a real identity and one account per person, and bars letting anyone else use yours. This is the clause a rented sending profile breaches directly rather than at the edges. | linkedin.com ↗ |
| The official API grants far less than these products do. | LinkedIn’s self-serve permissions cover sign-in, email address and posting on your own behalf. Pages, Ads and Sales Navigator partner access are granted through programmes rather than applied for, and no permission on the self-serve list returns people search or another member’s profile. | linkedin.com ↗ |
Of the 42 tools in this site's directory, 18 act on LinkedIn under your own name and 12 hold your signed-in session on the vendor's servers. Exactly 1 reaches LinkedIn through a sanctioned API — Salesloft, an enterprise platform that publishes no price at any tier. That is the honest shape of this market, and it is why step 8 on this page is an hour of your own time rather than a product recommendation.
The questions that come after the diagram
How long does a week of LinkedIn prospecting actually take?
About 11 hours, at the platform ceiling. That figure is the 9 steps on this page added up: 660 minutes, of which 500 — 76 per cent — is the 5 minutes of research and writing spent on each of roughly 100 people. Setup adds 33 minutes once a quarter. Spread over 5 days that is about 2.2 hours a day, which is the number worth checking against your actual calendar before the list is built rather than after.
Which steps can software run, and which need a person?
5 of the 9 need a person, and they are not the ones people expect: choosing how the list leaves LinkedIn, deciding where the cut falls, reading each message before it goes, sending them, and answering what comes back. Everything else — the filters, the enrichment, the briefs, the ranking, the drafting — can be handed to a prompt or a tool. The pattern is that a gate sits wherever the step produces something a stranger will receive, or commits the account to something that cannot be undone.
What does the full stack cost per month?
The only line this site maintains and dates is LinkedIn’s: Sales Navigator Core at $119.99 a month, or $89.99 effective prepaid for a year, read on 12 September 2026. On top of that, a contact-data seat is around $49 per user per month, monthly billing ($39/user/mo billed annually) and a full enrichment workspace is $167/mo billed annually, or $185/mo billed monthly. There is no single total here on purpose: three of the vendor lines are metered in credits or execution hours, and a meter cannot be turned into a monthly figure without knowing your volume. Of the 42 tools in this site’s directory, 35 publish a figure at all and the rest answer the question with a form.
Do I need Sales Navigator to run this workflow?
No, and what you give up is specific rather than vague. Premium Business at $69.99 is $50 a month less than Sales Navigator Core, and with it the search cap falls from 2,500 to 1,000, saved searches from 15 to 3, and the InMail allowance from 50 a month to 15 — which takes the cost of one credit from $2.40 to $4.67. Most of the filters step 2 writes do not exist on it. What the cheaper seat does not cost you is reach: the invitation ceiling is the same on both.
Where does this workflow break first?
At step 6, and almost always because it was skipped. A search returns up to 2,500 rows and an account sends roughly 100 invitations a week, so a list that is not cut to the week is about 25 weeks of queue — long enough that the research at the bottom of it is stale before it is used. The second most common break is step 1: without a written ICP, a search that returns the wrong people cannot be diagnosed, so it gets rebuilt rather than fixed.
Can an AI agent run the whole thing end to end?
Not through a route LinkedIn opened. Its self-serve API permissions cover signing in, reading an email address and posting on your own behalf, and none of them sends an invitation or a message to another member. Products that do it anyway drive a signed-in session: 18 of the 42 tools in this site’s directory act on LinkedIn under your own name and 12 hold that session on the vendor’s servers. The User Agreement prohibits automated access by any means and enforcement lands on the member account rather than on the software. This page records what each route is and what it exposes; it does not tell anyone to take one.
What if I need more than 100 invitations a week?
There are three honest answers and one that is not. The honest ones: raise the acceptance rate, because LinkedIn adjusts the ceiling per account by exactly that and it is the only input you control; add another person with their own account and their own week; or move the volume to a channel that has no such ceiling. The one that is not: a second LinkedIn profile you operate. The User Agreement requires a real identity, one account per person, and bars letting anyone else use yours, so that route breaches a clause rather than a guideline — and this site does not sell, rent or operate accounts of any kind.
Is the time on each step measured?
No, and it says so rather than implying otherwise. The minute figures are this page’s own estimate, put there so the week adds up to something a person can compare with their calendar — not a benchmark and not a measurement of your team. The arithmetic built on them is the part worth keeping: 76 per cent of the week sits in two steps, so one minute off the per-prospect figure is about 1.7 hours a week and a more expensive LinkedIn plan is none. Replace the estimates with your own after one pass and the conclusion holds with better inputs.
Size the list to the week before you build it
Roughly 100 invitations a week is the ceiling on every LinkedIn plan, and at 5 minutes of research and writing per person it is about 11 hours. Everything upstream of that number is sized by it.