LinkedIn & multichannel sequencing

Where LinkedIn fits

This lesson's output: a draft LinkedIn campaign on your top 25 A-band leads, a written automation policy, and a sequence-rules skill plus a small LinkedIn-to-email handoff script - with a full cross-channel orchestrator as the optional advanced build, not the default.

Email scales; LinkedIn warms. A prospect who saw your name on a connection request opens your email differently than a cold one. The 2026 pattern is email as the volume channel and LinkedIn as the precision layer on your best accounts - not every lead, the A-band slice where a human-looking touch changes the odds.

The tool category to look for: LinkedIn outreach platforms that rotate sends across multiple accounts to stay under per-account limits, reachable by API (the category is crowded; any established one fits this build). Whatever you pick, this lesson only assumes three API shapes from it: create a campaign as a draft, attach a lead list, start the campaign. If your tool has those - and they all do - the build below works unchanged.

The ToS reality - read before you automate

Before any build, the part most courses skip: the legal and platform-risk picture, stated plainly so your team decides with open eyes.

• Sales Navigator has NO open API - partner-only, and the Sales Insights API is company-level with no lead contacts. Anyone selling you "Sales Nav API access" is selling scraping.
• Avoid session-based scraping (logged-in cookie scrapers): LinkedIn's fingerprinting and suspension rates increased through 2025-2026, and this route puts YOUR account at risk.
• The compliant pattern: use Sales Navigator manually for what it's great at (search, alerts), export what its native CSV covers, and resolve the rest through your enrichment waterfall - Prospeo's LinkedIn-URL-to-email endpoint and Apollo search reproduce Sales-Nav-style targeting from the data side.
• Keep volumes human-shaped on every rotated account: low daily connection requests, ramped slowly. The rotation exists precisely so no single account carries the load. Our own hard rule for any account we touch, including the founder's: at most 20 connection requests a day, weekdays only, spaced across hours, never a burst, and every batch approved by a human before it goes. Ten a day is the default; twenty is the ceiling.

Your LinkedIn tool by API - with the verify-first habit

Find your tool's API docs (every rotation tool publishes them; auth is usually a plain API key). The flow you'll use: create a campaign as a draft, attach a lead list, then start it - which maps cleanly to an approval gate between draft and start.

1. Probe first: "For each endpoint in our plan (create campaign, lead-list add, start campaign, inbox, analytics), make a minimal authenticated test call and write the results to li-endpoints.md - status, response shape, quirks."
2. Build on what passed: create_li_campaign.py creates a DRAFT campaign and attaches your A-band lead list (LinkedIn URLs from enrichment).
3. Human gate: review the draft in the tool's UI - targets, message, pacing - then start it via the API (or the UI button).
4. Pull replies and campaign analytics on the same morning-check cadence as email. If your tool ships an MCP server, connect it for conversational inspection of inboxes and campaigns.

The sequencing brain: your own skill

Now the piece that replaces the rented sequencer: a sequencing skill that holds the rules, and a small script that applies them. Keep sequence state in SQLite from the first run (state/engine.db, the same database the capstone formalizes) - CSVs stop being honest about who got touched the moment two channels are involved.

---
name: sequence-rules
description: Our multichannel sequencing logic. Used by the
  daily orchestrator and by anyone asking what touch a lead
  should get next.
---

Sequence for A-band leads (B-band: email-only track):

Day 0  LinkedIn: connection request, no pitch (LI tool)
Day 2  Email 1: signal-grounded opener (email sender)
Day 5  LinkedIn: short message IF connected, else skip
Day 7  Email 2: value follow-up
Day 12 Email 3: breakup, one binary question

Rules:
- A reply on ANY channel stops ALL channels immediately.
  Replied leads route to the triage agent (module 3).
- A LinkedIn connection accepted without reply counts as
  warm: note it in the email custom variables.
- Never two touches on the same day. Never more than 7
  total touches (58% of replies come from touch 1 - the
  rest decay fast past touch 5).
- All sends happen inside the channel platforms. This
  skill decides WHO advances; the email and LinkedIn
  platforms decide delivery.
- Default implementation: the email platform runs the
  email cadence itself; we script only the LinkedIn ->
  email handoff. The full orchestrator is the advanced
  path.

1. Write the skill above with YOUR cadence - the day numbers matter less than having one written set everyone follows.
2. Build the default path: the email cadence already lives in your lesson-7 campaign (touches, timing, stop-on-reply for email - your sender owns all of it). Have Claude write handoff.py: each morning, pull LinkedIn campaign state, and for every accepted connection or LinkedIn reply, update that lead on the email side - set the warm-connection custom variable, or stop the email track on a reply. Record every handoff in state/engine.db and log each decision as a JSON line.
3. Run it manually for a week on the pilot cohort alongside your morning check. Watch especially that reply-stops-everything fires correctly - test it with a colleague's reply before trusting it.
4. The advanced, optional build - a full orchestrate.py that owns every touch on both channels, reading lead state from engine.db and making all the advance calls itself - buys you cross-channel cadences your email platform can't express. It's also the hardest build in this track; attempt it after the handoff version has run clean for a few weeks, not before. Either way, the signal-to-multichannel chain is now live end to end: social or hiring signal, waterfall enrichment, score, personalize, LinkedIn touch, email sequence. That chain - signal in, coordinated touches out - is what intent platforms rent for four figures a month.

For teams: accounts, gates, and one set of rules

Module 2 is now complete: signals find the moment, personalization earns the open, infrastructure lands the send, and sequencing coordinates the channels. Module 3 closes the loop - what happens when they reply.

Do this now

Sources and further reading

• Prospeo API docs (LinkedIn URL to email)
• Instantly API v2 docs
• Claude Code docs - MCP