Your ICP might be a CISO with 400 connections and four posts since 2021.

That tells you they don't write. It tells you nothing about whether they're evaluating vendors this quarter. More likely, they are on Linkedin and get notifications. They just don’t have time to make content or it’s not a priority. 

The data here is blunt. In 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Report, built on responses from nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, buyers filled roughly 3.6 of their 5 shortlist slots on day one of the journey. 97% already had prior experience with at least one vendor on that list.

Then the number that should change how you spend your week: 68% of buyers already personally knew a seller at the vendor that won.

That's the whole argument for reaching out to people who never post.

Being a familiar name before the journey starts beats being clever once it's underway… or worse, spraying and praying with automation. A quiet buyer is never going to find you through a post that took off, because they don't read the feed that way. 

They'll remember a conversation. You being genuine, not pitch slapping them. 

There's one finding in that same report people love to quote at me. 6sense says sales development outreach plays almost no role in when a buyer makes first contact, because buyers deliberately ignore unsolicited outreach until they're ready to move.

That's real. It also doesn't say what people think it says.

What buyers ignore is the pitch. The connection still registers. And since buyers now reach out at about 61% of a journey averaging just over ten months, a request you send today lands roughly six months before that person will take a call with anybody.

How do you find a buyer who doesn't post?

You stop using posting as the filter. It’s true That if they aren't posting, they are less likely to take any action on LinkedIn at all. 

I've said for years that you can't mail someone who has no mailbox. Still true. What changed is my definition of a mailbox.

Active doesn't have to mean publishing. Someone who leaves two comments a month is technically active and reachable. Just don’t expect a quick response. They need to be at least commenting, even if it's the incredibly lame “Congrats!” only ones. 

Most tech founders scroll straight past those people, because the only filter they're running in Sales Navigator is "Posted in the last 30 days."

The second change is how you build the list. Keyword targeting is the step 2 of Sales Navigator list building now.  Linkedin FINALLY got better about this. 

You target the language your buyer actually uses about themselves, in their headline, their About section, their comments, rather than a static filtered list that's stale the week you export it.

That's also what surfaces the quiet ones. A filtered list finds people by title and headcount. Keywords find people by what they care about, which is the thing you're opening the conversation with anyway. It also finds them by the job titles and industries Sales Nav has no filters for.

Same problem I wrote about with reach, where the wrong 10,000 followers are worth less than the right 800.

How many touchpoints before you send the DM?

Fewer than you've been told. This is the piece most tech founders get backwards.

Standard advice says three to five touchpoints first. Comment on their posts, react, get on their radar, then reach out. That's sound when your buyer posts at least1-3x per month.

When your buyer posts twice a year, three to five touchpoints is a nine-month warm-up… if you can even call it that. You'll age out of your own funnel waiting for it.

So compress it. One genuine, specific comment on whatever they last posted, even if it's from March. Then the request. Then the DM, 24 to 48 hours after they accept.

You don't propose on the first date. You also don't court somebody for a year before you say hello.

One of the key rules on that opening line. Don't lead with their job title or their company… ever. That’s almost as bad as pitch

"Hey Sarah, saw you're VP of Engineering at Acme" reads as a lazy, salesy bullshit inside four words. A quiet buyer is more sensitive to that than a loud one, because nobody's been approaching them.

Reference something they actually said. If they've said almost nothing, reference the post on one comment they left. Figure out a commonality. Whatever you have to do to disarm them.

…or, my personal favorite, and 1 of the The focal point of our conversation generation for our clients is sending a blank connection request to your ICP, then asking:

“Hey NAME,

Thanks for connecting. Appreciate you opening the door.

Always like to ask new network folks this. Were you growing your network or was there something about my profile that made you think it might be worth connecting?”

Sounds silly. It’s not. I got a 45% reply rate with Oracle executives with this. Better yet I figured out exactly who was actually interested in my services and I didn't have to kiss their ass first to figure it out.

On volume, 15 to 20 targeted requests a day is plenty and it sits in safe territory. Withdraw anything still unaccepted past three weeks, since sitting requests are what actually trip a post performance penalty. I broke that down when connection limits started dropping.

This is exactly how we were able to tap into our fintech founder clients very tough compliance and banker audience, about as quiet an audience as this platform has: 77 conversations started, 12 sales calls, and $300K in a single month.

Four moves to make this week

• Pull your last 50 target accounts you passed on and re-sort them by comment activity instead of post activity

• Rebuild your targeting around three to five keywords your buyer uses about themselves, then cancel the Sales Navigator renewal

• Cut your pre-DM touchpoints to one specific comment, sent the same week as the request…. Or none with the above conversation generation method

• Delete the job title and company name from the first line of your DM template. Or, just stop using templates. It’s like AI spray and praying without the tech.

Steve Lewis
CEO
TORC Executive Marketing

Want 60 to 80 sales conversations started for you each month, with zero automation? 

Apply to work together: https://www.torcexecutivemarketing.com/apply-to-work-together

Frequently asked questions

How can you tell if a LinkedIn prospect is active enough to be worth targeting?

Check whether they've commented or reacted in the last 30 days, rather than whether they've posted. Someone leaving two comments a week is logging in semi-regularly and will see your request. A profile with no activity of any kind in six months is the one to skip, because outreach only works if the person is actually on the platform.

How many connection requests a day is safe for a tech founder?

Around 15 to 20 a day is very safe, but if you only have time for it once a week and don’t care about post performance. Send it deep. Just know that if you haven’t been active, Linkedin is going to cap you at 100 until you are active consistently. 

The trouble comes from requests sitting unaccepted past about three weeks and from an acceptance rate that drops below 20%, so withdraw stale requests on a regular cycle.This you can do all at once, just don’t go over 400 in a day, ever. 350 to be on the safe side.

Should you comment on a prospect's posts before sending a connection request?

You can, but you don’t have to. There’s two different approaches to outreach, conversation generation and lead generation. For Conversation Generation: you do not want to comment at all ahead of time. It removes the mystery and defeats the point of the whole "How come you accepted my connection request?" approach we mentioned above. If you're doing traditional lead generation, then yes, commenting ahead of time certainly helps 

Broad commenting across fifty posts hoping to get noticed is a different activity and it's a poor use of a tech founder's time. For an audience that rarely posts, one comment is the right number, because waiting for three to five natural interactions can mean waiting months.

How long before LinkedIn outreach to a quiet audience produces sales calls?

Give it 90 days before you judge it. Most B2B buying journeys run about ten months, and buyers don't contact sellers until roughly 61% of the way through, so outreach you send in month one is often landing for a purchase decision that's still half a year out, depending on the time of year, especially in tech. It’s no secret you should be hitting outreach hard in Q1. Track conversations started per week as the leading indicator instead of calls booked in week three.