Ask your LinkedIn agency where their outreach list actually comes from

Before you sign with a LinkedIn outreach agency, ask them one question: where did this list come from. The honest answer is either a title-and-industry filter pulled from a database, or something built around actual buying intent. Those are two different products, and the invoice rarely tells you which one you're getting.

One sourcing method worth knowing, because it changes what "targeted" actually means: build the list from a competitor's LinkedIn company-page followers instead of a generic filter. People who already follow a company in your category are showing real interest, not a guess based on job title. The catch is that a company's follower list includes its own employees, so the first step is filtering staff out before anyone gets touched. Once the list is built this way, the opener writes itself: "Saw you follow [Competitor] - do you use them?" isn't a mail-merge trick, it's a fact about how the person landed on the list in the first place.

This particular version of the technique is credited to Jānis Plūme of Outbound Pros, and it reached us through Salesforge's newsletter on September 8. We checked it before writing this: Plūme and Outbound Pros are real, and the underlying idea, sourcing from a competitor's followers and stripping out staff, shows up independently elsewhere too, including write-ups from Databar.ai, ScaliQ, and connectsafely.ai. What we could not verify is the original newsletter issue itself, or the specific numbers attached to it: 2,333 connection requests, 1,142 accepted (49%), 1,855 DMs sent, 321 replies (about 17%). We couldn't trace the source or confirm those figures independently, so treat them as one vendor's self-reported result, not a proven benchmark.

We added this exact sourcing method to our own LinkedIn playbook on September 8, the same day the newsletter landed. Worth saying plainly: this isn't a technique we've run for years with our own numbers to show. It's new to our toolkit, and we haven't run a full campaign on it under our own name yet. What we do have, from years of running LinkedIn outreach for clients, is a real reply-rate benchmark: a well-run campaign lands somewhere in the 18-25% range. The Salesforge case's self-reported ~17% sits in that same neighborhood, which makes it plausible, not proof.

Whichever agency you're evaluating, including us, ask these before signing anything:

• Where does the list come from, a database filter or something built around intent?
• If it's a database, which one, and what filters define it?
• Can you show me one list and explain why these specific people are on it?
• What's your real reply-rate range, not your best month?

We'll answer all four for MDR any time you want to check. Ask the question before the invoice, not after the campaign underperforms.