Works from a list you choose, one LinkedIn profile URL per lead, so every touch lands on someone you want
Comment-led lead generation
Turn a list of names into people who already know yours
Lead generation on LinkedIn has two halves: choosing who, and getting them to care. Icebreakly handles the second half. You bring the list. It comments on their posts in your voice until you are a familiar name and the first conversation is easy to start.
See how a comment campaign runs, step by stepBest for
- Consultancies and agencies selling high-value retainers to a short list
- B2B teams running account-based programs
- Founders building pipeline from their own network
The problem
A list is not a lead
Buying or building a list has never been easier, which is why a row in a spreadsheet is worth so little. The scarce thing is recognition. A name becomes a lead when the person behind it knows who you are and has a reason to answer. That takes repeated, relevant contact, and it is the step most lead generation skips.
Comments respond to the specific post, which shows the lead that you read it
Stages from Stranger to Warm reveal which names are turning into real leads
A ready list of leads at 12 or more touches tells you who to approach this week
How it works
From a named list to a first conversation
Decide on the 50 to 300 people worth a relationship and collect their LinkedIn profile URLs
Add them to a comment campaign and choose Approval or Autopilot
Let comments accumulate as each lead posts, at about one per lead per day
Check the ready list weekly and start conversations with the leads who now know you
The two halves of LinkedIn lead generation
Ask ten people what LinkedIn lead generation means and most will describe sourcing: search filters, exports, lists pulled from post engagement. That half of the job is well served. There are databases, extractors and LinkedIn’s own Sales Navigator, and each can produce a thousand plausible names in an afternoon.
The second half is the move from name to conversation, and it is where pipelines stall. A list of a thousand strangers is still a thousand strangers. Typical cold outreach treats that as a numbers problem and sends more. Comment-led lead generation treats it as a familiarity problem and works on fewer people for longer.
Icebreakly is a tool for the second half only. It says so plainly because the distinction matters. If your bottleneck is not knowing who to target, start with sourcing and come back afterward.
How a comment turns into a conversation
Take a head of finance at a logistics firm. In March she posts about closing the books in four days where it used to take nine. Your comment asks how her team handled intercompany reconciliations. She replies. Two weeks later she shares a hiring post, and you are there again with something useful about onboarding controllers. By May your name has appeared under six of her posts.
Now compare two messages arriving in her inbox on the same morning. One is from a stranger with a calendar link. The other is from the person who has been adding sensible remarks to her posts all spring. The second message needs no clever opening line. It can say, plainly, that you have enjoyed the exchange and would like twenty minutes.
Sometimes the lead moves first. People check who keeps commenting, look at the profile and send the connection request themselves. That request arrives in your normal LinkedIn inbox, and you answer it like any other message.
Choosing the list is the real targeting work
Because Icebreakly comments at a human pace, list quality matters more than list size. A hundred carefully chosen people are a better use of the same weeks than three hundred loosely chosen ones.
- Pick people, not companies: the named buyer, the champion and the person who signs
- Favor leads who post at least a couple of times a month, since silence gives you nothing to respond to
- Keep two or three names per account so that one quiet profile does not stall the whole account
- Prune monthly: remove people who changed role and add whoever replaced them
Tools and reading for the first half
These pages help with deciding who goes on the list and what to do once they are warm.
- See: /ideal-customer-profile-generator to decide who is worth warming before you build the list
- See: /linkedin-post-finder to find posts worth commenting on by hand
- See: /linkedin-outreach-strategy for a warm-first plan: pick 100, show up for weeks, then ask
- See: /ai-prospecting-tool for the difference between choosing leads and warming them
- See: /signup to start the 7-day trial with 10 monitored leads
FAQ
Common questions about linkedin lead generation
Does Icebreakly find leads for me?
No. Icebreakly does not search for, scrape or export leads, and it has no import from Sales Navigator. You decide who belongs on the list and add each person by LinkedIn profile URL. Icebreakly then does the work of making those people familiar with you.
Where should my list come from?
Use sources you already trust: closed-lost deals in your CRM, target accounts from your account plan, a Sales Navigator search you review by hand, event attendee lists, or people who already engage with your content. If you need to define the customer profile first, the free ICP report generator on this site is a reasonable starting point.
What counts as a lead in a comment-led approach?
A lead is someone on your list who has seen your name often enough to recognize it. Icebreakly makes that visible with a touch count. Leads at around 5 touches are Familiar, around 12 are Trusted, and 20 or more are Warm. Many teams treat Trusted as the point where direct contact is worth making.
What if a person on my list never posts?
Then there is nothing to comment on, and Icebreakly will not invent an occasion. Comment-led lead generation depends on leads who post at least now and then. Review inactive names after a few weeks and swap them for colleagues at the same account who are active.
How many leads can I work at once?
The Free trial covers 10 monitored leads for 7 days. Standard covers 100 leads on one LinkedIn account for $49 a month. Pro covers 300 leads across 3 LinkedIn accounts for $99 a month, with extra accounts at $40 a month each.