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Pipeline + customer nurturing

How to maintain momentum during long sales cycles

Oleg Sobolev avatar
Written by Oleg Sobolev
Updated over 2 weeks ago

Stay visible to your pipeline, customers, and partners through regular LinkedIn engagement. Build relationships at different stages without being pushy. Works even if prospects don't post themselves. Make this a team-wide process for consistent relationship building.

Expected results

  • Keep momentum during long sales cycles

  • Bring back 20-25% of stalled opportunities

  • Earlier warning on renewal risks

  • More partner-sourced deals

  • Natural upsell conversations

  • Higher retention rates

  • Build stronger relationships with stakeholders

  • Get more multi-threaded deals

Who to nurture

Different relationship stages need different approaches. Use this guide to organize your engagement:

Stage

Who

Why

Frequency

Active opportunities

Key stakeholders, decision makers, team members from active deals

Keep momentum during long sales cycles, build multi-threaded relationships

Weekly

Ghosted prospects

No-shows, stuck pipeline deals, plus other account stakeholders

Bring back 20-25% of stalled deals without being pushy

Weekly/bi-weekly

"Not now" prospects

Timing-based deferrals, past lost deals worth revisiting

Stay top of mind for when their situation changes

Monthly/bi-monthly

Current customers

Project champions, daily users, new hires in decision-making roles

Spot expansion chances, prevent churn, get early warning on risks

Monthly

Channel partners

Partner sales teams, solution architects, marketing, leadership

More partner-sourced deals, stronger relationships, higher partner retention

Monthly

The workflow

1. Set up your lists

Create separate lists in Extrovert for each relationship stage.

☝️ Pro tip: Don't limit yourself to direct contacts. Their teams will see your engagement, and you'll spot important changes faster.

☝️ Pro tip: If prospects don't post themselves, surround them with your presence by commenting on posts from people they read and follow.

☝️ Pro tip: Sync these lists from your CRM automatically using our API.

Campaigns vs Lists: Each campaign has its own context, tone of voice, and settings. Create separate campaigns when you need different personalities or settings. Use prospect lists within a single campaign to organize prospects in different groups with the same context.

2. Daily engagement routine

Spend 15-30 minutes engaging with posts from your lists. Use these filters to stay organized:

  • Desired frequency to track touchpoints by your schedule

  • Prospect list to focus on specific relationship stages

  • Post category to find relevant content

  • Posts per prospect to control how many posts you see from each person

☝️ Pro tip: Turn on delayed posting (Campaign → Settings → Delay between comments) to space out your comments naturally.

☝️ Pro tip: Use AI topic monitoring (Campaign → Settings → Topics monitoring) to highlight posts that match your expertise.

3. Watch for signals and adjust

Watch for these LinkedIn signals that show your nurturing is working:

  • Liking or replying to your comments

  • Profile visits after you comment

  • Sharing posts about relevant challenges

  • Posting about company changes (new hires, growth, leadership changes)

  • Questions about your industry or product area

4. Move prospects between lists

As relationships change, move prospects to different lists to match the right engagement frequency. This keeps your nurturing relevant and prevents you from over-engaging or under-engaging.

  • Active deals that go quiet → Ghosted prospects (from weekly to weekly/bi-weekly)

  • Ghosted prospects who re-engage → Active opportunities (back to weekly)

  • Active deals that close → Current customers (weekly to monthly)

Integration with sales process

  • Reference posts in your follow-up emails or DMs

  • Reach out after they engage with your comments (best time!)

  • Keep light engagement during quiet periods

  • Use their posts to track changes in their situation

  • Share relevant posts with CS team for customer insights

  • Use positive engagement as trigger to ask for referrals

Combine with content strategy

Comments work better with your own posts:

  • LinkedIn shows your posts to prospects who like your comments

  • Perfect way to target your content to your prospects

  • Regular commenting keeps your posts visible in their feeds

  • Comments help you stay top of mind, posts explain your value, and DMs drive action

Implementation guide

  • Start small: Pick 1-2 relationship stages to focus on first

  • Block time: Schedule 15-30 minutes daily for engagement

  • Team coordination: Share prospect lists and split relationship stages by role

  • Be consistent: Better to engage with 10 people daily than 50 people once a week

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