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Pipeline + customer nurturing

How to maintain momentum during long sales cycles

Written by Denis Bauer

Stay visible to your pipeline, customers, and partners through regular LinkedIn engagement. Comment on their posts, connect if not yet connected, and send nurturing DMs when it's time to check in. Unlike sequences that end after 2-4 weeks, Extrovert keeps suggesting touchpoints: when they post something relevant, or simply when enough time has passed.

Expected results

  • 25%+ ghosted deals reactivated

  • Keep momentum during long sales cycles

  • Touchpoints that feel timely and personal

  • Earlier warning on renewal risks

  • Natural upsell conversations

  • Higher retention rates

  • 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. Enable automatic connection requests to connect with prospects you're not yet connected with.

☝️ 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 voice, outreach cadence, and settings. Create separate campaigns when you need a different personality or a different follow-up rhythm. Use prospect lists within a single campaign to organize people who share the same treatment.

Start from the Nurture preset. When you create the campaign, pick Nurture. It turns on warm up and connection requests, suggests the first DM 3 days after the connection is accepted, sets follow-ups 45 days apart and sets the follow-up limit to No limit. Adjust the follow-up spacing to match the stage in step 3.

2. Daily engagement routine

Spend 15-30 minutes engaging with posts from your lists. Set these once on the campaign's Commenting tab:

  • Commenting pace per prospect to decide how long to leave a person alone after you comment on one of their posts. Match it to the stage: a few days for weekly stages, longer for monthly ones.

  • Feed sorting strategy set to Spread evenly so your attention is shared across everyone in the campaign instead of going to whoever posted most recently.

  • Limit posts per prospect is already on, keeping the newest 3 posts per person, so nobody floods your feed. Nothing to do unless you want a different number.

In a campaign's feed, the selector next to the campaign name narrows you to one prospect list, which is handy for working a single relationship stage. Take care with the Filters button beside it: it opens the campaign's saved commenting settings, so anything you change there stays changed for every session.

☝️ Pro tip: Turn on Extra delay for back-to-back comments on the Commenting tab to space out comments that would otherwise publish one after another for the same person.

☝️ Pro tip: Use topic filtering to highlight posts that match your expertise. You define the topics once in Settings → Topics to monitor, then on the campaign's Commenting tab set Filter by your custom topics to Only my custom topics.

☝️ Pro tip: With several campaigns running, work from Main Feed rather than opening each one. Under Customize feed, put a long nurture campaign on Low priority. It keeps ticking over in the background without crowding out the campaigns you are actively working.

3. Set up nurturing DMs

Open Campaign → Outreach and turn on Direct messages. Nurturing needs two decisions:

  • How often to check in. Under Follow-ups, set the ladder of pauses. For nurturing, a flat cadence works better than an escalating one, because you are keeping in touch rather than chasing an answer.

  • When to stop. Set the follow-up limit to No limit. A nurturing relationship shouldn't run out after three unanswered messages.

☝️ Match the cadence to each stage's frequency. Use the frequency column from the table above: roughly 7 days on every step for weekly stages, 14 for bi-weekly, 30 for monthly, 60 for bi-monthly. If a stage has only a few people, still run it. A small nurturing list keeps deals warm.

Turn on Follow up sooner after a relevant post. It is off until you switch it on. When someone shares real news, a funding round, a new role, a launch, the next check-in becomes due in about half the remaining time so you can react while it still matters.

Conversations that are due appear in the Recommended tab of the DMs page. Open one and you'll see:

  • A Follow-ups section showing what is due now, what it is counted from, and when the next one lands

  • The message history

  • A card naming the post, when a post is what brought the check-in forward

  • An AI-drafted message based on their profile, their posts, and the campaign's voice

Review, improve the draft if needed, then send. Nothing sends without your approval. A reply resets the sequence back to the first follow-up, so a conversation never falls off your radar.

☝️ Pro tip: Fill in the DMs tab of the campaign's voice (Settings → Voice library, open a voice, DMs). Selling points are the facts the AI may bring up, and DM templates are example messages it can adapt. A check-in template for a quiet deal and a light resource-sharing template are worth having for nurturing.

4. Watch for signals and adjust

Watch for these account activity 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

Extrovert watches for the posted ones too. With Follow up sooner after a relevant post switched on, a post like a funding round, a new role or a launch pulls the next check-in forward by about half the remaining wait. The post has to be less than 14 days old and the effect lasts 7 days. The follow-up number stays where it was, so nothing is skipped.

5. When a relationship changes stage

Cadence is a campaign setting. Pace, sorting and follow-up timing all live on the campaign, so a stage that needs a genuinely different rhythm needs its own campaign. One campaign cannot run weekly check-ins for hot deals and monthly ones for customers at the same time.

When someone moves between stages, move them into the list the other campaign uses:

  • Active deals that go quiet → your ghosted-prospects campaign (weekly to weekly/bi-weekly)

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

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

Lists organize people and decide which campaign treats them. On their own they do not change how often you comment or how often a check-in comes due.

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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