Rutherford MP opens 34 sales conversations from 375 LinkedIn invites in 30 days

Challenge

The obvious move — one campaign, one message, the biggest list available — is the move that burns the channel. LinkedIn acceptance rates collapse when the invite reads as automation, and a small agency does not get a second first impression with the brands it most wants.

Segmentation was not optional, because the early data would prove: agencies accept Rutherford's invites at nearly twice the rate brands do, while brands, once connected, reply at a higher rate than agencies. A single blended campaign would have hidden both facts and optimised for neither.

The other half of the problem is what happens after a reply. An outbound reply is perishable — a warm answer that sits for two days is a cold one — and a founder running delivery cannot also be the person refreshing the inbox.

Solution

Sapience built the system in La Growth Machine as three parallel campaigns — agencies, brands, and a brands variant that adds email to the LinkedIn sequence — each a four-message arc with two follow-ups, written for that buyer's actual reason to care. A fourth campaign, aimed at mass-tort law firms, is built and queued behind them.

Every reply fires a webhook into the Sapience platform, where an agent reads the conversation and briefs the team on who replied, from which campaign, and what they said — treating the reply strictly as data to report, never answering on Rutherford's behalf. The conversations stay human; the monitoring does not have to be.

Campaign totals sync into the growth database nightly, so the funnel — sent, accepted, contacted, replied — is one query rather than four screenshots, and the per-segment differences are visible instead of anecdotal.

Results

The first 30 days: 375 connection requests, 107 connections at 28.5% acceptance, 92 decision-makers taken into conversation, 34 replies. More than a reply a day, on a channel that cost the founder none of the month.

The segment split is the finding. Agencies accepted 43% of invites against the brands' 22% — but brands replied at 41% once contacted, against the agencies' 34%. Easier to reach and easier to close are different segments, and Rutherford now knows which is which from its own data rather than instinct.

Replies are still climbing — 14 to 34 across the two weeks the daily sync has watched them.

• 34 replies from 92 decision-makers contacted — a 37% reply rate
• 107 connections from 375 invites, a 28.5% acceptance rate
• Agencies accept at 43% vs brands at 22%; brands reply at 41% vs agencies at 34%
• Every reply briefed to the team by an agent as it arrives