If your competitor has done the hard work of educating the market and building an audience, you don't have to. The people following them on LinkedIn are already problem-aware and solution-aware. You just need to reach them with a better trade.
What the play is
Find a competitor's LinkedIn company page, scrape their followers, filter the list down to people who actually match your ICP, then reach out with a contextual call-out. The hook is simple: "I saw you're following X on LinkedIn" immediately, and the prospect knows why you're in their inbox.
This is one of the first plays we ship for new clients because it works even when the offer hasn't been validated to death. The audience is pre-qualified, so you're not paying to educate cold prospects. You're paying to be the second option they see when they're already shopping.
Why it works
- Pre-qualified intent. A follow on LinkedIn is a public signal of interest in your category.
- Faster ramp. Reply rates run 2-3x higher than cold lists with no prior context.
- Specific call-out. Mentioning the competitor in line one earns the next 10 seconds of attention.
- Stackable. You can run it across multiple competitor pages and pull a clean, de-duped list.
How we run it
1. Pick the right pages
For a direct competitor play, pick 2-5 companies that solve the same problem. For an ecosystem play, pick adjacent tools your prospect uses (think: a CPA targeting people who follow QuickBooks and Xero). Avoid pages with massive follower counts unless you're going to filter aggressively, since scraping costs scale with size.
2. Scrape the list
We pull the full follower list using a vendor that handles this cleanly (we currently use Following.co for delivery). Where we differ from most is: we don't ask the vendor to apply heavy filters during the scrape. They limit your final list size unnecessarily. Pull broad, then filter on your side.
3. Filter down to ICP
Drop the export into Google Sheets or Clay and filter against your ICP: titles that match the buyer or champion, industries that fit, company size, geography. Always exclude employees of the company you scraped (current and past), or you'll send a competitor's rep an outbound message and they will not be amused.
4. Enrich for email
Run the filtered list through your email waterfall (LeadMagic, BetterContact, Findymail, etc.) to find verified emails. For prospects without an email, fall back to LinkedIn: InMail if they have an open profile, automated connection requests via HeyReach if they don't.
5. Send the right copy
The copy ties back to the signal. Two angles work:
- The direct call-out. "I saw you're following [Competitor] on LinkedIn. I run a similar service but [your specific differentiator]. Worth a 15-minute look?" This works when your differentiator is sharp and you're comfortable with the optics.
- The ecosystem angle. "I saw you're following [Tool]. Curious - are you getting the most out of it? We've shipped 1,000+ campaigns on it and would happily audit yours." This works when you sell a service that complements the tool, and is less aggressive than calling out a direct competitor.
Channel strategy
Email is the easiest channel to scale this play on. The contextual call-out lands well in the inbox and the volume math works. If a prospect doesn't have a verified email, route them to LinkedIn through HeyReach with a similar opener. Coordinated email + LinkedIn doubles touch density without doubling the noise.
What to watch for
- Vendor freshness. Some scrapers return stale lists or pull from the wrong page when an avatar's history is dirty. We spot-check the first 50 rows before launching.
- Filter discipline. Always exclude past + current employees of the scraped company.
- Direct competitor backlash. Calling out a direct competitor by name will occasionally get pushback. Worth it on conversion rate, but only if you're comfortable with the trade.
- Cost on huge lists. Pages with 100k+ followers blow up scraping costs fast. Add light vendor-side filters (industry + company size) for those, then filter further on your end.
What "good" looks like
On a clean run with the right offer, we'd expect:
- 30-50% match rate after enrichment + ICP filtering
- Reply rates 2-3x higher than a cold ZoomInfo / Apollo list
- Meeting conversion that compounds week-over-week as the list refreshes
Source material adapted from Nick Abraham's breakdown of the play (Leadbird / Cleverly), with our own targeting, copy, and channel notes layered on top.