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Every entry opens with a definition that stands on its own, so you can read a single term without reading the page. Numbers appear only where we can stand behind them: LinkedIn publishes no rate limits, so any figure for invites per day or per week is a working range observed in practice, hedged in the sentence that carries it — never a platform figure. For the reasoning behind the safety terms, read the account safety guide; for the schedule they describe, the warm-up guide.
LinkedIn outreach
LinkedIn outreach is the practice of contacting specific people on LinkedIn — usually prospective customers — through connection requests, direct messages, InMail, and the engagement around them: profile views, comments and reactions.
It differs from advertising in that every touch is aimed at one named person, and from cold email in that the platform itself limits how much you can do per week. Done well it is the closest thing B2B has to a warm introduction at scale; done carelessly it is the fastest way to lose the account.
LinkedIn warm-up
LinkedIn warm-up is the practice of ramping a new or newly-automated account’s activity gradually — engagement only at first, then connection requests in small increasing numbers — so its behaviour never jumps ahead of what its history supports.
LinkedIn’s detection watches for sudden change rather than absolute volume, so an account that did nothing last month and sends seventy invites this week produces exactly the pattern restrictions exist to catch. Warm-up matters for three accounts, not one: a genuinely new account, a dormant one, and an established account that is new to automation.
Connection request
A connection request, also called an invite, is LinkedIn’s formal ask to join someone’s network, optionally carrying a short connection note of up to 300 characters.
It is the gate for most outreach: until it is accepted you generally cannot send a free direct message. Requests that sit unaccepted count against a pending-invite pile that itself becomes a risk signal, which is why volume alone is a poor strategy.
Invite acceptance rate
Invite acceptance rate is the share of sent connection requests that the recipient accepts, usually measured over a rolling window.
It is both a targeting metric and a safety metric. LinkedIn weighs acceptance rate when judging whether an account looks like a person building a network or software spraying strangers, so a falling rate is a reason to slow down and fix targeting rather than push harder.
InMail
InMail is LinkedIn’s paid direct message that reaches someone you are not connected to, without needing a connection request first.
It is sold as a credit allowance on premium and Sales Navigator tiers. Because it bypasses the accept step it looks attractive, but it arrives visibly marked as a paid message, and response rates generally reward a warmed, connected approach over a purchased one.
Ideal customer profile (ICP)
An ideal customer profile is a written definition of the kind of organisation and person most likely to buy — industry, size, role, geography and situation — specific enough that two people reading it would sort the same lead the same way.
It is the input every other decision depends on: who to search for, what counts as a good lead, and what a message should say. A vague ICP is the most common root cause of poor outreach results, because no amount of message quality rescues the wrong audience.
ICP fit score
An ICP fit score is a rating applied to an individual lead expressing how closely they match the ideal customer profile, typically with a short written rationale alongside it.
Scoring before contact is what lets a team spend its limited weekly invites on the best available people rather than the first ones found. In Nova, scoring runs on the enriched profile and a low-fit lead is held before any invite unless a human explicitly approves it.
Account restriction
An account restriction is LinkedIn limiting or suspending an account’s ability to act — commonly a temporary block on sending invites, a request for identity verification, or in the worst case permanent closure.
Restrictions follow from volume the account has not earned, machine-regular timing, off-hours bursts, low acceptance rates, large pending-invite piles and session anomalies such as unusual login locations. Automation of any kind is also against LinkedIn’s User Agreement, so the honest framing is reduced risk, never eliminated risk.
Trust tier
A trust tier is a band an outreach tool assigns to a connected account that determines how much activity it is allowed per day, based on the account’s age, history and recent health.
Tiers exist so a ten-year-old account with a large network is not held to the same ceiling as one connected yesterday, and so a single bad signal can move an account down rather than stopping it outright. In Nova, tiers sit on the account and are never pooled across a workspace.
Action ledger
An action ledger is a durable record of every action an outreach tool has taken on an account — each invite, message, view and like, with its timestamp.
Without one, a tool enforcing limits is guessing, because nothing tells it what other parts of the system already spent today. In Nova, the ledger is what the safety governor reads immediately before allowing the next action.
Safety governor
A safety governor is the component that checks each pending outreach action against the account’s current budget and recent history, and allows, delays or denies it.
The important behaviour is what it does when a budget is spent: the correct answer is that the action waits for the next day, not that it forces through. A governor that sees every feature at once is the difference between real limits and per-feature limits that quietly add up.
Engagement-first outreach
Engagement-first outreach is the practice of interacting with a prospect’s activity — viewing their profile, reacting to a post, leaving a genuine comment — before sending them a connection request.
The mechanism is simple recognition: an invite from a name the person has already seen is accepted more often than one from a stranger. Because acceptance rate feeds account health, the practice improves results and safety at the same time.
Profile view
A profile view is the act of opening someone’s LinkedIn profile, which LinkedIn may surface to that person in their "who viewed your profile" list.
It is the lightest possible touch and the usual first step in warming a prospect. Viewers of your own profile are also a lead source in their own right, since someone who looked you up has already shown interest.
Voice note
A voice note is a short recorded audio message sent inside a LinkedIn conversation, available to connections in the LinkedIn mobile messaging experience.
It stands out because very few senders use it, and it carries tone that text cannot. Nova can generate one in a cloned version of the sender’s own voice, and like every other AI-written touch it lands in an approval queue before it can be sent.
Sequence step
A sequence step is one scheduled touch in a multi-step outreach campaign, defined by its channel, its timing relative to the previous step, and its content.
Steps are usually written in advance as templates, which is what distinguishes them from AI-drafted messages. A well-built sequence stops entirely the moment the prospect replies, so nobody receives step three of a script after starting a real conversation.
Cold email
Cold email is an unsolicited email sent to a business contact who has had no prior relationship with the sender, for the purpose of starting a commercial conversation.
Its constraints are deliverability and consent rather than platform limits: authentication, sending reputation, unsubscribe handling and the applicable rules in the recipient’s jurisdiction. It pairs naturally with LinkedIn because the two channels fail for different reasons.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC
SPF, DKIM and DMARC are three DNS-based email authentication standards that together let a receiving mail server verify that a message genuinely came from the domain it claims and was not altered in transit.
SPF lists which servers may send for the domain, DKIM signs each message cryptographically, and DMARC tells receivers what to do when a check fails and where to report it. Sending outreach from a domain missing these is the most common reason mail lands in spam regardless of content.
Mailbox warm-up
Mailbox warm-up is the practice of increasing a new sending mailbox’s daily volume gradually so that receiving providers build a sending reputation for it before it sends at full rate.
It is the email counterpart of LinkedIn warm-up and fails the same way when rushed: a brand-new domain sending hundreds of messages on day one is filtered on volume alone. In Nova a connected mailbox gets its own ramp and daily cap, separate from the LinkedIn account’s budget rather than pooled with it.
One-click unsubscribe
One-click unsubscribe is an email header that lets a recipient opt out of further messages in a single action from inside their mail client, without visiting a web page or filling in a form.
Major mailbox providers now expect it on bulk commercial mail, and honouring it immediately protects sending reputation as well as the recipient. The matching obligation is permanence: an address that has opted out, or that hard-bounced, should never be mailed again.
Buying signal
A buying signal is an observable event suggesting an organisation may be ready to purchase — a funding round, a new executive in a relevant role, a hiring push, or a public post describing the problem a product solves.
Signals matter because timing often beats targeting: the same message to the same person converts very differently depending on what week it arrives. They are best used to decide the order of an existing list rather than to replace a defined ICP.
Intent signal
An intent signal is evidence that a specific person or company is actively researching a category, such as engaging with a competitor’s content or repeatedly visiting pricing pages.
It is narrower and more perishable than a general buying signal, and therefore more valuable while it is fresh. Treat it as a reason to reach out this week rather than as proof of a budget.
Lead enrichment
Lead enrichment is the process of adding missing detail to a lead record — job title, company size, industry, work email, recent activity — from sources beyond the one the lead arrived from.
It is what makes qualification and personalisation possible: a profile URL alone supports neither. Enrichment before contact also reduces wasted volume, since an enriched lead can be scored and discarded before it costs an invite.
Email lookup waterfall
An email lookup waterfall is the practice of querying several email-finding providers in a fixed order, stopping at the first one that returns an address for a given person.
The point is coverage and cost control: no single provider knows every contact, and asking them in sequence avoids paying several at once for the same answer. Nova asks Apollo, SalesQL and QuickEnrich in that order, which is what lets an email campaign run from a list of LinkedIn profile URLs.
Multi-channel outreach
Multi-channel outreach is contacting the same prospect across more than one medium — commonly LinkedIn and email — as part of a single coordinated effort.
Done badly it is simply the same person receiving two scripts at once, which reads as pressure rather than persistence. The coordinated version has one rule: the channels take turns, and a reply on either one stops all remaining steps. In Nova, an invite still unaccepted after seven days is the trigger for the email follow-up, and the two are never aimed at someone simultaneously.
Reply rate
Reply rate is the share of delivered outreach messages that receive any response from the recipient, positive or negative.
It is a more honest health metric than open rate, which email privacy features have made unreliable, and more immediate than meetings booked. Read it alongside acceptance rate: a high acceptance rate with a low reply rate usually indicts the message, while the reverse indicts the list.
AI SDR
An AI SDR is software marketed as performing the work of a sales development representative — finding prospects, qualifying them and writing outreach — with varying degrees of human involvement.
The term covers a wide range, and the meaningful question is where the human sits. Fully unattended sending is what produces both the generic messages the category is criticised for and the account risk, which is why Nova uses AI for research, scoring and drafting but holds every outbound message for human approval.
Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s paid sales product, offering advanced search filters, lead and account lists, saved searches with alerts, and an InMail credit allowance.
Its main value for outreach is search precision: filters that narrow a market far more tightly than the free search can. It is a list-building and signal tool rather than a sending tool, and its subscription is separate from any outreach software placed alongside it.
Pending invite withdrawal
Pending invite withdrawal is the act of cancelling connection requests that have been sent but never accepted, removing them from the sender’s pending queue.
A large pile of ignored invites is itself a negative signal, so periodically clearing the oldest ones is ordinary account hygiene. The safe way to do it is a trickle rather than a single bulk purge, since a few hundred withdrawals in one burst is its own anomaly; Nova withdraws stale invites at roughly one per account per hour and records each one in the ledger.
Weekly invitation limit
The weekly invitation limit is LinkedIn’s cap on how many connection requests one account can send in a rolling seven-day window — roughly 100 for most accounts since 2021.
LinkedIn has never published the figure, and it genuinely differs between accounts: newer accounts, accounts with low acceptance rates and accounts with large pending piles get less room. It is a rolling window rather than a Monday reset, so capacity returns gradually as old invites age out. No paid tier raises it — neither Premium nor Sales Navigator buys more invites, which is the single most common misconception about it.
Commercial use limit
The commercial use limit is a monthly cap LinkedIn applies to free accounts on how many searches for people outside your network you can run, resetting on the first of each calendar month.
LinkedIn does not publish the number, and it appears to vary with how search-heavy the account’s behaviour looks. It is separate from the invitation limit and bites earlier for anyone doing list-building on a free account — which is the one genuine argument for a paid LinkedIn seat that has nothing to do with sending.
Social Selling Index (SSI)
The Social Selling Index is a LinkedIn-published score out of 100 that rates an account across four pillars: establishing a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights and building relationships.
LinkedIn shows it at linkedin.com/sales/ssi and refreshes it regularly. It is a useful mirror for whether your activity is balanced — an account that only sends invites scores badly on engagement and insights — but it is not a safety metric and it is not an input to how LinkedIn polices automation. A high SSI buys no extra invite capacity.
Open Profile
Open Profile is a LinkedIn Premium setting that lets anyone on LinkedIn send the account a direct message for free, without a connection or an InMail credit.
It is the reason a prospect you have no connection to is sometimes messageable at no cost. For a seller it cuts both ways: turning it on for your own profile removes a barrier for inbound enquiries, and it means some portion of any prospect list can be reached without spending an invite at all.
InMail credits
InMail credits are the monthly allowance of messages a LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator subscription includes for contacting people the account is not connected to.
They are the metered alternative to a connection request, and they are not interchangeable with invites: having credits left does not give you more weekly invitations, and running out does not stop you inviting. In practice they are best saved for the small number of prospects who are genuinely worth a paid touch rather than spent as a volume channel.
Connection degree
Connection degree describes how far someone is from you in LinkedIn’s network graph: 1st degree is a direct connection, 2nd degree shares a connection with you, and 3rd degree is two hops away.
It decides what you can do without paying. You can usually message a 1st-degree connection freely; a 2nd-degree contact needs an invite or an InMail. Degree is also a targeting signal worth using — a 2nd-degree prospect with a mutual connection you both respect accepts at a visibly higher rate than a 3rd-degree stranger.
Boolean search
Boolean search is the use of the operators AND, OR and NOT, quotation marks for exact phrases and parentheses for grouping, to build a precise LinkedIn people search.
It is how a written ideal customer profile becomes a list without a paid seat: ("head of revenue" OR "VP sales") NOT recruiter gets closer to one role than any single keyword. It works in free LinkedIn search as well as Sales Navigator, and it is usually the cheaper half of the answer to "do I need Sales Navigator".
LinkedIn jail
"LinkedIn jail" is informal slang for a restricted LinkedIn account — it is not a LinkedIn feature or an official term, and LinkedIn itself never uses it.
What people mean by it is one of several distinct states: an invite-only limit, a temporary read-only restriction, a verification challenge, or a full suspension. They have different causes and different recovery paths, which is why the slang is unhelpful for diagnosis. The useful question is always which restriction, not whether you are "in jail".
LinkedIn shadowban
"Shadowban" is a community term for the belief that LinkedIn is quietly suppressing an account’s content reach without notifying it — LinkedIn has never confirmed that such a state exists.
Reach on a given post varies enormously with timing, format and how the first hour performs, so a drop is far more often ordinary variance than a penalty. Treat it as a hypothesis rather than a diagnosis: there is no dashboard that confirms it, no appeal process for it, and no reliable published method of testing for it. The measurable states — restrictions and invite limits — are the ones worth acting on.
Lead magnet
A lead magnet is something useful given away in exchange for a conversation or contact details — a checklist, a template, a teardown, a short piece of original data.
In outreach it changes what the first message can say: offering a specific, relevant artefact is a reason to reply that asking for a meeting is not. The version that works on LinkedIn is usually small, immediately usable and specific to one role, and it is offered rather than gated behind a form in the first message.
Where to go next
These terms are the shorthand; the guides are the arguments behind them — the complete outreach guide for the whole system, message templates for what to actually say, and lead generation for where good lists come from. Comparing software? We maintain fact-checked comparisons against other outreach tools, with pricing verified against their own sites.
