My 2019 LinkedIn predictions, and what LinkedIn's rules say now

If LinkedIn carries part of your outbound pipeline, its rules are part of your sales plan. LinkedIn decides how many invitations your team can send, which tools it may use and which paid formats exist, and it can change any of them.

In October 2019 I published a solo podcast episode with eight predictions about where LinkedIn was heading as a sales channel. I was running Lead Cookie, the done-for-you LinkedIn prospecting company I later sold, and by then we had run over 250 LinkedIn outreach campaigns. I said plainly at the time what the predictions were worth: "They're not facts, some of these could be wrong, but this is just what I believe at this point."

This essay sets those predictions beside what LinkedIn's own help, plan and advertising pages said in October 2026. It is written for a CRO, CMO or head of sales deciding how much of a pipeline to run through LinkedIn, how to budget for it and what to ask of the team or vendor running it.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan is a partner in Fieldtrip, a group of marketing agencies, which this essay links to.

How I reasoned in 2019

Cold email was getting harder. In the episode I said that, compared with a year or two earlier, "the deliverability, it just plummeted." Outbound prospecting was moving to LinkedIn, and I expected LinkedIn to shape that traffic to suit itself.

So most of the predictions started from what LinkedIn wanted. On automation tools I said, "They don't want automation. They don't want spammy bots." I closed the episode the same way: "LinkedIn wants to be the center of B2B sales." My advice was to stay agile and evolve with the platform as it changed.

When I started on LinkedIn it was possible to send up to 175 connection requests a day. Lead Cookie began at about 100 a day, and about six months before the episode LinkedIn scaled us down to about 75.

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Zoom

Historical observations and a forecast made in the article. These figures are not current LinkedIn account limits.

The eight predictions beside LinkedIn's pages

Each row puts what I said in October 2019 beside what LinkedIn's own pages say. Some predictions can be checked that way; others describe the market, which no help page measures.

In the same episode I also stated one thing as a fact: cancel Sales Navigator and you lose the leads and conversations inside it. LinkedIn's cancellation page still describes that, as the Sales Navigator section below explains.

What LinkedIn's pages show for each prediction

Invitation limits cannot be bought past

I expected LinkedIn to keep cutting the daily allowance and then charge for more. On the volume, I said, "I predict that eventually that number will level out between twenty-five to fifty per day." On the price, my picture was that if the unpaid allowance fell to 25 a day, you could still send 100 or 150, "but you're going to have to pay."

LinkedIn's page on invitation restrictions (opens in a new tab) gives no daily number, so the 25 to 50 figure cannot be checked against it. It is direct about the price: "You can't buy or acquire more invitations while you've been restricted, or otherwise." The limits apply to Basic and Premium members alike.

What the page does describe is a test of relevance. Restrictions follow from sending many invitations in a short time, or from invitations that are ignored, left pending or marked as spam. In 2019 I hoped the throttling would bring less noise, and with it the need to "get more targeted and higher quality with who you're going after and what you're saying."

LinkedIn's rule on automation tools

My own rule came from an early scare. Lead Cookie had built some of its first processes on a third-party browser extension, and when that tool was shut down, I "made the decision at that point never to rely on an external bot or tool." We ran the work by hand. Doing it by hand did not make the service fully compliant: in January 2019 I wrote that "Lead Cookie is technically against Linkedin's terms of service," because our team operated clients' profiles.

LinkedIn's page on prohibited software and extensions (opens in a new tab) says it does not permit third-party software, including bots and browser extensions, that scrape, modify the appearance of, or automate activity on its website. Its invitation page adds that an account suspected of automation may be suspended or restricted, and that repeated suspensions may make a restriction permanent.

Paid messages and the advertising auction

I thought InMails "kind of suck," because they read like a sales page arriving in your inbox. I predicted a pay-to-send model and, further out, a bidding market for decision makers, which I flagged myself: "This one could be wrong, but it, it actually makes sense." Paid messages were not new then: LinkedIn had opened Sponsored InMail to all advertisers (opens in a new tab) through Campaign Manager in November 2016.

On LinkedIn's help pages, InMail is a Premium feature (opens in a new tab) with a number of message credits that depends on the subscription. Separately, Sponsored Messaging (opens in a new tab) puts message ads and conversation ads into members' inboxes, charged per send, and LinkedIn "strictly controls the number of times a member can see Sponsored Messaging." LinkedIn's advertising page (opens in a new tab) says ad costs are set by an auction. For audiences in the European Economic Area and Switzerland, these ads reach only members who have opted in to receive them.

So auction-priced message ads exist, but these pages do not describe the guaranteed top-of-inbox placement I had heard rumored, and one-to-one invitations cannot be bought. My budgeting advice from the episode fits the paid formats: "if you want to do LinkedIn as a channel, you have to start having a kind of a base level ad spend budget. It's almost like doing pay-per-click."

Sales Navigator: lists, sync and lock-in

Lead Cookie ran an Airtable spreadsheet alongside LinkedIn because there was no good way to organize the conversations. You could already save and tag people in Sales Navigator; I hoped it would add deal stages and follow-up reminders.

Its help pages describe custom lists (opens in a new tab) for saved leads and accounts, and alerts. Its plan page (opens in a new tab) offers CRM sync with Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics and others, and adding leads to the CRM directly, positioning Advanced Plus as the plan for teams that need those integrations. On these pages, Sales Navigator is built to feed a CRM; they do not describe a deal-stage pipeline of its own.

The lock-in I described is still there. LinkedIn's cancellation page (opens in a new tab) says messages, saved leads and saved accounts cannot be saved, are removed as soon as you cancel, and do not return if you subscribe again; the cancellation itself takes effect at the end of the billing cycle. An individual subscriber added to a company's corporate license can move that data across. My advice in the episode was to budget Sales Navigator as an annual cost to the business.

What no help page can settle

Three predictions are about the market: that LinkedIn stays central to B2B selling, that the cheap end of the market drops out, and that results improve for those doing it well. LinkedIn's pages do not measure any of them. My later accounts give a narrower view, of Lead Cookie's own market.

Less than six months after the episode, in an April 2020 essay, I wrote that "LinkedIn is throttling back the volume play" and that "In 3-5 years, outbound will be low-volume, and highly personalized." By May 2020 I had moved Lead Cookie toward fewer, better campaigns at a higher price, because "The market demands lower-quantity, higher-quality, outreach."

In a May 2025 interview (opens in a new tab) I described Lead Cookie's market this way: "we got in early when it was good, and then it became totally saturated and spammy and everyone was doing it." That remark does not say when the saturation came, and in April 2020 I had already described a rise of spammers on LinkedIn over the previous two years, so it does not settle the eighth prediction either.

What this means for your LinkedIn plan

LinkedIn's published rules emphasize relevant invitations and prohibit third-party tools that automate activity. They give no daily allowance, and they rule out buying extra invitations. That suggests a practical habit for anyone planning the channel: base the plan on the platform's published rules and stated aims, and reread them at each planning cycle, treating any forecast of the mechanics as a guess.

From there, I'd plan around four points.

• Choose the right way to reach each person. LinkedIn recommends invitations to people you know and trust, and InMail or Groups for members you don't know. Invitation limits apply to every account and cannot be bought past, so a target that only works at high volume depends on a level LinkedIn does not publish and can restrict.
• Separate subscriptions, advertising and management. Check which InMail credits your subscriptions already include, then agree any message-ad spend and management fees before judging the channel's return.
• Keep the work in your own hands and records. Automation tools break LinkedIn's rules, and leads and messages saved in Sales Navigator are removed when the subscription is canceled. Record conversations and leads in your CRM as you go.
• Keep the dependence in proportion. In January 2019 I wrote that Lead Cookie's fatal flaw was that "We built our business on top of Linkedin," and that "Anytime Linkedin changes something, our entire business has to change to adjust." A pipeline can carry the same exposure. Platform risk in B2B marketing covers how to size it.

If someone else runs LinkedIn outreach for you, these questions test a proposal against the platform's rules:

My last word in the episode was that LinkedIn as a sales channel would not die, but would keep changing. If its rules changed again next quarter, which part of your pipeline would you notice first?