LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a powerful tool for prospecting, but its core messaging feature—InMail—can be frustratingly restrictive. With only 50 InMail messages per month on the core plan, ambitious sales reps, recruiters, and founders often find themselves hitting a wall just as their outreach efforts gain momentum.

Even more concerning? Many users report that "InMails aren't effective" anyway, creating a paradox where you're limited by a feature that might not even deliver the results you need.

This article provides a playbook of field-tested strategies to bypass the 50 InMail limit, find and message prospects for free, build powerful multi-channel sequences, and leverage automation safely—transforming your outreach from a trickle to a scalable engine.

Deconstructing LinkedIn's Limits: Know the Rules to Bend Them

Before diving into workarounds, let's understand exactly what we're working with:

The Official InMail Credit System

LinkedIn allocates a specific number of InMail credits monthly based on your subscription:

• Sales Navigator Core: 50 credits/month

• Premium Business: 15 credits/month

• Recruiter Lite: 30 credits/month

• Premium Career: 5 credits/month

Unused credits roll over each month up to a cap (e.g., 150 for Sales Navigator), but this still creates a hard limit on your outreach capacity.

The "Good News" Rule

LinkedIn does offer one helpful policy: you get a credit back if the recipient responds (accepts/declines) within 90 days. This incentivizes quality messaging but doesn't solve the volume problem.

Beyond InMail: Connection Request Limits

It's also worth noting that LinkedIn caps standard connection requests at approximately 100 per week for most accounts—another limitation to be aware of when planning your outreach strategy.

The "Free Message" Playbook: Three Ways to Send Unlimited Messages on LinkedIn

Here are three immediate, actionable strategies to message prospects without using a single InMail credit:

Strategy 1: Hunt for "Open Profiles"

What they are: Many LinkedIn Premium users have "Open Profiles," allowing anyone to message them for free.

How to find them manually: On a prospect's profile, click on More > Message. If the pop-up shows a Free Message option, their profile is open, and it won't cost you a credit.

How to find them at scale: Tools like Evaboot can filter and export lists of leads from Sales Navigator, specifically identifying those with Open Profiles. This makes the process scalable for serious prospecting efforts.

Strategy 2: Leverage LinkedIn Groups

The method: Being a member of the same LinkedIn group as your prospect allows you to message them directly without being connected.

The caveat: These messages often land in the "Message Requests" folder, so your opening line needs to be compelling enough to warrant opening.

Scaling the process: Use tools like Phantombuster to extract member lists from relevant, active groups in your industry, creating ready-made outreach lists of people you can message for free.

Strategy 3: Connect with Event Attendees

The opportunity: LinkedIn Events gather highly relevant prospects in one place, and you can message attendees directly from the event page.

The strategy: This is a high-intent, timely approach. Reach out to attendees right after an event to follow up on a session or topic while it's still fresh in their minds.

Scaling the process: Use Phantombuster's LinkedIn Event Guest Exporter to extract attendee lists for targeted outreach campaigns focused on event participants.

Go Multi-Channel: When Email is Better Than InMail

Breaking free from the LinkedIn ecosystem by integrating email into your outreach can dramatically scale your efforts and provide a crucial backup channel.

Why Multi-Channel Wins

• Bypass Limits Entirely: Email has higher volume limits (e.g., 150/day) than LinkedIn.

• No Single Point of Failure: If your LinkedIn account faces restrictions or emails land in spam, you have another channel to rely on.

• Reach the Unreachable: Email finders can retrieve contact info for 70-80% of leads, including those you can't message on LinkedIn.

Step 1: Find Their Corporate Email Address

Several Chrome extensions can help you discover email addresses directly from LinkedIn profiles:

• Hunter - A popular tool with a free tier of 25 searches/month

• Emailchaser - Offers competitive accuracy with affordable plans

• Apollo.io - Comprehensive tool with CRM integration

• Saleshandy Connect - Free forever with real-time verification

In a recent test of email finder tools, results varied significantly. For example, Saleshandy Connect found 88/100 emails with 0 unverified, while Apollo.io found 90 but had 5 unverified.

Step 2: Build a Simple Multi-Channel Sequence

Here's a sample outreach sequence that combines LinkedIn and email:

• Day 1: Personalized LinkedIn connection request. (Keep it short, focus on a shared commonality).

• Day 3: Follow up with Email 1 (if connected & email found). Reference the LinkedIn connection.

• Day 5: Light touchpoint on LinkedIn (e.g., like or comment on a recent post).

• Day 7: Follow up with Email 2, providing a different angle of value.

• Day 10: Send a LinkedIn DM (if connected).

This approach creates multiple touchpoints across different channels, significantly increasing your chances of getting a response without relying solely on InMail.

The Automation Tightrope: Scaling Safely to Avoid LinkedIn Jail

Let's address the elephant in the room: automation tools can supercharge your outreach, but they come with risks. As one user bluntly puts it: "Dude you better not try to act smart with LinkedIn... they may ban you forever."

Acknowledge the Risk

LinkedIn does not officially support automation, and using third-party tools comes with the risk of account restrictions or bans. However, many sales professionals use these tools successfully by following best practices.

The Golden Rules of Safe Automation

1. Warm-Up Your Account: Don't go from 0 to 100 connection requests overnight. Gradually increase your activity over several weeks to establish a normal pattern.

2. Stay Within "Human" Limits: Never exceed the ~100 connection requests per week limit. Keep daily activity reasonable and space out your actions.

3. Prioritize Personalization: The biggest red flag for LinkedIn is sending generic, spammy messages at scale. Use personalization variables and craft thoughtful templates that sound like a real human wrote them.

4. Choose Reputable Tools: There's confusion between tools like Dripify and Linked Helper in the market. Tools that run in the cloud can sometimes be riskier than those that operate from your browser, but the key is always how the tool is configured. Some users report switching tools (like from Dripify to Closely) triggered LinkedIn warnings.

Managing the Flood: How to Handle All the New Replies Without Chaos

If you successfully implement the strategies above, you'll face a new challenge: managing a flood of conversations across multiple channels. Your LinkedIn inbox can quickly become a chaotic mess of hot leads, follow-ups, and cold responses. Critical messages get buried, and opportunities are lost.

Achieving 'Inbox Zero' on LinkedIn with Kondo

This is where a tool like Kondo comes in—a 'Superhuman for LinkedIn' designed to help you manage high-volume conversations efficiently:

• Triage with Labels & Split Inboxes: Instead of one cluttered feed, categorize conversations with labels like Hot Lead, Candidate, or Follow-Up Needed. View each category in its own clean, prioritized inbox. Use the L shortcut to apply labels instantly.

• Never Miss a Follow-Up with Reminders: When a prospect says "check back in a month," don't rely on your calendar. Hit H in Kondo to snooze the conversation until the right follow-up date. It will disappear and reappear at the top of your inbox exactly when needed.

• Reply in Seconds with Snippets: Save common messages (like your Calendly link or answers to FAQs) as snippets. Type ; to instantly insert a template, personalized with the prospect's name.

• Sync to Your CRM Automatically: With Kondo's Business Tier integrations, you can automatically push conversation data to HubSpot, Salesforce (via Zapier/Make), Google Sheets, or Notion, eliminating manual data entry and ensuring your CRM stays updated with LinkedIn activity.

From Limits to Limitless Outreach

The 50 InMail per month limit isn't a wall; it's a prompt to get more creative and strategic with your outreach. By moving beyond InMail and building a scalable system, you can connect with more prospects and close more deals.

To recap the core strategies:

• Leverage free messaging loopholes (Open Profiles, Groups, Events)

• Expand your reach with a multi-channel email strategy

• Use automation safely and responsibly

• Manage the resulting conversations efficiently with a tool like Kondo

With this approach, your outreach can scale far beyond LinkedIn's official limitations while maintaining compliance and effectiveness. The final piece is ensuring you have the tools in place to manage the success you generate and turn conversations into conversions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I send more than 50 InMails on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

You can bypass the 50 InMail limit by messaging prospects for free through Open Profiles, mutual LinkedIn Groups, and event attendee lists. These methods allow you to send messages that don't count against your monthly InMail credits. The three primary strategies are identifying users with "Open Profiles" that allow anyone to message them, joining the same professional groups as your prospects, and messaging attendees of relevant LinkedIn Events.

What is the safest way to automate LinkedIn outreach?

The safest way to automate LinkedIn outreach is to stay within human-like activity limits, warm up your account gradually, and prioritize personalization to avoid sounding like a bot. Because LinkedIn's official policy does not support automation, it's crucial to minimize risk by never exceeding approximately 100 connection requests per week, slowly increasing your activity over time, and using thoughtful, personalized templates.

Why is a multi-channel approach better than just using LinkedIn?

A multi-channel approach using both LinkedIn and email is better because it bypasses LinkedIn's volume limits, provides a backup communication channel, and allows you to reach a higher percentage of your prospects. While LinkedIn is powerful, its weekly connection and monthly InMail limits create a bottleneck. Adding email to your sequence lets you contact significantly more people and ensures you have another way to reach your prospect if your LinkedIn message isn't seen.

How can I find a prospect's email address from their LinkedIn profile?

You can find a prospect's email address from their LinkedIn profile using specialized Chrome extensions known as email finder tools. Tools like Hunter, Saleshandy Connect, or Apollo.io can be installed in your browser. When you visit a prospect's LinkedIn profile, these extensions can search for and often verify their corporate email address, allowing you to add them to a multi-channel outreach sequence.

What should I do when my LinkedIn inbox gets too busy from successful outreach?

When your LinkedIn inbox becomes overwhelmed with replies, you should use a conversation management tool to organize, prioritize, and respond to messages efficiently. Increased outreach leads to more replies, which can create chaos. A tool like Kondo helps you manage this volume by adding features like labels to categorize conversations (e.g., Hot Lead), reminders to follow up at the right time, and snippets to send common replies instantly, ensuring no opportunity is missed.