How our two-phase LinkedIn Ads system generated $618K in pipeline in one quarter
About Aline
Aline is a legal tech platform that helps in-house legal teams manage contracts and legal operations more efficiently. Founded by a former General Counsel, the company has a unique advantage: the person behind the product has lived the exact pain their buyers face every day.
Their target audience (General Counsels and legal operations leaders at mid-sized companies) is a hard group to reach through traditional marketing. They’re skeptical of vendor outreach and rarely respond to cold ads. Aline needed a system that would build trust before asking for a conversation.
The Challenge
When Aline came to us, they had no paid campaigns running on LinkedIn. No warm audiences. No retargeting data. And no pipeline coming from the platform.
The founder had credibility in the legal space, but no way to scale that credibility beyond her immediate network. Organic posts reached a limited audience, and there was no system to turn attention into pipeline.
Now we had to shift into a lead generation strategy that would turn this credibility into pipeline.
What We Did
We built a two-phase system designed to earn trust before asking for anything.
- Phase 1: Thought Leader Ads (Months 1–3): We ran Thought Leader Ads featuring the founder’s perspective on the challenges GCs deal with daily. These weren’t product pitches. They were insights and observations from someone who had been in their shoes. The goal was recognition: get her name in front of every target account, consistently, until they associated it with credible thinking.
- Phase 2: Conversation Ads (Months 4–6): Once accounts were warm, we layered in Conversation Ads — LinkedIn’s native direct message format. These only went to people who had already engaged with the Thought Leader Ads or visited the website. The message acknowledged their engagement and offered a tangible incentive for a conversation. Because the audience already knew the founder, the message landed as a warm invitation, not a cold pitch.
- Sequencing as the strategy: The critical decision was what we didn’t do. We didn’t blast Conversation Ads to cold audiences. We didn’t run lead gen forms from day one. We invested three months in building familiarity before we ever asked for a meeting. That patience is what made the conversion numbers possible.
What Happened Next
- 44 qualified leads generated in one quarter at $186 per lead
- 93% show-up rate on booked calls
- 73% of calls converted into active pipeline
- $618,400 in total pipeline generated on $17,149 in ad spend
- ~36x pipeline-to-spend ratio
Takeaway
Conversation Ads can be a gamechanger on LinkedIn — but only when your audience already knows who you are. The leads were affordable and the show-up rate was exceptional because every prospect had been exposed to the founder’s content for weeks before receiving a direct message. The system matters more than any single tactic. Build trust first, then convert it.
👉 Want to see how a similar system could work for your company? Connect with us and book a strategy call here!
