Here’s a question worth sitting with: if your LinkedIn outreach is getting a 20% reply rate but not generating pipeline, is it working?

Most people would say yes. Vuk would say no.

Vukasin Vukosavljevic — CMO of HeyReach and former first employee at Lemlist — joined me on the LinkedIn AdWise podcast to break down how HeyReach scaled from 15K MRR to $10M ARR in just 26 months. And one of the clearest threads running through the whole conversation was this: the metrics most B2B teams obsess over are the wrong ones.

Not just for outreach. For the entire go-to-market motion.

The Reply Rate Trap

Reply rate is the vanity metric of LinkedIn outreach. Everyone reports it. Leadership loves seeing it go up. And it tells you almost nothing about whether your outreach is actually working.

The number Vuk cares about — and the one HeyReach built their entire growth philosophy around — is positive reply rate. Not replies. Positive replies. Responses that signal genuine interest, move a conversation forward, or indicate a real buying signal.

The difference sounds semantic. It isn’t. A 20% reply rate full of “please remove me from your list” is actively damaging your brand and wasting your team’s time. A 3% positive reply rate that books six qualified calls per month is a growth engine.

This same principle applies directly to how we think about LinkedIn ad campaigns at Impactable. Impressions and clicks are easy to report. Pipeline influenced is what actually matters. The metric you choose to optimize for shapes every decision downstream — which audiences you target, what creative you run, how you structure your sequences.

Why 1% Can Be Better Than 20%

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Vuk shared something in the episode that reframes the entire conversation around reply rate benchmarks:

“I know users who consider 1% reply rate crazy good because their ACV deals are phenomenal. If one deal closes, it pays for the whole year of the tool.”

That’s not a rationalization for poor performance. That’s a fundamentally different way of thinking about what “good” means in outreach — one that’s tied to business economics rather than activity metrics.

If your average contract value is $50K and your outreach books two meetings a month, a 1% positive reply rate is an incredible result. If your ACV is $500 and you need volume to hit revenue targets, 1% is a disaster. The benchmark is meaningless without the business model context behind it.

This is why cookie-cutter outreach advice is so dangerous. “Aim for a 15% reply rate” sounds actionable. But if your deal economics don’t support the volume game, chasing that number will burn out your sequences, damage your sender reputation, and generate a pipeline full of prospects who don’t have the budget to buy.

The right question isn’t “what’s a good reply rate?” It’s “what reply rate, at what conversion rate, supports my revenue model?”

User Win Rate: The KPI Nobody Talks About

Vuk introduced a concept in the episode that we hadn’t heard framed quite this way before, and it’s stuck with us since: user win rate.

The idea is simple. Are your users actually winning with your product? Not just using it — winning with it. Getting the outcomes they came for. Seeing results they’d tell someone else about.

In the outreach world, that means: are your sequences generating positive replies that turn into meetings, that turn into pipeline, that turn into revenue? If they are, users win. If they’re generating activity that looks impressive in a dashboard but doesn’t move the business forward, users don’t win — and they won’t stay, refer, or expand.

“If users are not winning, they will not share it. Ultimately, if users are winning, we as a B2B business will be winning.”

This is a useful lens for any B2B marketing motion, not just outreach. When we think about LinkedIn outreach services, the measure of success isn’t how many connection requests went out or how many replies came in. It’s whether the conversations we’re starting are creating real opportunities for our clients.

The same applies to ads. A campaign that generates 50 leads a month but closes zero deals isn’t a success — it’s a reporting illusion.

The Integration Play: Why “Why Compete When You Can Integrate?” Is the Best GTM Advice We’ve Heard This Year

HeyReach didn’t just build a good product. They made a strategic bet early that shaped their entire distribution model: integrate with Clay before anyone else did.

At the time, Clay was gaining serious traction as the infrastructure layer for B2B outbound — the tool smart operators used to build enriched, personalized prospect lists at scale. HeyReach was a LinkedIn automation tool. The natural move would have been to compete for the same audience. Instead, they plugged in.

The result? Every Clay user who wanted to run LinkedIn outreach at scale had an obvious answer: HeyReach. Distribution through integration, not through ads. Vuk’s framing of it was spot-on:

“We thought, why compete when we can integrate? Instead of fighting for the same audience, we can plug into each other and grow together. You want to rent the smart distribution opportunities as much as you can.”

This is a principle worth stealing for your own go-to-market. What tools does your ICP already use and trust? Where are they already spending time? An integration or partnership with that ecosystem gets you in front of qualified buyers who already have the problem you solve — without the CPM of a cold audience.

It’s not unlike how we think about cross-channel amplification at Impactable. LinkedIn ads work better when they’re plugged into a broader ecosystem — retargeting visitors from Google search, following up on organic content that’s already resonating, amplifying what’s working on SEO. The channels that compound are the ones with connective tissue between them.

Agencies as Your Early ICP: An Underrated Go-to-Market Move

One of the more counterintuitive parts of HeyReach’s growth story is who they went after first. Not individual reps. Not SMB founders. Agencies.

On the surface, agencies seem like a harder sell — more skepticism, more procurement friction, tighter margins. But Vuk explained why they were actually the ideal early ICP: agencies run outreach for multiple clients simultaneously. One agency win wasn’t one seat. It was ten, twenty, fifty. And agencies that get results talk to other agencies.

That word-of-mouth multiplier changed the math entirely. Instead of acquiring users one at a time, HeyReach was acquiring distribution channels.

This is something that maps directly to B2B marketers thinking about where to focus their LinkedIn targeting. The question isn’t just “who’s most likely to buy?” — it’s “who, when they buy, creates the most downstream growth?” That might be an agency, a consultant, a systems integrator, a power user with a large network. The economics of a single win are very different depending on who that win is.

Our LinkedIn lead generation strategies cover this kind of ICP prioritization in depth — specifically how layered targeting on LinkedIn lets you get granular enough to focus your budget on the accounts that move the needle, not just the ones that are easiest to reach.

Don’t Turn on Paid Until Inbound Is Working

Here’s the part of the episode that directly connects Vuk’s world to ours — and where the advice gets really practical for anyone running LinkedIn ads.

HeyReach didn’t start with paid acquisition. They built inbound first: product-led word-of-mouth, agency relationships, the Clay integration, thought leadership from the founders on LinkedIn. Only once those flywheels were spinning did they layer in paid channels.

Vuk was direct about why. Paid amplifies what’s already working. If your inbound signal is weak — if users aren’t winning, if your messaging isn’t resonating organically, if you don’t have a clear story about why you win — paid ads will just accelerate the leak. You’ll spend more to acquire users who churn at the same rate, and your CPL will creep up as the algorithm struggles to find more of an audience that doesn’t really exist yet.

This is a conversation we have constantly with clients who come to us wanting to jump straight to LinkedIn ads without the organic foundation in place. The LinkedIn lead gen guide we’ve built out covers the pre-conditions for paid success — and product-market fit, or at least message-market fit, is always at the top of the list.

That said, Vuk was also clear on the flip side: waiting too long to run paid is its own mistake. Once you have signal — once you know what messaging lands, which audiences respond, what content generates genuine interest — paid becomes a multiplier.

Thought leader ads are particularly powerful here because they let you take the organic content that’s already proven itself and put distribution spend behind it. You’re not guessing at creative. You’re amplifying what already works.

Thought Leadership Isn’t Optional Anymore

The last piece of the episode worth calling out explicitly: Vuk’s take on personal branding and thought leadership as infrastructure, not vanity.

LinkedIn changed his career trajectory. He was direct about that. And the reason wasn’t follower count or engagement rate — it was that consistent, genuine posting built a body of evidence that he knew what he was talking about. By the time he joined HeyReach and started talking publicly about their growth, there was already an audience who trusted his perspective.

“LinkedIn changed my life. Personal branding and company growth are not binary.”

This is something we’ve seen play out across hundreds of client accounts. The companies whose founders and executives show up consistently on LinkedIn — sharing real takes, documenting what’s working, engaging with their ICP’s content — have a warmer audience when they run ads. Their thought leader ads perform better. Their retargeting audiences convert at higher rates. Their cost per lead is lower.

It compounds. And it compounds faster than most teams expect.

If you’re not investing in LinkedIn thought leadership as part of your demand gen motion, you’re building on sand. The paid channels work, but they work a lot harder than they need to.

The Takeaway

HeyReach’s growth from 15K MRR to $10M ARR in 26 months wasn’t a single tactic. It was a set of compounding decisions, each one building on the last:

Build a product users win with. Find the ICP with the highest distribution multiplier. Integrate instead of compete. Measure outcomes, not activity. Layer in paid only once the organic signal is clear.

None of it is revolutionary. All of it requires the discipline to not chase the shiny metric — whether that’s reply rate, follower count, or lead volume — and stay focused on the thing that actually drives revenue.

If you want to hear the full conversation, tune into the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

And if you’re ready to build the kind of LinkedIn outreach and ads ecosystem that compounds — let’s talk.