During our latest How I Sell with Sales Navigator session, Brand strategist
His system is built on compounding behaviors: filtering his feed by targeted lead lists, commenting strategically to maximize visibility, responding to profile views with unexpected warmth and humor, and organizing leads by engagement stage rather than pipeline status.
What stood out during this session was the philosophy and strategy around his use of LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.
The mindset behind the method: LinkedIn as a digital conference
Liam's entire approach to LinkedIn starts with a single reframe: he treats the platform like a digital networking event.
Every post is a panel talk. Every comment is a hallway conversation. Every profile view is someone noticing you across the room.
👉 In this framing, the goal isn't to close deals from a cold DM. It's to become a familiar, credible presence to the right people, so that when a business conversation does eventually happen, it already feels warm. You're not interrupting a stranger. You're continuing a relationship.
Most sellers approach LinkedIn in reverse. They identify a target, send a connection request, and immediately pitch. Liam's logic is the opposite: build familiarity first, let intent emerge naturally.
Sales Navigator is what makes this scalable. Without it, you're relying on LinkedIn's algorithm to decide what content you see, and it bases that on engagement patterns, not what's most relevant to your goals. Sales Navigator gives you control. You decide who's in your "conference room." You curate the conversations you show up in. You shape the relationships before they're relationships.
That's the foundation. Everything else follows from it.
Filtering your feed by lead list: the compounding engine
Tutorial: this is how Liam build his lead lists:
The foundation of Liam's workflow is the lead list. Rather than searching for people one by one, he builds segmented lists organized by persona.
For his role at Brandy AI, his current lists include marketing executives, content and SEO professionals, brand executives, and enterprise target accounts.
How to build a lead list in Sales Navigator:
- Navigate to the Lead filters section in Sales Navigator
- Enter your target job titles in the Current job title field
- Set filters for seniority level (e.g., VP, Director, C-suite) and geography
- Apply the "Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days" filter — Liam calls this filter alone worth the cost of the subscription
- Click Save search, then begin reviewing profiles and saving them to a named list
That last filter is critical. Liam found early on that follower count doesn't equal activity. Of a pool of 2,500 people matching his search criteria, only 310 had posted in the last 30 days. Those are the people worth prioritizing.
Once Liam has built his lead lists (organized by persona, like marketing executives, brand leaders, or enterprise accounts) he doesn't passively scroll LinkedIn. He filters his Sales Navigator feed to show only content from those lists.
This is a small habit with a large effect.
💡 When you filter your feed this way, every comment and reaction lands in front of the exact people you want to reach. You're not scattering attention across a generic timeline. You're concentrating presence where it counts.
How to filter your feed by lead list:
- On the Sales Navigator homepage, locate the feed filter options
- Select Leads to see content from everyone across your saved list
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Or select a specific list to focus on one audience segment at a time.
Liam structures his week around this intentionally. The point is to build a consistent rhythm of showing up in front of the same people, week after week, creating the feeling of familiarity that makes outreach feel warm instead of cold.
The compounding effect here is real. The tenth time someone sees your name in their notifications, you're no longer a stranger. You're a presence. That's when conversations start to happen organically.
The commenting strategy that drives 50%+ of his profile appearances
Here's the finding that surprised many people in the session: 51% of Liam's LinkedIn appearances in the previous 7 days came from comments, not posts.
Think about what that means: you don't have to be a prolific content creator to build visibility on LinkedIn. You just have to show up in the right conversations.
The logic is straightforward: when you comment, your headline travels with you. Every person who sees that comment sees your name, your role, and your company. It's a moving billboard that follows you around the platform, entirely for free.
But Liam's approach to commenting isn't random, it's deliberate - and the strategy is what makes it work.
💡 You can view your own LinkedIn profile analytics here.
- Comment on posts with low engagement first. A post with 8 reactions is an opportunity. You might be the only commenter, which means the author will almost certainly notice you, and likely check your profile. On a post with 400 comments, you're invisible.
- Prioritize people in your ideal client profile. 10 comments across 10 posts from the same person compounds their awareness of you far faster than scattered engagement. The goal isn't reach, it's depth with the right people.
- Don't wait until you know someone. Liam is direct on this: commenting on a stranger's content isn't just acceptable, it's one of the fastest ways to get on their radar. Especially when the comment adds genuine value to the conversation.
👉 For posting your own content, Liam recommends finding a cadence you can sustain for 6 months, even if that's just once a week. The platform rewards consistency over intensity. A seller who posts once a week for a year will almost always outperform one who posts every day for a month and burns out.
What to do when someone checks your profile
In Sales Navigator, you can see who's viewed your profile, and this signal is incredibly important. When someone visits your profile after you've commented on their post or connected with them, that's intent. They're curious, and the door is open.
Most sellers either ignore this signal or respond with a stiff business introduction. Liam does something different: he sends a GIF!
“I'm a big fan of GIFs. If somebody looks at my profile, I will almost always send them a GIF of Forrest Gump waving, or a GIF of Ralph from Simpsons waving at them. It's a lot easier than saying, “hey, I saw you looked at my LinkedIn profile, you know, anything you see interesting?”
You just start the conversation by making them laugh. And then it immediately relieves any tension, and it sort of lifts their guard down so they don't think I'm just trying to pitch them something.
I'm of the mindset that if you're honest and open about why you're connecting with somebody, and you take an interest in who they are and what they do, they're more likely to accept your connection request and strike up a good conversation with you.”
👉 The strategic logic here runs deeper than it might appear. Cold outreach fails because it feels transactional and impersonal. Humor disarms that dynamic entirely. It makes you memorable. It gives the other person an easy, low-stakes reason to respond, and it opens a door that a formal pitch would likely keep shut.
The goal at this stage isn't to sell something. It's to make the first real interaction feel human. From there, the relationship can develop on its own terms.
Organizing leads by engagement stage
For sellers doing active outbound, Liam suggests using separate lists as a lightweight CRM inside Sales Navigator, organized not by company or title, but by engagement stage.
The structure he recommends looks something like this:
- Responsive prospects: people who've engaged with your content or replied to your messages
- People who engage with your content: those who comment on or react to your posts
- Recently connected: new connections you wants to follow up with before the relationship goes cold
This is a different way of thinking about pipeline: rather than organizing contacts by where they sit in a sales funnel, this method organizes them by the quality and warmth of the relationship. The question isn't "what stage of the deal are they in?", it's "where are we in getting to know each other?"
This shift in framing keeps outreach feeling relational rather than transactional. It also makes it easy to pick up conversations at the right moment, allowing you to reach out to a responsive prospect when they've just posted something relevant, rather than following a rigid sequence tied to days since first contact.
💡 For those who use a CRM alongside Sales Navigator, this list structure can act as a pre-pipeline layer, capturing relationships before they're formally in a sales process, so no warm signal gets lost.
A reflection on Liam’s system behind the tactics
What makes Liam's approach distinctive isn't any single tactic, but rather the coherence of the system.
Every element reinforces the others. Targeted lead lists make feed filtering meaningful; feed filtering makes commenting intentional; strategic commenting generates profile views; profile views create openings for human connection; and organizing leads by engagement stage ensures those connections are nurtured, not forgotten.
None of it relies on volume. It relies on consistency, intentionality, and a genuine belief that relationships are what drive sustainable growth on LinkedIn.
If you want to put this into practice, the place to start isn't with tools. It's with the question Liam asks himself before anything else: who do I actually want to be a familiar face to?
Build your lists around that answer. Filter your feed to see signals from those people. Show up in their conversations. Let the relationships develop before you need them.
💬 Have you tried any of these methods? Let us know in the comments!
👉 Connect with Liam Darmody on LinkedIn!
