How to get CISOs to reply: 62% acceptance, 56% reply rate on LinkedIn
Danilo Prelevikj, Co-Founder at Viralnetix cracked one of LinkedIn's hardest audiences by treating outreach as a conversation, not a pitch — and CISOs started talking back.
Useful links and tools
CISOs can smell a sales pitch before they even open the message. When it comes from a practitioner instead of a rep, the whole dynamic flips. It's not seller-to-buyer anymore, it's peer-to-peer.
How it works
The problem: CISOs don't respond to cold pitches
Chief information security officers are some of the most unresponsive people on LinkedIn, and it's not hard to see why. They get cold pitches all day, every day. Straight cold outbound rarely lands, no matter how sharp the copy is.
Danilo was running an evergreen campaign for a cybersecurity client targeting CISOs and security leads at companies with 100 to 2,000 employees, split into two parallel tracks: companies with OT environments like manufacturing and healthcare, and cybersecurity service providers who could resell or integrate the product. He needed a way to get in front of that audience before the pitch even started.
Step 1: Find people already talking about the problem
Danilo used Trigify to track people actively engaging with popular cybersecurity posts relevant to what the client sells. Anyone liking or commenting on the right topic was already thinking about it, which meant the conversation started half-warm instead of ice cold.
Step 2: Qualify every engaged lead before reaching out
Every engaged lead got pushed to Clay for qualifying. Clay confirmed whether the person was a partner or a prospect, checked job title fit, and pulled personalization straight from the exact post they'd interacted with.
Step 3: Lead with conversation, not a pitch
The outreach itself was conversation-first. Soft openers, no pitch, no meeting CTA. Just a real back-and-forth. [UNCLEAR — confirm with contributor: verbatim message templates for opener and follow-ups]
Once the exchange was a few messages deep and the fit was clear, the client asked for the booking. By then, the lead was already warmed up, so the ask didn't land like a sales move.
Step 4: Send from a practitioner, not a salesperson
The sender wasn't even a sales rep. It was a cybersecurity practitioner. That peer-to-peer framing, instead of seller-to-buyer, did a lot of the heavy lifting on its own. It's a big part of why the acceptance rate climbed as high as it did.
Step 5: Catch non-responders on a second channel
LinkedIn non-responders got followed up via email through Instantly, using HeyReach's native integration. Nobody who didn't reply on LinkedIn just fell off the list — they moved to a second channel automatically.
Key takeaways
- Warm the lead with intent signals before you ever send a message. Engagement on relevant content is a better qualifier than a title on a spreadsheet.
- Skip the pitch until the fit is confirmed. A real conversation earns the right to ask for a meeting — a cold ask doesn't.
- Who sends the message matters as much as what it says. A practitioner talking peer-to-peer outperforms a rep pitching a product.
- Non-responders aren't dead leads. Following up on a second channel turned LinkedIn silence into email conversations.
