You can spend hours searching LinkedIn, checking profiles, trying different keywords, browsing companies, and building prospect lists. But a job title or company profile doesn't necessarily tell you whether someone is actually interested in what you sell.
A person may look like your ideal customer on paper and still have absolutely no interest in your product.
But on Linkedin there are millions of professionals discussing their work, their problems, the tools they use, the challenges they face, and the solutions they are looking for.
What if, instead of simply looking for people who could become customers, you could find people who are already participating in conversations about the problems your product or service solves?
That's the idea behind Intelli-Leads.
Intelli-Leads is an open-source lead-discovery agent designed to help you find qualified lead opportunities on LinkedIn quickly.
It researches your target customer, discovers relevant LinkedIn conversations, analyzes the context, and identifies the opportunities that are most relevant to your business.
Instead of starting with a list of people and guessing who might be interested, you start with the topics and problems that matter to your customers.
The problem with traditional LinkedIn prospecting
A typical LinkedIn prospecting process looks something like this:
Find a person → Check their profile → Decide if they might be interested → Send a message
The problem is that you're making an educated guess.
You know their role.
You may know their company.
You may know their industry.
But you don't necessarily know whether they currently have the problem you solve.
This is why building large prospect lists doesn't automatically produce qualified leads.
More prospects doesn't necessarily mean more opportunities.
What matters is finding people who are relevant and have demonstrated some level of interest in a relevant topic.
Find conversations, not just profiles
Intelli-Leads approaches LinkedIn prospecting differently.
Instead of asking:
"Who has the job title I'm looking for?"
It starts with a more useful question:
"Where are people discussing the problems my potential customers care about?"
The agent takes your target customer and researches the topics, problems, and discussions that are likely to be relevant.
It then searches for LinkedIn conversations connected to those topics.
The result is not simply a database of names.
You get real LinkedIn conversations that you can inspect, together with the people participating in them.
This gives you something that a traditional prospect list often lacks:
context.
You can see what the person is talking about, what problem they are interested in, what other people are saying, and why the conversation may be relevant to your business.
What is the proper way to do organic marketing on linkedin
Rather than sending a cold message to someone who may have no interest in what you offer, LinkedIn itself recommends a more natural approach: start by engaging with people and their conversations before trying to connect with them.
Instead of a cold reach to an email lead that may not be interested in the topic you are going to advertise.
Linkedin official marketing guide does not suggest to connect to a person you do not already know, obviously because it is not a successful strategy. At best if the person accepts you can have more connections but are not doing much very likely.
Instead the official marketing guide suggests that you could go either to an article a person wrote and post a comment there or maybe add a comment on the same linkedin post that person also commented on, or maybe even reply to the person's comment.
Then after some time, maybe the day after, you will send a connection request via Linkedin and say who you are. Now the person knows you because maybe they read your comment! Or at least you have something in common with the person because you commented on the same topic of interest.
The good news is that Intelli-leads can help you a lot automating a good part of this process!
How Intelli-Leads finds qualified lead opportunities
The process can be broken down into four main steps.
1. Define your target customer
Start by describing the type of customer you want to find.
For example:
- Hiring Managers
- Accounting Firm Managing Director
- Business Consultant
- Web design agency
The more clearly you define your target, the more useful the research becomes.
2. Research relevant topics
Intelli-Leads doesn't simply take your description and perform one search.
It researches the kinds of topics and problems that your target customers are likely to discuss.
For example, if you sell AI automation services, relevant conversations might involve:
- Hiring challenges
- Cash flow management
- Business growth
- Improving online sales
These topics become the basis for finding relevant conversations.
3. Discover LinkedIn conversations
The agent searches for LinkedIn content related to those topics.
Instead of manually searching LinkedIn over and over again, Intelli-Leads automates the research process and discovers potentially relevant posts and discussions.
This is where the system can save a significant amount of time.
Rather than spending hours trying to find conversations manually, you can let the agent perform the initial research and return a list of opportunities to investigate.
4. Identify the best opportunities
Not every conversation is equally valuable.
Intelli-Leads analyzes the discovered content and helps identify the opportunities that are most relevant to your target customer and your business.
The goal is simple:
Spend less time searching and more time talking to the right people.
From qualified lead to customer
Finding the lead is only the first step.
The important part is what you do after finding it.
This is where Intelli-Leads deliberately keeps a human in the loop.
The current open-source version is focused on lead discovery and research. It doesn't try to automatically send hundreds of connection requests or spam people with generic messages.
Instead, it gives you the information you need to start a more relevant conversation yourself.
A typical workflow looks like this:
Find a relevant conversation → Read it → Engage → Connect → Start a conversation → Qualify → Sell
This is important because the person has already shown some interest in the subject.
You're not approaching them completely out of context.
Step 1: Open the conversations found by Intelli-Leads
After the agent completes its research, it saves the results to a text file.
The file contains LinkedIn URLs for the relevant articles or posts discovered during the research.
Open those links in your browser and review the conversations.
Don't treat the output as a list of people to immediately contact.
Treat it as a list of conversations worth investigating.
Step 2: Look for genuine opportunities
Read the post and its comments.
Look for people who are discussing problems related to what you offer.
For example, imagine you are a recruitment agency looking for hiring managers.
You discover a LinkedIn post where a hiring manager is discussing how difficult it is to find qualified candidates for an open position.
That is much more interesting than simply finding someone whose profile says "Hiring Manager."
Or imagine you are targeting an Accounting Firm Managing Director and find a conversation about cash flow management, a Business Consultant discussing business growth, or a company discussing how to improve online sales.
In each case, you have more than just a profile.
You have context.
You know what they are talking about.
You know there is a relevant problem.
And you can decide whether there is a genuine opportunity to help.
Step 3: Engage with the conversation
Instead of immediately sending a sales pitch, participate in the discussion.
You might:
- Comment on the original post
- Reply to someone's comment
- Add useful information
- Share your experience
- Ask a relevant question
The goal isn't to disguise a sales pitch as a comment.
The goal is to become part of the conversation.
If your contribution is useful, the person may notice you naturally.
Step 4: Connect later
Once you've interacted with the conversation, you can send a connection request.
This is much more natural than contacting someone completely out of the blue.
For example, you could reference the conversation you both participated in:
"Hello Mr. [Name], I'm the guy who replied to your comment on the LinkedIn post about [topic]. I found the discussion interesting and thought it would be good to connect."
Now the connection has context.
You aren't a completely unknown person appearing in their inbox with a generic sales message.
Step 5: Start a real conversation
Once the connection is accepted, don't immediately jump into a sales pitch.
Continue the conversation.
Ask questions.
Understand their situation.
Find out whether the problem you identified is actually important to them.
Then, if there is a genuine fit, introduce your product or service.
The objective isn't to sell to everybody.
It's to identify the people who actually have a problem you can solve.
Why this can be better than cold outreach
Cold outreach generally starts with the person.
You find someone who appears to match your ideal customer profile and send them a message.
The challenge is that you don't necessarily know whether they are interested.
The Intelli-Leads approach starts somewhere different:
Problem → Topic → Conversation → Person → Engagement → Connection → Conversation
This gives you an additional signal of relevance.
The person isn't simply a potential customer because their job title matches your search.
They are participating in a conversation related to a problem or topic that matters to your business.
That doesn't guarantee they will become a customer.
But it gives you better context for deciding who is worth your time.
Intelli-Leads doesn't replace the human
Automation is useful for research.
It is much less useful when it comes to genuine relationships.
That's why Intelli-Leads focuses on automating the repetitive research work while leaving the actual interaction to you.
The agent can help you:
- Research your target customer
- Discover relevant topics
- Find LinkedIn conversations
- Analyze the context
- Identify promising opportunities
- Save the results for you to review
You decide:
- Which conversations are actually interesting
- Who you want to engage with
- What you want to say
- When to connect
- Whether there is a genuine business opportunity
The machine finds the opportunity. You build the relationship.
Who can use Intelli-Leads?
Intelli-Leads can be useful for anyone whose business depends on finding relevant prospects.
For example:
Founders
Find conversations where potential customers are discussing problems your startup solves.
Freelancers
Find people actively discussing the type of technical, design, marketing, or consulting work you provide.
Agencies
Discover companies and professionals discussing challenges that match your agency's services.
Sales teams
Reduce the amount of manual research required to identify relevant LinkedIn opportunities.
The real value: save time finding the right people
Lead generation can become a full-time job.
Searching.
Filtering.
Checking profiles.
Trying different keywords.
Building spreadsheets.
Repeating the same process every day.
The problem isn't necessarily a lack of potential customers.
It's the time required to find the relevant ones.
Intelli-Leads is designed to automate a large part of that research.
Instead of spending your time searching LinkedIn for hours, you can let the agent investigate relevant topics and conversations first.
Then you can spend your time where it matters most:
reviewing opportunities and talking to people.
From lead discovery to a complete sales workflow
The current open-source version of Intelli-Leads focuses on the first and most important part of the process:
finding qualified lead opportunities.
But the idea can go further.
The complete workflow could eventually look like:
Target Customer → Research → Find Relevant Conversations → Identify Qualified Leads → Engage → Connect → Start Conversation → Qualify → Convert
A more complete paid/pro version is being developed to automate additional parts of this workflow.
The principle remains the same:
Use automation to find the right opportunities faster, without removing the human element from the relationship.
Start finding qualified leads on LinkedIn
LinkedIn already contains the conversations you need.
Your potential customers are asking questions, sharing problems, discussing tools, looking for recommendations, and talking about the challenges they face.
The challenge is finding those conversations before spending hours searching manually.
Intelli-Leads helps you do exactly that.
Give it a target customer.
Let it research the relevant topics.
Let it discover LinkedIn conversations.
Review the opportunities.
Then use the context to start genuine conversations with the people who matter.
Finding qualified leads is much harder.
Intelli-Leads makes finding them faster.
Marco Pileri
Marco leads the engineering team at Intelli Design, specializing in AI-powered automation systems and intelligent lead generation tools. With over two decades of experience building software, he focuses on creating practical AI solutions that solve real business problems.