find-buyers-in-linkedin-comments

Find buyers in LinkedIn comments

A person who writes "I pay 100 a month for Sales Navigator and still build my lists by hand" under a post has told you three things a people search never will: they have the problem today, they own it, and they said it in public. This skill finds those posts, takes the people who engaged, and keeps the ones who fit. It needs nothing but LinkedIn; run it once or make it a daily pass.

What you need from the user

• The intent, in their own words and language: "people struggling with manual LinkedIn prospecting", "founders doing their own sales who hate cold email". One sentence.
• Anchors: 5 to 15 short words for tools, brands and chores the buyer would name. Sales Nav, Waalaxy, Lemlist, prospects froids, liste de prospects.
• Who is a buyer and who is not: "anyone doing their own B2B prospecting; exclude vendors, agencies, consultants, recruiters".

If they give you a post URL instead, skip the search and start at "Score the post".

Step 1. Write the searches (short, many, in every language)

LinkedIn post search is an AND over every word. A natural pain phrase like "tired of prospecting by hand" finds almost nothing. What works, measured on a real day:

Query style	Queries	Posts found in one day	Target post found
Pain phrases, 4 to 6 words	16	18	no
Topic keywords, 2 to 3 words	20	638	yes, ranked first by engagement

Rules:

• 2 to 3 words per query. Tools, brands, chores. Sales Nav, not Sales Navigator (the short form found the target post, the full name did not: never rely on one query).
• 15 to 20 queries. Write them in each language the buyer speaks.
• Sort by date, filter past 24 hours (or since your last pass). Relevance sort surfaces old high-engagement posts you already saw.
• Recall comes from the searches. Precision comes from the next two steps, never from a longer query.

Step 2. Filter on engagement first (it is free)

Median reactions on a raw result page is 0 to 4. Rank every found post by reactions + 2 × comments and keep the ones above 20. On a real day 638 posts became 45, and 11 of those had over 100 reactions. Nobody engages with a post nobody saw, and the people you want are in the engagement, not in the post.

Step 3. Score the post

Read the post body and put it in one of four buckets:

Bucket	Keep?	Tell
Rant or ask from someone who has the problem	yes	first person, present tense, a number, a question
Vendor pitch or launch	no	"we built", "excited to announce", a link to a product
Job post or hiring	no	"we're hiring", "join us"
Thought leadership about the market	maybe	third person, no personal stake; take only the commenters who disagree or ask

Score 0 to 100 against the intent. Keep 70 and above. The bucket matters more than the number: a vendor pitch with 400 reactions is 400 people who like the vendor, not buyers.

Step 4. Take the right people

From each kept post, in this order:

1. Commenters. They wrote something. Read the comment: "same here, we do it in a spreadsheet" is intent; "great post!" is nothing. Score each comment 0 to 100 against the intent, keep 70 and above.
2. Reactors. Silent, so no intent score. Keep them only if they fit the buyer description; expect 85 percent to be 2nd-degree connections.
3. The author. Off by default because the author of a post about your market is as often a vendor as a buyer. Read the profile: a founder venting about their own sales process is the best lead on the thread, and free.

Then apply the buyer description before any model scoring, as hard exclusions: vendor, agency, consultant, recruiter, SDR at a tool company. Models rate an outbound consultant 80 on "fit" if you let them.

What a real post yields: 96 reactions and 80 comments gave 150 unique people. Against a strict people-search ICP (Head of Sales, 11 to 200 employees, SaaS, France): 1 fit. Against the buyer description above: 22 fit, 5 with intent above 70, plus the author. Read engagers with a loose fit, not the ICP you use for search.

Step 5. What to do with them

Do not pitch in the thread. Visit the profile, react to the post, reply to their comment with one specific sentence (see the linkedin-comment-and-invite-writer skill), and invite two days later with a note that names the thread. The conversation opens itself.

Worked example

Post: "Help, I pay 100 a month for Sales Navigator and still build my lists by hand" (French, founder, 96 reactions, 80 comments). Found by the query Sales Nav, ranked first on engagement, scored 92 against "people struggling with manual LinkedIn prospecting". Yield after gates: 22 fitting people, 5 with explicit intent, plus the author.

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To run this every day from your own LinkedIn account, without the search loop, the GTM Otto plugin has a post-discovery skill that turns the same recipe into a daily lane. It needs a GTM Otto account.