Your first lead gen campaign

Need to set up your agent first?

Follow the getting started guide to install your agent and connect your AI provider. Using OpenClaw? See the self-hosted setup.

Before you can reach out to anyone, you need a list of the right people. A lead gen campaign finds and qualifies prospects automatically. This guide takes you from zero to your first qualified leads.

Step 1 - Teach your agent who you are

Your agent needs to understand your business to find the right people. This information is called context - set it once and your agent remembers it across every conversation.

There are 5 types of context:

Type	What to write	Example
Who am I	Your name, role, company	"Marie, CEO at DataFlow, B2B analytics platform"
Product / service	What you sell and who it's for	"Real-time dashboard for e-commerce teams, 50-500 employees"
ICP	Your ideal customer profile - who you want to find	"VP Marketing or CMO at SaaS companies, 100-1000 employees, Series A-C"
Tone of voice	How your agent should write	"Professional but friendly, no buzzwords, short sentences"
Playbook	Instructions for how to search and qualify	"Search by title, visit profile, check company size, skip freelancers"

Send this to your agent:

Here's my context. Save it for all future sessions:

Who I am: [name, role, company, value prop]
What I sell: [product/service description]
My ideal customer: [ICP - titles, industries, company size, qualifying signals]
Tone: [casual/professional, language, personality traits]

You can also edit context from the Context page without typing a prompt.

Step 2 - Create a campaign

A campaign is a named project that tracks your leads and prevents duplicate actions. Think of it as a folder for a specific audience.

Create a lead gen campaign called "[your campaign name]".
Target: [audience description].
Goal: find and qualify [X] new prospects per day.

Step 3 - Run your first search

Start simple: search by job title and location.

Search LinkedIn for [job title] in [industry/location].
Visit each profile, qualify against my ICP, and save matches to campaign "[name]".

Here's what your agent does:

Searches LinkedIn for matching profiles
Filters out obvious non-matches based on their headline alone (no profile visit needed - saves your daily limits)
Visits remaining profiles to read their full data
Evaluates each profile against your ICP
Saves qualified contacts to your campaign

Since visits count toward your daily limit (350/day), you can tighten the headline filter by adding exclusion rules to your ICP:

Update my ICP to exclude: freelancers, students,
anyone with 'intern' or 'junior' in their title,
companies under 10 employees.

How qualification works

After visiting a profile, your agent reads the full data and checks:

Does their company match your target size and industry?
Do they have the right seniority?
Have they posted about topics relevant to your product?
Are they active on LinkedIn?

Each qualified contact gets a note explaining why they matched - useful later for personalized outreach.

Your contacts and pipeline

Every profile your agent visits is saved as a contact automatically. Contacts flow through stages:

New - just discovered, not yet evaluated

Qualified - matches your ICP, ready for outreach

Approved - you've reviewed and confirmed them

When contacts engage with your content (likes, comments, replies), they get promoted automatically.

Filter contacts by campaign, pipeline stage, tag, or name in the Campaigns page.

Running your campaign

Two ways to work:

Manual (in the chat) - send prompts like:

"Run today's lead gen for campaign [name]"
"Show me today's leads"
"How many qualified leads this week?"
"Pause the campaign"

Automatic (autopilot) - activate a campaign and it runs on its own. Your agent searches, visits, and qualifies during business hours at a safe pace. Each run has its own credit budget so no single campaign drains your balance.

Set a daily target (leads per day) and a total target (total leads). Your agent tracks progress automatically. When the total is reached, the campaign completes on its own.

Use a fast model for daily lead gen

Haiku (or Gemini Flash on the budget preset) handles searching, visiting, and qualifying perfectly. Save creative models for outreach where personalization matters. See AI providers.

Test mode

Run your campaign without touching LinkedIn - your agent logs every action it would take without executing anything. No daily limits consumed. Tell your agent: "Run a test of my lead gen campaign. Show me what you'd do but don't execute anything." See Limits and account safety for more on test mode.

The method: test, measure, refine

Define your context - ICP, tone, and playbook. Ask Sonnet to help if you're unsure.
Run a test - use test mode to see what your agent would do without touching LinkedIn.
Go live with a small batch - run one day of real lead gen (30-50 profiles).
Check your numbers - how many search results passed filtering? How many visits led to qualified leads?
Refine your ICP - too few qualified leads? Broaden your criteria. Too many unqualified ones? Tighten exclusion rules.
Scale up - once your qualification rate is above 30%, activate daily autopilot.

A healthy pipeline produces 5-15 qualified leads per day from 30-50 profile visits.

What's next

Once you have qualified leads, it's time to reach out:

From connection to conversation - Connect, message, follow up, and handle replies automatically
Inbound leads - Turn incoming LinkedIn messages into qualified pipeline