Context

When running LinkedIn outreach sequences, you may want to avoid sending messages or connection requests to people you're already connected with on LinkedIn. This helps maintain professional relationships and prevents awkward situations where you're reaching out to existing connections through automated sequences.

Answer

Yes, you can prevent outreach to your first-degree LinkedIn connections. When setting up your LinkedIn messaging sequence, you can configure the connection request step to automatically stop the lead's sequence if you're already connected with a contact.

Here's how to set this up:

1. When creating or editing your sequence, go to the "Settings" tab > "Messaging" > "Edit sequence".

2. Add or navigate to the LinkedIn Invitation (connection request) step

3. In the LinkedIn Invitation settings panel, locate the dropdown menu for "Behavior if a connection already exists when sending a Linkedin invitation".

4. Select "Stop Sequence" from the dropdown options

This setting will automatically end the outreach sequence for any contacts you're already connected with on LinkedIn, ensuring they don't receive additional messages through your campaign.

Note: If your sequence includes both LinkedIn and email steps, the prospect may still receive emails before the sequence is stopped. Therefore, this option is best suited for LinkedIn-only sequences.

Alternative method

Export connections and add them to an exclusion list: with an external tool, export the LinkedIn connections of the relevant account and add them to an exclusion list to hard-block them from your campaigns. This is the recommended approach for multi-channel sequences (LinkedIn + email), as it ensures that excluded prospects will not receive any outreach at all.

Please note that it is not currently possible to exclude existing connections directly from the search interface when creating a list.