Cold outreach to a company you have zero connection with converts badly. The fix everyone knows: find the person on your team who knows someone there. The problem is actually finding that path — cross-referencing your team’s networks against a target account by hand is hours of LinkedIn clicking per deal.

This tutorial shows the automated version: give it your people and your targets, get back ranked introduction paths — shared employers, overlapping tenure, shared schools — plus the single best connector to ask.

The tool: LinkedIn Warm Path Finder on the Apify Store. No LinkedIn cookies, no login.

How it works

The actor takes two lists:

  1. Connectors — your people: teammates, alumni, advisors, investors. Anyone whose network could contain a path to your targets.
  2. Targets — either specific people (target_urls) or entire companies (target_company_urls).

It then walks the public overlap between the two lists and returns ranked warm paths with the evidence behind each one.

Step 1 — Collect connector URLs

List the LinkedIn profile URLs of your team, your alumni network, your advisors — the people willing to make an introduction for you:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-teammate/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-alumni-friend/

Step 2 — Add targets

Either specific people:

{
  "connector_urls": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-teammate/",
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-alumni-friend/"
  ],
  "target_urls": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/target-buyer/"
  ]
}

…or whole companies (used when target profile URLs are empty):

{
  "connector_urls": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-teammate/"
  ],
  "target_company_urls": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/target-account/"
  ]
}

Company mode finds paths to people at those companies — useful when you don’t know yet who the right buyer is.

Step 3 — Run and read the paths

Each result is a ranked warm path: who connects you, to whom, and why the path is real — shared employer, overlapping tenure, shared school. The actor also names the best connector to ask for each target, so you start with the strongest ask instead of guessing.

Typical use:

  • Account-based sales — run your top 10 target accounts, get the intro map, then sequence warm asks before any cold email goes out.
  • Fundraising — find which of your advisors overlaps with which funds.
  • Recruiting — which teammate can intro us to this candidate?

Why warm paths beat cold outreach

A warm intro converts several times better than a cold email because the recipient’s trust starts pre-loaded. The expensive part was never the asking — it was the finding. This makes the finding a five-minute job instead of an afternoon of clicking.

Going further

Pricing

Pay-per-event on the Apify platform. New accounts include free platform credit — a typical single-account path-finding run costs cents. See the actor page for current pricing.

FAQ

Do I need to log in to LinkedIn? No — the actor works from public data without cookies or login.

Does it message anyone? No. It only finds paths; the introduction ask is always made by a human.

What counts as a path? Public, verifiable overlap: shared employers, overlapping tenure, shared schools. It doesn’t infer “they might know each other” from nothing.