"Why we show LinkedIn leads we're not sure about"

Short answer: when a lead looks right but you can't confirm their company, don't drop them and don't message them. Put them in a separate "check by hand" list, and count only the confirmed ones toward your target.

The problem

A search result gives you a name, a title, a company and a location, and not much more. Say it reads "Operations Manager at Nova, Gdańsk". Is Nova the 30-person logistics firm you're targeting, a salon with the same name, or a company that closed last year? From the search result alone you can't tell, and the person's title fits perfectly.

This happens all the time, and more often the narrower your target is. If you only want one kind of company in one country, the check is strict, so a lot of good people end up in the "can't confirm yet" pile.

Two easy answers, both wrong

Drop them. It feels safe, and it throws away real fits. You've already spent the effort to find and score them, and the company line being thin is a reason to look closer, not a reason to discard.

Message them anyway. This is the acceptance-rate problem: invites to people at the wrong kind of company get ignored, and low acceptance hurts the whole account. One wrong guess is cheap. A list full of them is not.

The third answer: label and hold

In NudgeLink's lead discovery, a person who looks like a fit but whose company wasn't confirmed is kept, and marked "needs verification: company unconfirmed". A few rules go with that:

• They don't count toward your target. Results are shown as qualified, company to verify, and still needed, where "still needed" is your target minus the confirmed fits. A run doesn't stop at "target reached" because it found twenty maybes.
• Their score stays honest. The score is capped while the company is unconfirmed, and the card says why. They pass the quality threshold on how well the person fits, so they show up, but they aren't presented as sure things.
• The best maybes are checked first. Reading a full profile is usually what settles the company, so the unconfirmed leads with the best fit are enriched first.
• You decide. Nothing here is messaged until you accept it. You can check by hand and accept, or reject.

It follows the same principle as the rest of how scoring works: a lead that doesn't qualify is kept visible as data, never silently discarded.

How to do it by hand

You don't need a tool for this. In a spreadsheet, add a column "company confirmed?" with three values: yes, maybe, no. Then spend two minutes per maybe:

1. Open the company's LinkedIn page. Do the name, size and country match what you're targeting?
2. Open the company's website. Does it exist, is it active (recent news, working contact page), and does it do what your target customers do?
3. Check the official register if you target registered businesses. In Poland that's KRS for companies and CEIDG for sole traders; most countries have an equivalent. It confirms that the company exists and is still trading.
4. Check the person still works there. The current role on their profile should have a start date that makes sense.

Only "yes" gets an invite. "Maybe" goes to a second pass next week, or gets dropped if you still can't tell.

What it costs

More clicking, and a run can take longer to reach its target, because the maybes don't count. We think that's the right trade. A wrong invite costs you acceptance rate and account trust, and a maybe that you checked and confirmed costs two minutes and turns into a real lead.

If your lead list has a lot of "probably fine" in it, start there. Label the doubtful ones, count only the confirmed ones, and keep the numbers in your reply and acceptance rates honest.