Audiences

An audience is the defined set of prospects a campaign reaches. You describe who you want, Handshake searches LinkedIn for matches, then checks each person against your description so only the right ones come through.

What it is

An audience is a list of the people you want to reach, built in two stages. First you write a short brief that describes your ideal prospect. Handshake then searches LinkedIn for everyone who might fit, and qualifies each result one by one against your brief. The people who clearly fit surface for you to review and approve; the rest are set aside. Every audience belongs to a campaign - the campaign is the outreach sequence, the audience is who it goes to.

Why it exists

Building a good prospect list by hand is slow and easy to get wrong. A raw LinkedIn search gives you thousands of names, most of them not quite right. Handshake does the searching for you and then reads each profile against your brief, so you start from a list that has already been filtered for fit rather than wading through everyone. You stay in control: nothing gets messaged until you approve the contacts.

Who can see it

Partners and their client/seat users build and manage audiences for the clients they have access to. Admins can see audiences across all partners. What you see is always scoped to the client and account you have selected in the breadcrumb bar at the top of the screen.

A partner can also send an audience to their client for sign-off using a share link, which lets the client review and approve without logging in (covered below).

How it works

1. Create an audience

You create an audience from inside a campaign. Open the campaign and choose Add Audience. A dialog opens with three ways to build the list:

Auto Generated - you describe your ideal prospect in plain words and Handshake builds the LinkedIn search for you. This is the normal path.
Sales Navigator URL - if you already have a Sales Navigator search or list, paste its URL and Handshake imports the people from it. Requires an active Sales Navigator subscription on the connected seat.
Profile URLs - paste specific LinkedIn profile links to import exactly those people.

2. Write the brief

For an Auto Generated audience you fill in a short brief. These fields do two jobs: some shape the search, and some are used later to judge each person's fit.

Field	What it is	Used for
Target Audience	The roles you want, e.g. "VP of Sales, Sales Directors, CROs at B2B SaaS companies"	Search + fit check
Target Industries	Where those people work, e.g. "Marketing agencies, SaaS companies"	Search + fit check
Target Geography	Countries or regions, e.g. "USA, UK, UAE"	Search + fit check (location is a hard requirement)
Primary Roadblock	The main problem this person faces	Fit check
Key Benefit We Offer	The value you bring them	Fit check
Example Companies (optional)	Company pages that look like your ideal customer	Sharpens the fit check
Audience Name	A label so you can find it later	Display only

What makes a good brief: be specific about the identity of the person - their role, their industry, and where they are. Those three define the lane and are taken literally. Describe the roadblock and benefit in real terms, the way you would explain them to a colleague, because Handshake reads each profile and asks "does this person likely face that problem and benefit from this?" Vague briefs let too many marginal people through; overly narrow ones can starve the search. Aim for clear and honest rather than clever.

When you are ready, choose Generate Search. For a Sales Navigator URL, choose Import [number] Contacts instead.

3. Search casts a wide net

Handshake then searches LinkedIn (through its data provider) for everyone who could match. This stage deliberately errs wide - it would rather pull in a borderline person than miss a real one, because the next stage does the precise filtering. A search pulls up to 2,500 people at a time, and each connected seat has a daily limit of about 2,500 imported profiles so it never hammers LinkedIn. If your search would return more than 2,500 people, Handshake splits it into smaller segments (for example by region or seniority) and runs them in turn, so nobody who matches is silently dropped.

Contacts start appearing in the audience as they are found, so you can watch the list fill in. A large search takes time to work through; you do not have to wait on the page, and you get an email when it finishes.

4. Qualification checks each person against the brief

Once people are found, Handshake reads each profile - their role, company, headline, location and tenure - and judges it against your brief. Every contact lands in one of three states:

Qualified (green check) - a clear fit. Ready to be approved and messaged.
To Review (blue eye) - probably a fit, but Handshake is not confident enough to be sure. Held for you to decide.
Unqualified (red cross) - not a fit. Set aside, not messaged.

The check leans inclusive: When a person is borderline, Handshake errs toward keeping them, because you review everyone before anything sends. Location is the one hard line - if neither the person nor their company is in your target geography, they are not qualified.

Qualified and unqualified are not deleted from view - you can always see the full results and override any decision. But unqualified contacts are kept out of your send list, so messages only ever go to people you have approved.

5. Review and approve contacts

Open the audience and go to the Contacts tab. You will see the qualified results (and can switch to see all of them). For each contact you can:

Click the status icon to change it. Clicking cycles through Qualified -> Unqualified -> To Review, so you can overrule Handshake on any individual.
Select several at once and use the bulk actions to approve a batch together.

Anyone in To Review is waiting on your judgement - mark them qualified to include them or unqualified to drop them. When you are happy, approve the qualified contacts. That moves them from the staging list into the live audience, and only then can the campaign draft messages for them.

The audience also has a brief/configuration view where you can read Handshake's summary of the audience and edit the brief later. Changing the identity fields (roles, industries, geography) is a big change - it can mean your existing contacts no longer match, so Handshake will suggest re-running the search. Changing the roadblock or benefit is a smaller change that may just need a re-check.

6. Segments and lanes

Two things divide an audience into lanes:

When a search is too big for one pass, Handshake splits it into segments and reports them together with a single summary email when they all finish.
After contacts are in, Handshake can propose one or more campaigns from them on the Campaign Setup screen, each with its own targeting and messaging angle. You toggle the ones you want on, edit their details, and choose Proceed to create them.

7. Park and move contacts

Contacts are not stuck in one place. From a contact's actions you can:

Move to [another audience] - shift the contact into a sibling audience in the same campaign.
Approval - send the contact back to the review queue to be looked at again.
Park (remove from audience) - take the contact out of this audience without deleting the person, so you can place them somewhere else later.

This lets you tidy a list, rescue a good contact from the wrong lane, or hold someone aside without losing them.

8. Live vs Paused

An approved audience is Live - its approved contacts can receive messages. You can pause an audience at any time: Pausing stops new outreach and clears messages that were queued but not yet sent (replies are never touched). Pausing does not delete contacts or their history, so it is fully reversible - resume and the audience goes back to Live and picks up where it left off. See Campaigns for how sending is controlled at the campaign level too.

A partner can hand an audience to their client for sign-off without giving them a login. Use the Share button on the audience to open the share dialog, which has two tabs:

Share Link - generate a link you can send yourself. You can optionally restrict it to named email addresses and set when it expires (7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or no expiration - the default is 30 days). Choose Generate Link and copy it.
Share via Email - have Handshake email the link directly to one or more people.

When the recipient opens the link, what they can do depends on how you set it up:

If you limited the link to specific emails, they first verify themselves: They enter their email and Handshake sends a 6-digit code to confirm it is really them. The code lasts about 10 minutes and they get a few attempts before needing a fresh one. An email that is not on your list is turned away.
Once in (or straight away, for an open link), they see the audience just as you do for review. They can read the brief and Approve it, go through the contacts and mark each one qualified or unqualified, use Mark All Qualified / Mark All Unqualified, and finally Approve Import to sign off the qualified contacts.

Approving through the share link does the same thing as approving inside the app: The qualified contacts move into the live audience. Every approval is recorded with the email of the person who made it, so you have a clear record of who signed off. You can revoke a share link at any time, after which it stops working immediately.

Limits and what to watch out for

Search size: a single search pulls up to 2,500 people; bigger searches are split into segments automatically. Each connected seat also has a daily import budget of about 2,500 profiles - if you hit it, the import pauses and continues the next day.
Targeting size: campaigns work best with roughly 2,000-2,500 contacts. A much smaller list limits results; a much larger one is split or capped.
Unqualified contacts are not deleted - they stay visible so you can override, but they are kept out of the send list. Nothing is ever messaged unless you approve it.
Location is strict. If a search returns too few people, loosen the role or seniority wording rather than the geography - geography is treated as a hard requirement.
Editing the brief after contacts exist can invalidate matches. Changing roles, industries or geography is a major change and usually means re-running the search; Handshake will tell you when a re-check or re-import is recommended.
Pausing clears queued (unsent) messages for the audience but keeps contacts, history and replies. Resuming brings it back to Live.
Share links carry real approval power. Restrict them to known emails for sensitive audiences, set a sensible expiry, and revoke any link you no longer need.
A Sales Navigator URL import needs an active Sales Navigator subscription on the connected seat; without one, use Auto Generated instead.