How Expandi CEO Stefan Smulders grew Expandi to $10.7M revenue and 3.7K customers in 2024.

thanks for the warm introduction I hope everybody can hear me well I guess I'm the last one today and I did not expect it people here so really appreciate all your support especially as I come all the way from the Netherlands and we're going to talk today about sniper targeting so before I start I just want to know do we have some power users here some LinkedIn power users who's leveraging LinkedIn for lead generation who is actually leveraging LinkedIn to create content we have people who create content on LinkedIn or people who recruit and use LinkedIn to attract candidates okay this will be really great for all of you I have two left hands so I hope I can manage click on the right times what I actually want to share with you I divided it in three easy things and it's all about out-of-the-box strategies and race on how to search and find your audiences on LinkedIn so I'm not talking about sales Navigator searches and talking about search tweaks divided in for example LinkedIn groups inbound leads and some strategies which are leveraged for the past couple of years and which get me each and every time up to more than 70 acceptance rate and as a bonus some hex some email hex and how you can get a 55 reply rate after finding the Right audience and Outreach these people on LinkedIn there's no need to make that many notes as I want to share everything with you afterwards through QR code for the ones who do not know me my name is Stefan I'm the founder of expanding World leading software for LinkedIn Automation and I bootstrapped my SAS within two and a half years up to seven million in Revenue we mainly did that through Linkedin Outreach and the best place out there we created playbooks out of it and heavily distributed them to the audience I share this story I found a 500 last Edition in Austin so for the ones who want to watch that back I think it's on YouTube or Nathan put it on YouTube as well but let's start with some search tricks and I think for the ones who are quite active on LinkedIn and some people already raised their hands it became a bit of a more challenging one and a half year ago when LinkedIn put unfortunately in all these limits right um so I will share a bit about that and why it's important to to quality searches and sniper targeting and because if you have less people to outreach it will become way more important to find the right people as we have less shots left to approach all these people especially on LinkedIn some Spotlight filters and I see people thinking LinkedIn groups there are so many LinkedIn groups but I will tell some tricks about that and how you can leverage it yourself and for the ones who using LinkedIn to build out authority to build out a personal brand you can attract a lot of inbound leads and with some tricks it's quite easy to import all these people into a CSV and follow up on them on LinkedIn or to other channels but let's start with a 100 weekly limit LinkedIn is fighting spam it's the number one problem especially as a platform is growing super super fast it means that they wants to stop people approaching each other as at least people you do not know so therefore I think it becomes way more important to only Outreach people you know or at least that's what LinkedIn is aiming for and of course it's not possible we have a lot of workarounds we can bypass these limits but that's not what we're going to talk about today I especially want to focus on sniper targeting so only tactics on how you can find people with out-of-the-box strategies on LinkedIn to build your audience um LinkedIn groups I just talked about it who's leveraging LinkedIn groups are we have some people here already in LinkedIn groups or use it if you know for example that if you're part from a LinkedIn group for more than four days you can message these people without making connection requests so LinkedIn limited amount of connection requests up to one another week which is sort of 20 a day and if you're part of a group you can message these people without making connection requests and it's quite an easy conversation starter if you go to your basic search bar on LinkedIn you search by hashtag on a specific topic and you select the tech groups it will pop up all the relevant groups related to that specific keyword um you can make quite an easy introduction if you're not using it as a connection request you can send the message as I just mentioned and this is an example of how you can make and and kind of an enter area part of the same group let's exchange IDs and if you end for a coffee just let me know I will share all these things afterwards as well so with future profile if you have a paid subscription on LinkedIn for example sales Navigator it's possible to see who has future profile I for example leverage LinkedIn by producing content consistent each and every day and I attract I think in the last 90 days almost 8 000 profile visitors with a tool like expanding we can easily import all these profile visitors and you can use that as an elite source as a starting point to engage with these people you can do that on LinkedIn we can export them in a CSV we're capturing all the email addresses will make it quite easy to retarget these people to follow up on them per email and I think it's it's quite interesting because these people already showed interest in you in your profile so it's quite easy to engage with them afterwards and refer to that profile visit this is an example of how you can do that it's not that special quite easy and you can personalize that even more if you want that of course sniper targeting these are my three favorite strategies um LinkedIn it's full of content right I just mentioned it we see our timelines everybody's posting but how cool would it be if we can scrape each and every post on LinkedIn and I'm not talking only about your post but let's say your competitors post and Company posts or any post on LinkedIn and we can import within a split second all the people will like and comment on that specific post we can capture all the email addresses and within two minutes we can provide you with a CSV file you can use for retargeting you can use for email Outreach to a cool tool like instantly for example or if you can leverage and to like expanding to follow up on all these people on LinkedIn it's quite easy to make an introduction as you can refer to us a specific post I never ever achieved and I did it many times over for the past couple of years a lower acceptance rate by using or leveraging this strategy 70 percent um this is actually how it works you go to the specific post you copy the URL you go to into like expand your import the URL and within a couple of minutes it will pull over all the people who are engaged with that specific post after that you can decide what you do and leverage such a tool to follow up on these people per LinkedIn it's not needed um an example of how you can break through the noise with your messaging as everybody is approaching each other some boring outdated messages and bring some fun in it will always help me a lot to get people engaged and this is an example of how you can do that you can do that through connection requests to open emails for example but also through group messaging or event messaging that's also for events if you're part of an event it's possible to engage with these people without making connection requests if you're part of that specific event sniper targeting pool photos we see still a lot of people who are asking questions on LinkedIn and ask people to vote on that if it's your own poll it's possible to scrape all the people who vote for your poll to get engagement you can use for example an engagement pod which will give you a bit more traction and more people will see your post and I do like expand you can import all the People based on answers and funnel them based on answers to funnel them further to approach them afterwards this is how it works and an example again of a funny connection request which you can leverage in relation towards someone who voted on your pool defense LinkedIn is also full of events are we joining are some people who are joining LinkedIn events or Lincoln live sessions nobody cool yeah you you host it yourself I guess as well right yeah yeah um if you go to your basic search bar and you search for a specific keyword on LinkedIn and you enter the tab events afterwards that pull out all the relevant events in relation to your keywords which means that if you decide to attend that event then you're able to scrape all the people we also decided to join at the event so actually all these people decided to spend their valuable time to join that upcoming event we can pull over and expand all the people who do that and we can provide you with all the email addresses and additional information so you can use it for again retargeting you can use it for email Outreach or you can use it for approaching them on LinkedIn as well and it worked for each and every event the only requirement is that before you do it you need to decide to join that event yourself as well the reason this works so well is that you actually have a lot in common and these people already decided based on the topic to to join the specific event so if you provide something which is a bit similar or related it's actually quite cool to engage with these people and you will achieve a very high acceptance rate if you decide to send them connection requests GIF animations I think is by far one of the most...