How Expandi Reached $7M in Revenue Through LinkedIn Automation and Sniper Targeting (Interview with CEO Stefan Smulders)

Introduction and Audience Warm-Up

Stefan Smulders

00:00Thanks for the warm introduction. I hope everybody can hear me well. Okay, good. I guess I'm the last one today and I did not expect that people here, so really appreciate all your support, especially as I come all the way from The Netherlands. And we're 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? Just raise raise raise your hands. Who's leveraging

00:26LinkedIn for lead generation? Who's 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

00:55race on how to search and find your audiences on LinkedIn. So I'm not talking about self navigator searches, I'm talking about search tricks divided in, for example, LinkedIn groups, inbound leads and some strategies which I 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 hacks, some in mail hacks and how you can get a 55% reply rate after finding

01:23the 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.

Stefan's Background and Expandi's $7M Revenue Story

Stefan Smulders

01:36For the ones who do not know me, my name is Stefan. I'm the Founder of expandi, world leading software for LinkedIn automation and I bootstrapped my SaaS within two and a half years up to 7,000,000 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 shared this story at Founder500 last edition in Austin. So for the ones who

02:03want to watch that back, I think it's on YouTube or Nathan put it on YouTube as well. But

02:12let'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?

02:28So I will share a bit about that and why it's important to do 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. 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

02:54leverage it yourself. For the ones who are 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 through other channels.

03:12But let's start with the 100 weekly limit. LinkedIn is fighting spam. It's the number one problem, especially as the platform is growing super, super fast. It means that they want 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

LinkedIn's 100 Weekly Connection Request Limit

Stefan Smulders

03:38workarounds. We can bypass these limits, but that's not what we are 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.

03:56LinkedIn groups, I just talked about it. Who's leveraging LinkedIn groups? Are we here have some people here who are already in LinkedIn groups or use it? Did 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.

LinkedIn Groups: Messaging Without Connection Requests

Stefan Smulders

04:13So LinkedIn limited amount of connection requests up to 100 a 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.

04:41And you can make quite an easy introduction. If you're not using it as a connection request, you can send a message as I just mentioned. And this is an example of how you can make kind of an intro. If you're part of the same group, let's exchange IDs. And if you're for a coffee, just let me know.

04:59I will share all these things afterwards as well.

Profile Visitors as a Lead Source

Stefan Smulders

05:04We'll feed your profile. If you have a paid subscription on LinkedIn, for example, Sales Navigator, it's possible to see who has viewed your profile. I, for example, leverage LinkedIn by producing content consistent each and every day. And I attract, I think in the last ninety days, almost 8,000 profile visitors. With a tool like expandi, we can easily import all these profile visitors and you can use that as a lead source or as a starting point to

05:29engage with these people. You can do that on LinkedIn. We can export them in a CSV. We're capturing all the email addresses, which make it quite easy to retarget these people to follow-up on them per email. And I think 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.

05:53It's not that special, quite easy.

05:56And you can personalize that even more if you want that, of course. Sniper targeting, these are my three favorite strategies. LinkedIn is 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 then 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

Sniper Targeting: Scraping Post Engagers

Stefan Smulders

06:25a split second all the people who 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 a tool like expandi to follow-up on all these people on LinkedIn. It's quite easy to make an introduction as you can refer

06:50to us a specific post. I never ever achieved and I did it many times over for the past couple of years, lower acceptance rate by using or leveraging this strategy than 70%.

07:06This is actually how it works. You go to the specific post, you copy the URL, you go to a tool like expandi, you 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.

07:29An 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. They'll 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 email, for example, but also through group messaging or event messaging. That's also for events. If you're part of an event,

Poll Voter Scraping Strategy

Stefan Smulders

07:55it's possible to engage with these people without making connection requests if you're part of that specific event. Sniper targeting poll voters. 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 poll, which will give you a bit more traction and more

08:23people will see your post. And a tool like expandi 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 to someone who voted on your poll.

08:50Events. LinkedIn is also full of events. Are we joining? Are some people here who are joining LinkedIn events or LinkedIn live sessions?

LinkedIn Event Targeting

Stefan Smulders

09:00Nobody?

09:02Cool, yeah. Hosted yourself, guess, as well, right? Yeah, yeah. If you go to your basic search bar and you search for a specific keyword on LinkedIn and you enter the tap events afterwards, it 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 who also decided to join that event. So actually, all these people decided to spend their

09:31valuable time to join that upcoming event. We can pull over and expound the older 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 works for each and every event. The only requirement is that before you do it, you need to decide

09:55to join that event yourself as well.

09:59The reason this works so well is that you actually have a lot in common and these people already decided based on the topic to join that 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 a connection request. GIF animations, I think is by far one of the most interesting

GIF Animations and Doubling Reply Rates

Stefan Smulders

10:28approaches I will share today as most of us are struggling on LinkedIn, especially if we use LinkedIn for outreach to break through the noise, right? And I did at least 100 active campaigns

10:46without actually just with messaging and the rest of them with GIF animations. And each and every time, a doubled reply rate as everybody is sending the same messages, outdated, boring, finding them on Google. And instead of sending that, will show in a bit some examples. For the ones who have a paid LinkedIn subscription, let's say Sales Navigator, it's possible to send in mails, right? But it's always a challenge with these credits. You have a couple of

Sending 800+ Free InMails to Open Profiles

Stefan Smulders

11:16credits and then at the time point you want to use it, they are gone. So I can learn you a trick how you can send more than 800 free emails to open profiles without using any credits. And on top of that, I will share all the playbooks, all the strategies, a breakdown of the strategies we talked today.

11:38It's per calendar month. Per what? Per calendar month. Calendar month. Yeah, calendar month.

11:46You're familiar on LinkedIn,

11:50you see there on top of my profile that I have kind of a golden icon. And that golden icon, that means that your profile has a status open. And if the profile has a status open, it means that you're able to send them free email without using any kind of credits, lengthiness, or requesting. Of course, it's undoable to walk through all these profiles one by one because it's causing a lot of time. So what we can

12:19do is if you retrieve and search, it doesn't matter if it's in post engagement search, I just explained, if it's in sales navigator search or an event search, you can pull over all these people into expandi and within a split second, you can set a filter and we can see and provide you with information if it's an open profile. And then you can start a campaign only to people with an open profile. So it's actually kind

12:41of an in mail with a subject line and some messaging you can use in there,

12:48like here. Instead of only using content, it really helps to use personalized GIF animations. And an example here, you see a colleague of mine, Amy, who is leveraging GIF animations. Animations. And if we send it to one, ten, 50 or 100 people, at each and every time we'll personalize the GIF animation based on the personalizations we put in. So it can be a first name, a company name, and it can be an image, but it also

13:14can be the profile image as you see right there. You will actually receive super cool reactions from a lot of people as it's different in terms of what they receive on average each and every day.

GIF Animation Campaign Results and Statistics

Stefan Smulders

13:30From all the at least 100 times I experimented for different purposes with leveraging this at each and every time uplift engagement up to 50, sometimes up to 70% in comparing to maybe on average at 25%, 30% if you're not using it. So it's definitely worth to consider it and especially if you have not done it yet, it's quite an interesting approach to break through the noise and maintain. And here you see some statistics and examples from

14:00campaigns we executed on with our own team.

14:07You can use it for example, these are just some random examples. I can provide you with more if you want. After the connection request, to push, not to send a link on the left side, you see our colleague Amy. And it's just, yeah, they call it an icebreaker image where you just actually thank people for connection if you want to use it for that purpose. In the middle, you're seeing call to action from our colleague, Sharon.

14:29It's also with a dynamic content and it will really help to get kind of a positive reply from people, kind of a different vibe. And if you want to send or use it as a reminder, for example, if you invite people for your webinar, as you see on the right side from our colleague Ivan, then you can also use it and you can personalize it, in this case with first name. And no matter if you send

14:54it to 11050 or even 1,000 people, it will each and every time use the right personalizations to execute on that.

Hyper-Personalization with Dynamic Images

Stefan Smulders

15:04For the ones who are familiar with Sales Navigator, you have a filter in Sales Navigator that you can select people based on changing job roles. For example, in the last ninety days, how cool would it be if you can send them in connection request or congrats or in kudos with a bottle of champagne based yes, sorry. So your software is putting name into the video? Correct. We do that in combination with Hyperice. It's a personalization toolkit

15:38which you can also leverage outside of LinkedIn for personalized landing pages for email outreach, and in our case also for LinkedIn outreach. You can also use it, for example, as inbound. So let's say I think we all use Calendly or sort of a similar tool that people book in an appointment, you can just add an extra step or actually ask an additional question that they need to fill in before they confirm or submit their LinkedIn profile.

16:05If they fill in their LinkedIn profile, we can pull over by reverse web book automatically in connection request and push such kind of cool GIF animation out there. You can use it if you do a post on LinkedIn. I did myself a lot of posts where I ask people to leave and comment and then return I will provide them with a guide. And there's an example of how you can send them

16:37such kind of a guide after they leave a comment and it's fully automated.

16:42For the ones who are leveraging LinkedIn for recruitment, I think we all see that the kind of outdated approaches, I saw your profile, it's super, super cool. I really want you to engage with me. It's not working perfectly fine anymore. I experimented a lot with most wanted posters. So let's say I pull over a most wanted poster and I put in there, I'm looking on the lookout for a new rock star, let's say your first name.

17:11You really get such cool replies from people as they never received it before. So if you want to leverage LinkedIn recruitment, it could be a really interesting idea to do it that way. I have playbooks about how you can do that and you can find them on our expandi blog as well.

Recruitment Use Case with Most Wanted Posters

Stefan Smulders

17:30And we talked about these kind of strategies, so how you scrape people by leveraging content creators. We talked about open InMails and how you can find these people and what place you can use for that.

17:47We talked about scraping LinkedIn events. So actually every event possible and visible on LinkedIn. And we also talked about LinkedIn Pulse and hyper personalization using personalized images and GIF animations. For the ones who became quite enthusiastic after I shared all these things, I have good news, you can scan this QR code, you can leave your email, I will not spam you, I promise. And then you can access all these guides. So it's a breakdown of all

Summary of Strategies and QR Code Offer

Stefan Smulders

18:17these five strategies with the house, with the wise, with the place and all the messaging you can use to leverage it yourself. This was what I want to share today. Give me some love if you like it. And I wish you all a great evening with some beers as well.

Nathan Latka

18:37Thank you so much, Stefan.