SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Sniper Targeting: Tactics your competition doesn't know about, even with the 2021 LinkedIn changes
30 May 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm very excited to share this recording with you guys, which happened at our conference, sasopen.com, with over 100 speakers, all founders of B2B SaaS companies. We have a very high bar for what speakers share on stage, so you're going to enjoy this episode where we dive deep into revenue graphs, real tactics, and real growth metrics.
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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 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?
Just raise your hands. Who's leveraging LinkedIn 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? OK, this will be really great for all of you. I have two left hands, so I hope I can manage to click on the right times.
What I actually want to share with you, and I divided it in three easy things, and it's all about out-of-the-box strategies and ways on how to search and find your audiences on LinkedIn. So I'm not talking about sales 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 on 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 Expandi, the world's leading software for LinkedIn automation. And I bootstrapped my SaaS within two and a half years, up to $7 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 shared this story at Founder 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.
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Chapter 2: What are the key tactics for sniper targeting on LinkedIn?
I will share all these things afterwards as well. who viewed 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 90 days, almost 8,000 profile visitors.
With a tool like Expanded, we can easily import all these profile visitors, and you can use it as a lead source as a starting point to engage with these people. You can do that on LinkedIn. We can export them in a CSV. Recapturing 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 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.
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 competitor's post and company posts or any post on LinkedIn. And we can import within a 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 through a cool tool like Instantly, for example. Or if you can leverage a tool like Expanded to follow up on all these people on LinkedIn. It's quite easy to make an introduction, as you can refer towards 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 than a 70%. This is actually how it works. You go to the specific post. You copy the URL. You go to a tool like Expander. 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. 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 a connection request 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 people who see your post.
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Chapter 3: How can LinkedIn groups be leveraged for lead generation?
For 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 90 days. How cool would it be if you can send them a connection request or a congrats or a kudos with a bottle of champagne-based, yeah, sorry. Correct. We do that in combination with Hyperise.
It's a personalization toolkit which 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. Let's say I think we all use Calendly or sort of a similar tool. If 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. If they fill in their LinkedIn profile, we can pull over by reverse web hook automatically in connection request and push such kind of a 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 a comment. And in return, I will provide them with a guide. And this is an example of how you can send them such kind of a guide after they leave a comment. And it's fully automated. For 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 on the lookout for a new rock star, let's say your first name. You really get such cool replies from people as they never received it before.
So if you want to leverage LinkedIn for 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 Expanded blog as well. And we talked... about these kind of strategies, so how you scrape people by leveraging content creators.
We talked about open in-mails and how you can find these people and what place you can use for that. We talked about scraping LinkedIn events, so actually every event possible and visible on LinkedIn. And we also talked about LinkedIn polls 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 these five strategies with the hows, with the whys, with the plays, and all the messaging you can use to leverage yourself.
This is what I want to share today. Give me some love if you liked it. And I wish you all a great evening with some beers as well.
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