Automate prospecting on LinkedIn and maximise your opportunities on the world’s biggest B2B database
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
LinkedIn is one of the largest networking platforms on the planet. We all need it, but getting those LinkedIn connections and scale is difficult.
During the recent episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, Guillaume Portalier — the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Waalaxy — talked about LinkedIn automation. He explained how his company helps entrepreneurs and business owners through their tool, which allows you to automate your sales prospecting on LinkedIn and via email.
Essentially, they help you leverage the platform and save time.
Image from LinkedIn
Interacting on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the platform for business-to-business (B2B) relations — selling products or services or finding new partners. It has over half a billion people users that enter very precise and up-to-date details and information about them, making it the biggest B2B database in the world. Waalaxy essentially leverages that database to allow you to contact people.
There are two ways you can leverage the platform: demand generation (demand gen) and lead generation (lead gen)
Demand gen is basically about producing content — whether it's LinkedIn posts, articles, or even comments on others’ posts. People will see what you're producing, and if it resonates with them or interests them, they will contact you on LinkedIn or perhaps via email.
On the lead gen side, it’s you who find the people on LinkedIn that you want to target directly. You will contact them manually on LinkedIn or use automation tools such as Waalaxy.
Image from Unsplash
Whilst there are automation tools like that, the bad news is you won’t be relieved of the pain of finding who you want to target. You can’t automatically know who you want to reach out to. You still have some job to do, which is mainly finding the ideal prospect.
For that, you’d need to go on Linkedin, search, and have a certain number of people you want to contact. Then, with Waalaxy, you can extract those prospects and profiles into the platform. Instead of manually sending invites and remembering to follow up when they accept — which is a huge pain — these processes will now be automated.
Once you have the prospects in the platform, you can create a sequence (for example, an invitation and two follow-up messages). If you add those prospects to the sequence, they will automatically receive the invitations and get a separate message if they do not reply.
What you need to do on your part is to perform the search and extract your prospects’ profiles into Waalaxy. You can search for Marketing Directors in a certain geography, get a subset through LinkedIn, and then Waalaxy can take that subset and import it into the platform.
Screengrab from Waalaxy
Waalaxy works with all types of LinkedIn accounts — whether they’re free or premium. However, Guillaume recommends using the Sales Navigator option on LinkedIn.
A key factor in whether your campaigns will be successful or not is your ability to contact the proper people. If you're targeting a business developer, but you're contacting a web developer, they won’t be interested in the product you’re offering. The Sales Navigator feature gives you more precise search results on LinkedIn than the standard LinkedIn search.
Making Reaching Out via LinkedIn More Effective
Before you can send a message on LinkedIn, you have to send someone an invite, and they’ll have to accept it. If they refuse it, you won’t be able to send them a message afterwards. So the first thing is you need your prospects to accept your invites if you want to be able to contact them.
The segmentation mentioned above part is another important thing because it will play a key role in the results that you’ll have with your campaign.
Another key element is your ability to craft a proper message. This is called “copywriting,” or the ability to write to sell. It’s definitely an art; it’s something that isn’t easy for everyone.
Waalaxy offers pre-filled templates to users. However, these are only templates. They can't make that one out for you because they don’t know what you will be selling, who you are exactly, and what your value proposition is.
One example of a template will be: “Hey, I'm [insert who you are or your company]. I'm selling, [insert your value proposition].” You can use such templates to get inspiration and help you start off rapidly.
Image from Unsplash
Currently, Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t yet so advanced that it can analyse all the messages and determine whether a prospect is interested or not. You need to send an A, B, or C message, depending on the response.
In Waalaxy’s case, their goal and main focus is to generate. Once an answer is generated, you will manually follow up on LinkedIn and take the conversation.
When a prospect replies to an invitation, a message, or an email, they automatically exit the sequence and do not receive the follow-up message. As someone replying to their message, you don’t want to send them a follow-up message that has nothing to do with the previous one.
Integrating Email
Before Waalaxy was Waalaxy, they were previously called ProspectIn. And the difference is that now, the platform integrates with email as well.
If you take email and LinkedIn, you’ll have about 95% of your B2B lead-gen contacts. This is why they’ve integrated the possibility to both retrieve the professional email of the prospect and then send them emails through an integrated sequence.
For example, you can start by retrieving the prospect's email and then sending a series of two emails. If the person does not reply to your emails, you will send an invite on LinkedIn and two follow-up messages. You can also try the other way around.
They also have synchronisation that lets you send data through your customer relations management (CRM) platform if you want to gather all the emails or look at the different statuses. Waalaxy, in this sense, works like a LinkedIn CRM where you can share all that data across your favourite server.
On Account-Sharing and Sending Out Invites
Some entrepreneurs and business owners will either have a virtual assistant (VA) or an agency managing their LinkedIn. Entrusting the management of LinkedIn (and Waalaxy) to someone else on your behalf depends on the use case, according to Guillaume.
Take note that LinkedIn doesn’t really like it when someone logs in from the United States and somebody else, almost at the same time, uses it as well from the other end of the globe. If this is the case, you need to use a virtual private network (VPN) to make LinkedIn believe that your VA, for instance, is actually located in the US.
This is also the same with Waalaxy. You’ll have to use proxies to replicate your location.
Image from Unsplash
A year ago, LinkedIn also reduced the number of invites you can send per week from about 500 to 100. LinkedIn has a quota and Waalaxy also has its own to make sure you’re not visiting more than 150 people per day or not inviting more than 100 people per day. They have limits built into the tool to make sure you can’t exceed those limits.
They also replicate human behaviours. For instance, they have random timers between actions.
With Waalaxy, they wanted to focus on the tool's simplicity. Though some other competing products enable you to do pretty much what you want, take note that you have to do it at your own risk. For them, it’s important to lock the tool so you can’t risk your LinkedIn accounts.
Getting Waalaxy Noticed
Waalaxy is about product-led growth — not sales-led. They don’t have any salespeople selling products or doing demos.
Basically, all of their marketing goes through their products. They’ve invested a lot in making it an easy-to-use, easy-to-onboard tool.
Screengrab from Waalaxy
They’ve also invested in the customer experience. They have high-quality chat support that replies in less than five minutes, seven days a week. This team is a master of the tool, and they can help you create your campaign, among others.
All this helped them get a lot of referrals.
Though they’re also doing search engine optimisation and search engine advertising, much of their acquisition strategy and how they make the company known is based on the products and the people who speak about them.
They use Intercom as the key pillar of their customer experience. And Guillaume considers it the most important tool they use. They chose this tool because they wanted a chat experience where customers can get a quick response instead of receiving it the next day or in two days.
Intercom is also their CRM. It’s more than their chat support tool. Thanks to their technical people, they can add data and plug internal tools into Intercom to help the overall customer support experience.
To learn more about them, visit www.waalaxy.com. You can check out this link to get a two-month free trial. To reach out to Guillaume, visit his LinkedIn page.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Natanaelginting on Freepik
