With over 6 billion users around the Globe, LinkedIn is the first platform that B2B businesses' go-to to generate leads - either by Demand Generation or Lead Generation.
In this episode, Guillaume Portalier, Founder of Waalaxy, explains the different demand generation and lead generation, and how their platform, Walaaxy, can help entrepreneurs like you to #getnoticed on LinkedIn and scale your lead generation strategies through automation, not just on LinkedIn but also on email.
Guillaume also shares how Waalaxy works from selecting your leads to importing them to Waalaxy, to setting up the automated messages, follow-ups, and emails, to their last point of contact within the automated steps.
If you're interested to try Waalaxy, they now offer a FREE 2-month trial - https://waal.ink/Zgh3CR
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Post-production, transcript and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants
The UnNoticed Entrepreneur is hosted & produced by Jim James.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James. And today we're going to Montpellier in France, to talk to Guillaume Portalier, who is the COO and Co-Founder of a company called "Waalaxy." Guillaume, bonjour, welcome to the show.
Guillaume Portalier:Hey, Jim, thanks for having me.
Jim James:It's my pleasure. And we're going to talk today about "LinkedIn Automation." And let's face it, LinkedIn is one of the largest networking platforms on the planet. We all need it, but it's terribly difficult to get really the LinkedIn connections and the scale. So tell us, how does Waalaxy help entrepreneurs, business owners to really make the most out of LinkedIn without tucking a huge amount of time from their lives?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, so Waalaxy is a tool that allows you to automate your sales prospecting on LinkedIn and via email as well. And so, we basically leverage the platform and allow you to save your time.
Jim James:Look, and I think all of us know that time is of the essence and LinkedIn is such a challenge because there are different ways to engage with LinkedIn and different aspects of using LinkedIn. With your experience, Guillaume, of Waalaxy, do you want to explain what are some of the ways that a business owner can interact on LinkedIn? And how does Waalaxy help us to do that?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, sure. So first of all, I'd say LinkedIn is the platform for B2B, you know, relations and to sell product or services, or finding new partners. It has almost half a billion people on it, that all enter very precise and up-to-date details and information about them, which makes LinkedIn the biggest B2B database in the world. And so what we do, we basically leverage that database to allow you to contact people. And so to come back to your question - there actually are two ways to leverage the platform, and I would differentiate what we call "Demand-Gen" on one side, and "Lead-Gen" on the other side. So for dimension, it's basically producing contents, so whether it's via LinkedIn posts or LinkedIn articles, or even, you know, by commenting stuff on other posts, other people posts. So that's the "Demand-Gen" side. It means basically that people will see what you're producing and if it resonates with them or if it interests them, they will contact you on LinkedIn or else via email maybe. So that's the "Demand-Gen" side. And on the "Lead-Gen" side, it's you that find the people on LinkedIn that you want to target directly and then either contact them manually on LinkedIn or use an automation tools such as Waalaxy, to automatically contact them.
Jim James:So let's just think then, Waalaxy, how is it helping, Guillaume? Because many of us, including me, have a VA, for example, who's been, you know, helping to try and find the correct kind of people by job title, for example, or by geography, or by industry, participating in groups. How can you relieve people like me of all of that hard work?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, the bad news is we don't really relieve the pain of finding who you want to target because, unfortunately, we can't automatically know who you want to target, you know? So you will still have some job to do, some stuff to do. Mainly finding the ideal prospect. And so for that, you go on LinkedIn, you perform a search, and then you have a certain number of people that you want to contact. And where Waalaxy intervenes is, it allows you to extract those prospects, those profiles, into Waalaxy. And then from there, instead of manually sending invites and then remembering to follow up when they accept, et cetera, which is a huge pain, and that's lots of times we allow you to automate that process. So once you have those prospects into Waalaxy, you can create a sequence, for example, an invitation and two follow-up messages. And then add those prospects into the sequence, and they will automatically receive the invitations, and then add the different messages if they do not reply.
Jim James:Okay, so Guillaume, so just to be clear, it's not harvesting in the first place for names. I've already got those names and I'm connecting my LinkedIn contacts database to Waalaxy. Is that correct?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, that's it. I mean, we are harvesting in the sense that we're extracting the profiles from LinkedIn to add them into Waalaxy. But then, you know, I don't really know. And when I say, "I," it's basically "Waalaxy." Waalaxy does not know in advance what you want to do, who you want to target; it's not that intelligent. I mean, artificial intelligence is not yet advanced enough to do that. So you have to decide exactly, "Okay, I want to target business developers." So you perform your search on LinkedIn and then you are able to extract those profiles.
Jim James:Oh, okay. So just to be clear, so I could do a search, for example, for, you know, "Marketing Directors" in a certain geography, and I would get a subset through LinkedIn, and then Waalaxy would take that subset and import them into Waalaxy. I'm not having to do that myself manually, right? I'm not taking one record at a time.
Guillaume Portalier:That. That's it. Exactly. Exactly.
Jim James:Yeah, okay, so great. So it is, to some degree, you know, I've got to make decisions about who I'm looking for, but then Waalaxy is helping me to get all of that data. Does that work with just the premier, you know, and the paid-for LinkedIn subscriptions? Or is that also working if I have the free account on LinkedIn?
Guillaume Portalier:Yes, it works with all types of accounts on LinkedIn, including the free one, though we highly recommend the use of the "Sales Navigator" option on LinkedIn. Because again, one key factor, meaning whether your campaigns will be successful or not, is your ability to contact the proper people and the correct people. So, you know, if you're targeting business developer and somehow you're contacting web developer instead of business developer, these are two different kinds of people. And obviously, the people that might be interested by a product for business developer, web developer won't be interested by the same product. And so, the Sales Navigator, basically allows you to have much more precise search results on LinkedIn compared to the standard LinkedIn search, so you can still have some decent results using the standard LinkedIn search, but we highly recommend the Sales Navigator one.
Jim James:Okay, that's really good advice on that, Guillaume. So with Waalaxy, let's just say, I've got my subset from LinkedIn, I've passed the data into Waalaxy, which I'm sure is a seamless experience. Can you just take us through the workflow, because I think for many of us, LinkedIn has almost like a "Putin-style offensive campaign" where you go diving in, send lots of messages to people that you think might be interested in. There are all these different responses, aren't there? Some are interested, some are not interested. Somewhat more information. Can you tell us how do you help with the automation of all those different responses to our outreach?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, so first, I would say that on LinkedIn, for the listeners that are not really aware of how it works, to be able to contact people - so basically, to be able to send a message to people, your first need to send them an invite, and then they have the choice to either accept it or refuse it. And if they refuse it, you're not able to send them a message afterwards. So you need your prospects to accept your invites if you want to be able to contact them. So that's the first thing. And then, again, it all came to... So I've previously spoken about, sorry, the segmentation part, which is very important and that will play a key role in the results that you will have with your campaign. And another key element is your ability to craft the proper message. You know, we call that "Copywriting"—the ability to write to sell, sort of. And so for that, because it's definitely a, an art or something that is not easy for everyone, we have some pre-filled templates that we offer to users, where you'll actually have a template. And again, as we don't know what you will be selling and who you are exactly, what's your value proposition, we can't make that one out for you. We've used some fake variables where we, for example, we'll say, "Hey, I'm [insert who you are or your company] and then, I'm selling, [insert your value proposition]." For example, that, that's just an example, but we've used those techniques to offer some pre-filled templates that allows you to, you know, have inspiration and start off rapidly.
Jim James:That's really helpful, Guillaume. What about the follow-up responses then? How do you do the triggers, because that's the big part. I've always found that the first part's not the hard part, it's the, you know, if the answer is A, they need B. And if the answer is C, they need D. How does Waalaxy manage that workflow?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, so again, the AI is not yet so advanced that it can analyse all the message and determines whether the prospect is interested or not interested. Depending on the response, sending A, or B, or C message. In our case, what we do is simply, our goal with Waalaxy is to generate. That's our main focus. And then, once an answer is generated, you manually follow up on LinkedIn and, you know, you take the conversation. So when a prospect, when a profile replies to either an invitation, a message, or an email, he or she automatically exits the sequence and do not receive the follow-up messages because, obviously, someone who's replying to your message, you don't want to send her a follow-up message that has nothing to do with the previous message.
Jim James:Okay, so you do have some decision tree work there, Guillaume. And you've mentioned that, now, the difference with the previous iterations, which I think were called "Pwol" which I tried in ProspectIn a couple of years ago. The new platform, Waalaxy, integrates with email as well. Do you want to just share with us, because that's key, that work takes place not just across LinkedIn, doesn't it? People then will maybe want to migrate someone to their CRM platform like HubSpot or Zoho, or AWeber. How does that work?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, so if you take email and LinkedIn, you have 95% of B2B legend contact and way of contacting people. And so it integrated the possibility to both retrieve the professional email of the prospect, and then send them emails through integrated sequence. So, for example, you can start by retrieving the prospect's email and then sending a series of, for example, two emails. And then, if the person does not reply to your emails, you will send an invite on LinkedIn and then two follow-up messages. You can try the other way around if you prefer. So you start with LinkedIn and then, if the person does not reply, you continue via email. And so that's for the email part. And then, obviously, we have synchronisation that allows you to send data through your CRM, if you want to gather all the emails or have the different status. Because Waalaxy works sort of like a LinkedIn CRM, and obviously you're able to share all that data across your favourite server.
Jim James:Okay, that's really handy because what we don't want is silos of data where we're then trying to manage them later. And speaking of management, what about the user access to Waalaxy? Because I personally use a VA, many people will have either a VA or even an agency somewhere managing their LinkedIn for them. Do you want to just talk to us about, you know, different emissions and can you delegate, in effect, the management of Waalaxy to someone else on your behalf?
Guillaume Portalier:Yes, you can. That's an interesting question. Yes, you can, but it depends on the use case. And I would say, in your case, it's kind of dangerous. I mean, it's not that it's dangerous, but LinkedIn doesn't really like to have one person using the products. So logging in, for example, the United States and at the same time, or almost at the same time, another person using LinkedIn with the same accounts at the other end of the globe. Or you'd need to use a VPN. So for example, your VA would have to need a VPN to make LinkedIn believe that he or she's actually located in the US, if you're in the US, for example. And it's the same with Waalaxy, so you can do that, but you'll have to be aware of using proxies to replicate the location. Basically, LinkedIn wants to... you can have different people using the same LinkedIn accounts, but they need to be roughly at the same location.
Jim James:And with Pwol, though. And with Waalaxy, sorry. I can, I can give my VA an account and she can manage my account for me though, right? So, so that's, I think, the key thing. You've touched on the point about LinkedIn and their sort of protocols. What's the danger of using a platform like Waalaxy in creating so many, if you like, emails and notifications that you get blacklisted or you get blocked because the platforms now are really clamping down, aren't they, on what in effect, could be considered to be spam?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, indeed. So, one year ago, LinkedIn actually reduced the number of invites you can send per week from roughly 500 to a hundred. And so there are quotas on LinkedIn. And obviously, we have our own quota to make sure you're not visiting more than 150 person per day, not inviting more than a hundred people per day, et cetera. So we have limits in build into the tool to make sure you can't exceed those limits. Also we replicate human behaviors. We have random timers between actions. So yeah, we basically replicate human behavior. So with Waalaxy, we wanted to focus on the simplicity of the tool. And so some other competing products decided that you, as a user, are able to do pretty much what you want, but then it's at your own risk. And from us, it was important to, you know, lock the tool so that you can't really risk your LinkedIn accounts.
Jim James:Yes, because that's the danger, isn't it? If you get locked out of your LinkedIn account. Guillaume, you are the Co-Founder of Waalaxy. You know, I love to ask entrepreneurs themselves how they get their own businesses noticed plainly you use LinkedIn, and I'm assuming using Waalaxy for that. But what else have you been doing as business owners to get the business noticed?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah. So we said we are a "Product-led Growth." So basically, by opposition to sales-led growth, so we don't have any sales people selling the products, performing demos or whatever. So basically, all our marketing and everything goes through the products. So we've invested quite a lot on, again, how easy it is to use the tool to onboard yourself on the tool. And then we invested quite a lot on the customer experience. So we have a chat support that replies in less than five minutes, seven days a week, with very high quality. So they are absolutely master of the tool, and so they can help you create your campaign etcetera. And for us, it helped us a lot with referrals. And obviously, now we have other ways or we are doing SEO, SEA. But lots of our acquisition strategy and how we make the company known is based on the products and people using it that speaks about the products.
Jim James:You know, it's interesting, Guillaume, you've mentioned there about the customer support 24/7. Is it 24/7? Or just seven days a week?
Guillaume Portalier:No, no, it's a seven days a week, not 24/7. I think we're like, 14 or 16 hours a day. So quite a long schedule.
Jim James:Okay, that's really fantastic. So I haven't heard of many companies of your size. You mentioned sort of about a 6 million pound turnover. So it's a sizeable company in that wonderful sweet spot of growing. What tools are you using for your CX? When you mention the online chat support, do you want to just give us some insight into what platforms you are using for that?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah. Intercom and a hundred percent recommended. It's the key pillar. By very far the most important tool that we use.
Jim James:Oh, Intercom, because I think another one is, for example, like Zendesk, is another one. Why did you choose Intercom?
Guillaume Portalier:Yeah, so I'm not really familiar with Zendesk, but I have a sense that Zendesk is more like a ticketing tool. It's more asynchronous, whereas we wanted a chat experience where you chat, you really chat, so you have a quick and you're not reaching for a response the next day or in two days. So that's why we've chosen Intercom. But also for us, Intercom is really our CRM. It's, you know, it's much more than simply our chat support tool. And it allows us to, as we have quite some technical people, we also have the ability to add data into Intercom to help the overall customer support experience to provide these support with internal tools that we can plug into Intercom. So it all work.
Jim James:That's really interesting, Guillaume. Thank you for sharing because a lot of people talk about CX, but you are one of the first companies I've talked to at this scale of a business growth that's investing so heavily in that. And if people want to look at Waalaxy, where can they go to find out more about you?
Guillaume Portalier:So simply waalaxy.com. And for the listeners that are interested, I'll give you a link where they can have a two-month free trial, if they want to try the product. And if people want to reach out to me, they can simply go on LinkedIn, obviously. So again, my name is very hard to pronounce for a non-French speaker. So I'll send you that, but I'll give you a link for the description.
Jim James:Guillaume Portalier in Montpellier. That's the way I'm remembering it. Your surname sounds like the place that you're based. So thank you so much and thanks for the generous offer. And I'll put that link in the show notes, of course. And also, I think, be on our website, theunnoticed.cc, in our useful apps page, because I think what you've got is a really great way to save time. Guillaume, thank you for sharing with myself and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs how Waalaxy can help us to overcome the challenges and also take advantage of the opportunities on LinkedIn with automation. Thank you.
Guillaume Portalier:Thanks, Jim. It was a pleasure.
Jim James:Or I should say, "Merci et au revoir." And thank you to my fellow audience for listening to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. I will put everything in the show notes. If you like the show, please do review this on one of the platforms you're listening to it on, and share it, most of all, with a fellow entrepreneur, because you might be able to save them and help them to keep on communicating.