LinkedIn automated sales outreach: 18 searches, 50 leads per account

I turned on LinkedIn outreach for the first time. Growth-Hacking.io already had about $10,000 in sales with no marketing.

Search for growth hacker in the United States

The list is a simple search: growth hacker, United States. I leave location off the location field so I can add minus-filters later. Overlap across searches is the thing I have to stay clever about.

Watch new Airtable rows, pull 1,000, mark finished

Searches live in Airtable in a table I called growth hacking outreach. A finished checkbox plus a filter — finished is empty — means a done search disappears and does not run again.

Integromat — now Make.com — watches a new row. The extract request takes 1,000 results. The search URL is the Name field. At the end, update that record: finished is true. The update module sits lower on the canvas than it should. I left it. A quick fix is enough.

While it ran I already had 360 leads. Enough to start. Each search goes to 1,000, then the next URL. 18 searches. That is 18,000 to begin with. I also ran B2B and LinkedIn. The extract scenario is once a day at 1 a.m.

Connection request is first name, not a pitch

I do not open with a sale. The connection line I already use is: Hi {first name}, I'd like to add you. First name in it. Not "hey I want to connect." I get about a 50% accept rate. In my data the profile does more of that work than the line: picture, heading, how complete the page is.

I paused the old campaigns in the campaign manager and pointed the Airtable API at the new table. The first message stayed. Changing the second message once changes every send:

Hi {first name}, great to connect. Do you use any tools to automate your sales outreach on LinkedIn? We're looking for some early-stage feedback on a tool we built for more advanced outreach across multiple platforms. Here's an example flow. Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback and if you're interested even set up a free account. Best, {name}.

The sign-off is already filled in. I dragged that down the list. 46 LinkedIn accounts, maybe 50. About 30 minutes of recording to stand the campaign up. Campaign name: growth hacking outreach. That string is how the rest of the automation finds this run. I could have scripted the paste. Not everything is worth automating.

An empty queue assigns the next 50 records

Records are grouped by LinkedIn account. On the first pass I had 58 rows with no account attached. One account can run one pitch, another a different one, so the assignment has to be automatic.

When an account has nothing left, it finds unassigned rows and takes 50. Next run it works those 50. The next account does the same until every account has a pile. When a pile hits zero it fetches again. That is why extraction runs first: each account needs inventory.

Watching it assign is why I use this stack. A person, even a VA, cannot paste that fast. It was about one record every 0.2 seconds, and it does not mistype. The only place to make a mistake is building the scenario.

A robot is a thousand times better at this paste

I do not want a world of only machines. Growth hacking is the hybrid: the hacker side is an engineering, problem-solving mind on growth. The human writes the automation. Anything that does not need creativity — and a lot of tasks that are not even repetitive — a machine does better. It does not take breaks. That is the efficiency. I turned both scenarios on a schedule.

A reply with an email becomes a Stripe customer

I already had a flow that watches the LinkedIn email that says you have a new connection, maps it to the right account, downloads the message, and marks the person as replied in Airtable. The inbox is Gmail. I added a router: campaign contains growth hacking.

The second message asks for an email if they want more. A regex pattern pulls that address out of whatever they typed. A long reply — hi Nathan, that sounds brilliant, I cannot wait to try your tool, here is my email, david at growthmarketing.com — still returns only the address. I tested it. Two-minute sleep so the next step does not look instant.

Then create a Stripe customer with no card. Free plan: 15 usage credits a day. After the pause, send: Hi {first name}, great to talk over LinkedIn, as promised here is 100% free access to the platform and Slack group, plus the access codes. It signs off as the LinkedIn account they were just talking to. I would believe that was a person. I sit here making automations all day.

Loom froze after about 12 minutes of the ending, so I walked the same canvas again. You could drop the same extract into Mailchimp if the job is a list, not a trial. I am happy this was built in one day.

OFM Insider and Automation Academy if you want the communities from this video. Tools and resources are Bento. A one-off session is Calendly. Four sessions is 4x Consultations.

Transcript

Hey guys, today I think is day seven of 100 days of growth hacking and I'm just getting started on, we're actually going to start outreach for the first time ever. So we've done about like $10,000 in sales doing no marketing at all, which is pretty good. And all I'm doing is we're just doing like a very simple search for growth hacker and United States. We could do location, however we have more flexibility up here, we can add in like minus filters later on. So I have to be like quite clever about how I get all these people in because we don't want too much overlap.

So I'm just going to set up this automation to run. I'm actually going to add a new module here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to start off by watching whenever a new row is added in here. So we can come over to what growth hacking outreach and we're also going to make a checkbox to say like finished. And then we can have a filter that will say finished is empty. So that means that when it's done, we can mark it as done and it will disappear and it means we won't run it again.

So we can start off with records to extract trigger field last. Cool. There we go. And so then in this request, we're going to number that we want to extract. It's going to be a thousand. And then the search URL is going to be name. Okay, cool. And then what we need to do is at the end of each of these, we need to put update record. So that we know that the search has been finished, right? Record ID finished true. Clone over. And. Okay, there we go.

So if we were actually going to make this automation cleaner, this particular module would be up here. But I don't want to rewrite it and it doesn't really matter. So we'll just put in a quick fix. But. Okay, cool. So that's like the first load of profiles done. That should start extracting. Let's start extracting. Let's not fall apart. Cause I've done this before. I know. I know. This database so here yeah basically just playing around with a lot of different different searches we've got 360 leads extracted so

far from our automation which is like more than enough to get started this will go up to like a thousand and then it's going to run on to the next search result so we've got 18 different searches here so we should get 18,000 results which gets us off to a pretty good starting point in fact I'm going to play around with this search a little bit more that is what I would probably go for I think this gets us off to a pretty good starting point results and then we can just run B2B and LinkedIn and I think we should be good to go I'm just going to set this automation to run once every day at 1 a.m.

right so that will just keep them bringing bringing in new leads for us so now let's work on setting up the outreach itself I'm going to keep really really simple and so rather than going in for like a direct sale this is just the general template I use for to sending a connection request it works very well I find that I get like a 50% acceptance rate I also find that with people accepting LinkedIn connection requests in my experience it often comes down more to the actual profile like to like the profile picture the profile heading how much information you have on the profile and so

on for getting good acceptance rates is generally just just my opinion based on on the data that I've seen so just having like it as long as it's personalizing there you have like the first name in there and you're not just like putting like hey I want to connect put the first name in there generally on connection requests I get pretty good acceptance rates I need to change the status on all of these to pause that's how I've like set up my campaign manager just to keep it very simple and then what we're going to do is come across and just change the Airtable API to the new API that we want it to run from okay cool and then we're just going to come over into this section and it's going to look something like this it's going to be hi first name I'd like to add you this it's actually it's exactly the same I don't even need to change the first message first message is fine and then on the second message it's going to be hi so

this by changing this message it's actually going to change everything being sent out right I hope that that makes sense so it's going to put hi first name great to connect do you use any tools to automate your sales outreach on LinkedIn we're looking for some early stage feedback on a tool we built for more advanced outreach across multiple platforms here's an example flow would love to hear your thoughts and feedback and if you're interested even set up a free account best and then the like the name is automatically going to be added in so

I've built that in already then what we can do is just drag this down across all of our that's that the message that we want to send out super easy so we've actually just basically set up an automation for for these 50 LinkedIn or 46 LinkedIn accounts whatever it was in about how long have we been recording for about 50 30 minutes maybe um uh what do we call this growth hacking outreach and I could make a script to do this but I'm I'm not that lazy um

not everything is worth worth automating so all that we're doing here is putting this is like the campaign name so it's a way for my like automation to identify it's just the structure that I have in place and I'll show you just how like there's a few like recent updates that I'll like share with you that I've um added into the automation so let me just finish setting this up and then we will go ahead and deploy this so each account will be like assigned its own set of records um

if that makes sense so cool that is all done so now what we'll do is on like the old campaigns that we were running we can now set them to like paused and we'll just drag that down and then on the new campaign we've just set up because we want that to start running cool so that has now run LinkedIn profile is coming in successfully good news nice so then if we go into our outreach yeah cool profiles are coming in nice so here's our outreach flow and so

what I was trying to explain is currently I I group my records based on the LinkedIn account so currently you can see we've got 58 records here but they're all set to empty um because it hasn't got a LinkedIn account to um associated to it yet and this is the way that we filter all of our different LinkedIn accounts out so you know one LinkedIn could do one outreach pitch another one could do another one and so on so we have to set up automatically so

when a LinkedIn account runs out of records it will automatically go and find more so if you watch this it wants to run it's going to go and assign itself records so this first account that's ran it can't find any records associated to itself so now it's moving these records over to this account and it's going to assign itself 50 records that is going to then go and reach out to the next time we run this scenario on this particular account um so that's just like a little automation i came up with it's given itself 50 and now it's finished ran successfully so

next time that account comes up to run it's going to target those 50 LinkedIn accounts right so if we just keep running this is going to the next account is then going to go and assign itself records and so on and and that will happen until all accounts have been given given uh records to target and then when that goes down to zero again um it will go and and find itself more records so that's why i wanted to set up the extraction to start with um

just to make sure that we have enough records to give each LinkedIn account this is also just why i love automation so much as well like not only does um do like you save yourself time but it's just just watching this just thinking like if i had to do this manually not even if i had an assistant or a virtual assistant or something not only is is automation just so much more efficient like there's no way i could paste over this quickly this is doing probably like one every like 0.2 seconds i would say um

but it just it doesn't make mistakes you know the the only part is actually building your automation to make it function correctly but there's there's no room for human error the only room for human error is actually building the automation once you understand how to do that uh it's like it's sort of no wonder that the world is heading towards like machines just like the rate that we can the computer can process information at compared to a human is just um it's unbelievable so i like really believe in like a mixture like i i i don't want like the world to move into like a like artificial intelligence and and robots doing everything for us you know i think we need a a sort of hybrid mix of um

of both like machines and and robots i think that we play well together for example like the there's two elements of growth hacking right it's a perfect example it's a mixture of both technology which is is where like the hacker side of things come comes into it it's like an engineering type mindset problem solving type mindset to um to growth and and that's where i think like the what is really interesting because the human brings like the creativity element to it like coming up with the automation and then on like the repetitive tasks and and not even repetitive tasks as well just any type of task um

that doesn't require creativity you can put automation and robots in place to to do a better job than you can like the reason i do this is like one because it's much more efficient but the reason it's more efficient is because a robot is is a thousand times better at performing this task than i am it doesn't need to take breaks um so i just love um yeah just really love like automation and i think you can just use it to your advantage so much that's all gone through successfully sure why um

but anyway this should now be able to be turned on to be automated full-time so i can just turn that on turn on scheduling and over here when this is done i'll turn on scheduling here as well as well okay cool um so yeah automation is actually now set to run what i actually want to do is we're going to add a router in here so this is a flow that i built already which is like an email um i think i've shown this before so

um just to explain it fully we're checking whenever LinkedIn sends us an email saying we've got a new connection we're basically finding out what account that's related to updating it downloading the message and then updating Airtable that person has replied um but just to build on top of that even more i'm going to come through and we're going to add in a router what that says condition campaign contains growth hacking and if it does then what we're going to do is we're going to add a we're going to add a regex pattern that will check if that person has an email address if that person has sent us an email address i'm going to change around our messaging slightly so

in all of these um accounts where we sort of finished things off from so we'll start off with this flow and it's going to say we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback okay so what we're doing here is we're changing the flow slightly and we're asking for an email email and hopefully someone's going to read that there are going to be a few people where like they're they're not going to read all of that um but when someone comes back with an email address what this will do let me just make sure this will be filled in correctly yeah nice so

if they reply back even if they come back with like a whole bunch of texts like hi nathan that sounds absolutely brilliant i cannot wait to try your tool here's my email address david at growthmarketing.com even if they reply back with all of that text this regex pattern will um it will ignore everything else because we're like we don't need any of that um why have they given us a huge pattern um it will ignore everything else they say and it will purely give us the um

the email which is the only piece of information that we're that we need from them um and then it's going to wait like two minutes uh just to to make it look like realistic so i'm just going to run a quick test so we can say hi nathan i'd love to hear more about your tool my email is david growth hacking.com so if we go ahead and run this as a little test there we go got it working so as you can see like that's an example response someone can send a massive thing and all we really want is their email address right so

we've managed to return the the email so then what we're going to do is add a uh we're going to make a contact in Stripe actually um we're going to make them as a customer but they're not going to have any credit card attached to them so we're going to use this we're going to run a http request okay fine method post hey guys i'm very sorry i did actually record like an ending to this uh video where we built out this automation i had the whole thing recorded but for some reason like after 12 minutes of recording Loom just just didn't continue for whatever reason like the recording froze um

so i'm very sorry about that because it was quite an interesting flow but i'll just walk you through it again so whenever we get a new um connection a new response to our outreach and that's automatically picked up in Gmail and then if it matches the can the campaign that we've just set up growth hacking campaign contains growth hacking in our email message we've asked them for uh sorry in our LinkedIn outreach we've said if you're interested to get more information please send over your email um

and this is a um this is um a regex pattern and what this will do is if um if their email if their message contains an email anywhere within the email so it can even say like hi nathan i'm really interested to hear more about your product and what you're doing um yeah so here's an example so you can say that hi nathan i'm interested to hear more about what you're doing um it will just pull out the email right it will actually ignore everything else that is is there um

so i can just run yeah so even though you can see like if someone sent back a text message like that it's just pulled out the email because that's the only piece of information that we're interested in um and then what it will do i just need to fix that part of the flow very quickly if message contains email then it's going to create a Stripe customer and it's going to give them a free plan that gives them like 15 um usage credits per day basically and then it's going to sleep for two minutes to make it look like it's a real person um

and then it's going to send an email that says like hi first name we've got that information from LinkedIn um great to talk over LinkedIn as promised here's 100% free access to our platform in Slack group and it's sending over the information and their access codes and then to make it even more clever it sends over the LinkedIn account that they were talking to so like i don't think this can look any more like a person even i would i would be um like there's no way for anyone to know even i would believe this is a completely real person that i'm talking to and all i just all i do all day is sit here making automations so

i think this is like a fantastic flow so um they respond in the message with an email that email is extracted they're created as a customer in Stripe and then we send them an invitation link to the email they've given after a two minute delay saying hey welcome on board first name here's all your information and then it signs off as the LinkedIn account they've just been talking to so i think that's a fantastic automation you could also use this in other ways like sending it like syncing to Mailchimp or something like that if you wanted to use this to grow your email list and so

on um but yeah i'm really sorry that that it didn't get recorded properly like there's some issue with with Loom but um yeah anyway like this is a really interesting automation and like i'm quite happy to have this built in in one day um cool yeah as always thank you very much for watching um and any questions please uh leave a comment