2 Proven Sales Strategies to Kickstart Your Sales Team Success with Expandi

If you’re a sales rep or manage a sales team, and you’re looking to utilize LinkedIn automation to start getting leads as fast as possible – this article is for you.

Below, we’ll be covering 2 main types of strategies for sales teams who utilize Expandi, in order to:

• Find your target audience on LinkedIn.
• Scrape those search results and segment or filter them down further.
• Connect with, send messages, and start booking meetings on autopilot.

The 2 strategies for sales teams will be split across 2 parts – for teams with “fresh” accounts and “aged” ones.

Here’s what this means:

• Fresh LinkedIn account – Sales representatives with new LinkedIn accounts or accounts that have been inactive for an extended period.
• Aged LinkedIn account – Sales reps with well-prepared LinkedIn profiles who have engaged in LinkedIn outreach (automated or manual) no later than three months ago.

It’s important to make this distinction as it affects your outreach directly.

If you’ve been active on LinkedIn for a while now, it’s less likely to get your account suspended and face LinkedIn limits.

Similarly, if you haven’t been on the platform for a while now and suddenly start messaging 100s of people in an hour, LinkedIn will probably detect that suspicious behavior.

Another way to look at your account health is based on the LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) score.

• SSI Under 60 – You should be cautious with the LinkedIn connections limit and warm up your LinkedIn profile first to show LinkedIn that you are a ‘healthy’ active user. You should move slowly with your cold outreach and focus on improving your LinkedIn social selling strategy.
• SSI Over 60 – You still need to be careful after starting, but you can focus on generating leads and reaching sales objectives

To find your SSI score, see here.

Regardless of your account and health though, we recommend moving carefully as you don’t want to overuse automation and get your account suspended.

We recommend moving carefully in any case, but the warm-up stage in the first case will take more time, and it would be better to choose campaign types that can help LinkedIn understand that you are not a spammer.

Now, if you’re ready to get started…

Each strategy below will cover 3-4 different campaigns you can start with, including the exact sequences and templates you can use.

And the best part?

You can follow the exact steps for free!

All you have to do is claim the free, 7-day Expandi trial here.

And from there, you can launch your first campaign within the first day, and start seeing real results before the trial even ends.

Meaning, if done right, you can cover the tool cost after the trial expires for free.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to get started setting up Expandi campaigns.
• 4 Main LinkedIn strategies for sales teams with a fresh account:
  • Messenger campaign.
  • Hand-in-hand campaign.
  • Companies with a buyer intent.
  • Event campaign.
• 4 Main LinkedIn strategies for sales teams with an aged account:
  • • Everything above but also:
  • Builder for your top-targeted contacts
  • Connector + Mobile connector for scaling: your ICP companies
  • Viewed profile campaign
  • Post engagement

What You Need Before Setting Up Expandi Campaigns

Before we get to the proven outreach and sales campaigns you can set up with Expandi, there’s something you should know.

If you want to automate LinkedIn lead generation safely without getting your account suspended, it’s important you follow the best safety practices we’re about to cover below.

If you’re a leader or manager responsible for a sales team, you’ll want to make sure the SDRs or account owners you’re working with have a “healthy” account. 

For optimal results, we recommend picking 3 people apart from your team and running a campaign from each of their accounts to easily scale your reach.

As mentioned above, this will be based on their account health (i.e. fresh or aged). So, make sure you pick LinkedIn accounts appropriately.

First, we’ll cover strategies for fresh LinkedIn accounts (mostly focused on warming up and growing your network). Then, we’ll cover campaigns for aged LinkedIn accounts, focusing on sales and nurturing.

The reason for the distinction is because of the LinkedIn connection limit. Typically, most users on the platform can send only about 100 connection requests per week.

So, if you’re running only one campaign from one account, at most, you’d be reaching around only 100 people.

With 3 accounts, that’s 300, and so on.

Though, you can also use Expandi’s Mobile connector campaign (see below), to bypass LinkedIn limits.

But of course, this depends on the account’s “health” condition.

So, let’s take a look at each scenario now.

4 LinkedIn Strategies For Sales Teams With Fresh LinkedIn Accounts

In this section, we’ll be focusing on campaigns solely aimed at warming up your LinkedIn account and growing your network.

Here’s how.

Warming up your LinkedIn account

First things first, you’ll want to configure your LinkedIn account to start warming it up with Expandi.

It’s always better to start slow and increase your outreach volume gradually. For this purpose, Expandi comes with a warm-up feature that correlates your limit and increases it day-to-day.

This shows LinkedIn you’re not a spammer who wants to send as many messages as possible, which is highly suspicious and very easy to detect.

To find this feature:

1. Go to Expandi,
2. Profile settings.
3. Account warmup.

With this setting, you start with only 10 connection requests, but the next day it’ll be 11, the next day 12, and so on. You should turn this on as a best safety practice.

It may take up to 3 weeks to get a better score, but you can move on with the campaigns below in the meantime.

Now, the strategies we’ll be covering for sales teams below include:

1. Messenger campaign – Targeting people based on Sales Navigator filters.
2. Hand-in-hand campaign with email – Reaching out via email first and then LinkedIn.
3. Companies with buyer intent – Targeting companies that raised funds or have a buyer intent.
4. Event campaign – Retargeting people who have attended your LinkedIn webinar. 

1. Messenger campaign

A messenger campaign within Expandi lets you automate sending direct messages to contacts that have accepted your request (i.e. 1st-degree connections).

This is a great way to reconnect with your audience, build relationships, or simply promote something new you’ve just created.

One way to start here is to simply share something valuable with your audience to show your expertise and build trust with them. Later, you can follow up with a pitch or offer your service or solution, though that depends on your offer.

When connecting with your existing network, there are a few growth hacks and filters you can use here. This way, you tailor your outreach and messages based on specific conditions.

Sales Navigator is ideal for this as you can filter your current connections to find ones matching your ICP.

You can:

• Find and target connections of your influencer / CEO.
• Follow up with your ICP personas.
• Target people who have recently changed jobs.
• Target your ICP personas who have recently posted about something.
• And more.

For example, if you’re targeting people who are following a sales LinkedIn influencer, it’s safe to assume they have some interest in the topic. And if you have a solution that makes their lives easier, they might be open to hearing your pitch. 

Or you can export your entire LinkedIn network. To set up this campaign, first, you need a list of your LinkedIn connections. You can export the list of people you’re connected with on LinkedIn for free.

1. Click Me at the top of your LinkedIn home page.
2. Go to Settings & Privacy.
   

   

3. Click on Data privacy on the left.
4. Under How LinkedIn uses your data, click on get a copy of your data.
   

   

5. Select the data files you want to export (in this case, your LinkedIn connections).
   

   

6. Finally, request archive, enter your password, and wait for an email from which you can scrape LinkedIn connections.
   

   

Keep in mind, when exporting your LinkedIn connections, some emails may be missing here. 

You’ll only see emails from contacts who allowed their connections to see their email or included it in the first place. See our guide on how to find someone’s email address if you’re wondering how to find the rest.

Once you have the CSV spreadsheet file, it’s time to get back to Expandi and upload it into the platform.

1. Go to Campaigns.
2. Select Messenger campaign.
3. Create without template.
   

   

4. Go to People.
5. Upload CSV of leads directly here.
   

   

Once that’s done, you need to set up a template you’ll be using to contact those people.

Now, this will depend on your objective.

But for this step, we recommend sharing something valuable you created (e.g. lead magnet, new blog post, case study, etc.). And you can set up the template in Steps section within Expandi.

For that, you can use an outreach message that looks something like:

“Hey {first_name},

How are you?

How is it going at {company_name?

Not sure if you’re already experimenting with LI outreach and different strategies (I’m here, btw, if you want to bounce some ideas). But I’d like to invite you to our upcoming webinar about video prospecting.

A bit of inspiration to our daily pipeline generating routine.

Here is the link:

[URL here]

Is this something potentially useful? Would be great to reconnect!

M.

Finally, press Activate and you’re good to go.

Once your campaign is live, you can see how it’s performing in the Stats section.

2. Hand-in-hand campaign

To increase your reply and acceptance rates, this campaign is ideal as it combines LinkedIn with email outreach.

With it, we’ll be targeting people who’ve read your emails but haven’t responded.

How’s that?

With Expandi, you can also send emails. So, we’ll be doing that first and then adding a LinkedIn follow-up to remind them of your email, making your outreach omnichannel.

1. Start by creating a lead list in LinkedIn tailored to your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP). Segment prospects by industry, company size, location, and specific use cases that align with your value proposition.
2. Import the said search in Expandi
3. Start the outreach with emails and set up conditions to follow up via LinkedIn if they haven’t replied to the email. This ensures your outreach effort covers multiple communication channels, increasing visibility of your messages. This works best with the Builder campaign in Expandi.

The templates here will depend vastly on your value proposal and audience. 

Be sure to check out our guide on outreach sequence templates if you need more inspiration though.

But typically, you’ll want to:

• Pitch or introduce yourself in the email first touch.
• Remind them of the email in the connection request.
• Send relevant content or a case study in the follow-up.
• Do a full pitch in the InMail as a last resort if it comes to that.

3. Companies with buyer intent

Buyer intent in Sales Navigator provides you with insights on accounts that are showing said intent. Allowing you to reach out to the right people at the right time.

With this filter, LinkedIn can now tell you if a specific person or group of people are showing this intent. Allowing you to save time and effort you’d otherwise spend in sourcing information and outreach.

To filter for buyer intent in Sales Navigator:

1. Go to Account section.
2. And under Spotlights, choose the relevant intent (senior leadership changes in the last 3 months, or funding events in the past 12 months).

Under the Workflow section, you can also sync your CRM with Sales Navigator to target people with buyer intent who are already in your CRM.

Then, when reaching out to these leads, you’ll want to personalize based on the specific intent. 

For example:

• “Hey {first_name}, congrats on the recent Series A funding at {company_name}. Any big ideas planned yet for (solution)?”

• “Hi {first_name}, just wanted to congratulate you on your new position! Just wondering if you’re already focusing on (solution) as {company_role}? Got a few ideas that might work for your new team.”

4. Event campaign

In this outreach campaign, we’ll be scraping attendees and reaching out to everyone who clicked ‘Accept’ to a LinkedIn event.

2 Ways you can launch this campaign:

• You can scrape your own LinkedIn webinar event.
• Or someone else’s.

This makes it very easy to find your target audience, based on their interests, and personalized based on the event. For example, people attending webinar events such as Money 20/20, WeBsummits, ShopTalk, and so on.

The key here is to focus on personalization and relevance.

And since we’ll be focusing on specific event attendees, both of these are going to be easy. 

For example, if people are attending an event about LinkedIn lead generation systems, it’s fair to say they might be open to hearing your pitch about 10xing their sales.

Focus on LinkedIn as the main channel (since the event happened on LinkedIn and it makes sense to connect there). But you can add an email follow up as well.

All you have to do is:

1. Find a relevant LinkedIn event, copy the URL, click ‘Attend’ so that Expandi can scrape it properly.
   

   

2. Go to the Search tab in Expandi. 
3. Click New search.
4. Paste the event URL.
5. And click Search.
   

   

Then, you set up a Builder campaign in Expandi, export the search, and add the sequences and templates.

If you’re scraping attendees of your own LinkedIn event (which we recommend), your outreach templates could look something like this:

Connection request

“Hey {first_name},

Saw you were planning to attend my webinar on LinkedIn lead generation strategies!

Would love to hear what your experience has been using LinkedIn to generate leads so far?”

Follow-up message 2

“Hope the event will bring you some value!

I’d love to share a playbook on growth marketing tactics for LinkedIn I recently wrote with my team

Would you like a copy?”

Follow-up message 3 (if they say ‘yes’)

“Awesome! Here you go: http://bit.ly/linktotheresource

Let me know your thoughts! I’d love some feedback- please feel free to send your honest opinion.”

You can copy and adjust the above templates based on your campaign specifics.

But the idea stays the same:

You’ll want to connect with people with whom you have something in common (i.e. attended the same LinkedIn event).”

Finally, you can also follow-up after the event (either via email if they opted in or LinkedIn), asking for their thoughts or pitching your solution.

So, to recap so far, what we’ve covered so far is 4 types of LinkedIn outreach campaigns ideal for fresh LinkedIn accounts.

These campaigns focus on boosting your network and “warming up” your profile.

Now, let’s take a look at campaigns for sales teams with aged accounts.

4 LinkedIn Strategies For Sales Teams With Mature LinkedIn Accounts

The 4 strategies for sales teams we’ll be covering below include:

• Builder for your top-targeted contacts.
• Connector OR/AND mobile connector campaign for scaling your ICO companies.
• Viewed profile campaign.
• Post engagement.

Let’s begin!

1. Builder campaign for your top-targeted contacts

To maximize engagement with top-priority contacts following email outreach, consider this outreach.

With this strategy, we’ll be focusing on building relationships and engaging specific, key prospects, while targeting them via email first and then following up on LinkedIn.

Here’s how it works.

1. Identify Key Companies: Begin by identifying the most crucial companies within your target audience that have not responded to your initial email outreach. These companies represent valuable opportunities for further engagement and relationship-building. See our guide on how to build a prospect list if you’re not sure how to do this.
2. Start With Email Outreach: Start your outreach campaign by sending personalized and compelling email messages to targeted contacts. Craft your emails carefully to address their specific pain points, challenges, or needs, demonstrating the value that your product or service can offer to their organization.
3. Find Decision-Makers: Within these identified companies, narrow down your focus to 3-5 potential decision-makers or key contacts part of the decision-making process and haven’t responded after the email stage.
4. Transition to LinkedIn: In the event of non-response or limited engagement through email, seamlessly transition to LinkedIn via Expandi.
5. Use Expandi’s Smart Campaign Builder: Build a smart campaign builder tool to streamline and automate your LinkedIn outreach efforts effectively. This advanced tool enables you to incorporate additional steps between follow-ups, such as visiting the profiles of your targeted contacts, engaging with their posts, or sending personalized connection requests, thereby increasing the chances of getting a positive response.

Before we set up the outreach sequence steps, we highly recommend filtering down your list of leads so that your campaign is more targeted.

You can do so directly within Expandi or export the CSV file and do it manually (or with a VA).

Look out for:

• Founders and CEOs.
• Decision-makers.
• Heads of relevant departments.

Then, your outreach sequence should look something like this:

1. Start by sending personalized email messages to your prospects, focusing on building rapport and addressing their specific needs or pain points. Tailor your emails to resonate with their interests and priorities, showcasing the value proposition of your offerings.
2. If there’s no response to your email, seamlessly transition to LinkedIn as an additional channel for engagement via Expandi. Make sure you’re targeting top decision-makers.
3. Send a connection request to prospects who are not yet connected with you. A direct messages if you are already connected.
4. After connecting, send a personalized message to initiate a conversation. Utilize personalization tags to capture their attention and convey the relevance of your offering.
5. If they still don’t reply, engage with their LinkedIn activity as a “soft” follow up. Like their latest post or endorse their skills.
6. Send a final follow-up message.
7. And if they still don’t reply, send a final LinkedIn InMail as a last resort.

First email

“Subject line: Is this relevant for {company_name}?

Hey {first_name},

Saw we’re both in the LinkedIn social selling group.

I help CEOs supercharge their outreach to the point they consistently get up to 72% reply rate through omnichannel outreach campaigns. 

We recently helped Salescout (agency similar to yours) book 6 new demons and $250k in their pipeline in just 3 weeks using an omnichannel outreach campaign.

So, thought this might be relevant for you too.

Would it make sense to send over a personalized 3-minute Loom for what this could look like for {company_name}?”

First email follow up with value

“Hey {first_name},

Just published a case study going over our above process step-by-step in detail.

Thought you’d be interested.

Check it out here (no opt-in!): [URL]

LinkedIn connection request, if not connected

“Hey {first_name},

Emailed you a few days ago.

Was wondering if you’d be interested in skyrocketing your outreach reply rates?

Can send over our top 10 templates for free.”

Open InMail, if not connected

“Subject lines: 72% Reply rates (here’s how)

{first_name}, you’re hard to reach.

Our clients are constantly getting 72% reply rates (sometimes higher!) thanks to our omnichannel outreach campaigns.

I can’t promise you’ll get similar results…

But if you’re interested, I’d love to demo the process in a quick, 10-minute call sometime next week.

No strings attached.

Pick a time here: [URL]

LinkedIn message, if connected

“Hey {first_name},

We recently helped Salescout (agency similar to yours) book 6 new demons and $250k in their pipeline in just 3 weeks using an omnichannel outreach campaign.

Can’t promise similar results. But if you’re open to it, we can discuss a potential strategy on a no-strings-attached 10-minute call for {company_name}.

Let’s talk here? [URL]”

Final LinkedIn follow up if no reply

“Hey {first_name},

I assume you have enough clients and aren’t focusing on growth right now?

If you ARE looking to scale though, we just published a new case study, going over our process.

Check it out for free here and let me know if you have any questions on outreach.! No opt-in required.

[URL]”

2. Mobile simulation outreach campaign

As you might be aware by now, because of the connections limit, most people on LinkedIn can only connect with around 100 people per week.

Thanks to the Expandi mobile simulation campaign though, you can bypass this limit and connect with 100 additional people per week.

Essentially, with this campaign, you’ll be sending around 80-100 connections from your desktop. 

The way this works is that the standard limit for desktop usage is typically between 80-100 requests per week (using the connector campaign type or the smart campaign builder). But with the mobile simulation campaign, users can send an additional 100 requests per week, without relying on the LinkedIn mobile app.

And then, Expandi will mimic human behavior to send 10-15 requests per day from your phone.

Though, keep in mind, you can’t include a connection request message with the mobile campaign. You can send connection requests, but they’ll be without a template.

Here’s how.

1. Press Add Campaign from the Expandi interface and select Mobile Connector.
   

   

2. Add a name and write your follow-up message templates.
   

   

3. Click on the “People” tab to add people to the campaign. Only 2nd and 3rd-degree connections can be added with Searched or Imported statuses on Expandi.
4. You can change the actions and conditions based on what you want to accomplish (and the templates, accordingly).
   

   

Message Example:

“Hey {first_name}, thanks for connecting! I like the work {company_name} is doing in tech and innovation, and wanted to reach out. I am always posting valuable resources and insights to help my network propel their company forward. Thought you’d be interested.”

3. Targeting companies with a hiring intent

Last but not least, here, we’ll be hiring companies who are already hiring.

With this in mind, we make the assumption that they have a problem they need solving.

Which is where you come in and pitch yourself.

For example, if you’re a marketing agency, you reach out to companies looking to hire marketers.

The specifics will vary, but at the end of the day, they need someone competent to solve a problem they’re having.

They’re hiring specialists, they have a budget, and since they’re hiring – they’re ready to spend the money.

Here’s the gist of this campaign.

1. Find companies that are hiring and apply relevant filters (industry, size, seniority, keywords, etc.).
   

   

2. Scrape the list of companies using Apify and their Glassdoor script.
   

   

3. Scrape your list as a CSV spreadsheet file.
4. Upload to Google Sheets.
5. Enrich data and find their contact info.

Then, you’ll need to export the data into Expandi via your CSV file and create a Connector campaign.

Finally, add the following templates and follow-ups.

Connection request

“Hey {first_name}!

Saw you at {company_name} were looking for {job_title} on Glassdoor.

We at (X Company) are a reliable and effective SEO agency working with 20+ IT companies across the US.

Have a few ideas on how to boost SEO for {company_name}, let’s connect!

Follow-up

“Thanks for connecting!

Checked out your website (URL) and noticed (personalization).

Do you have time tomorrow to discuss how to boost your organic traffic?

Glad to send over a Calendly link.

For a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of this campaign (and how to scrape the campaigns and personalize automatically), check out our full guide on targeting companies who are hiring right now.

4. Inbound ‘viewed profile recently’ campaign

Finally, this is another connector campaign in which people typically receive an acceptance rate of around 88-92%!

Here, we’ll be targeting people who’ve viewed your profile.

This works best if you’re active on LinkedIn – creating content or connecting with new people. 

Additionally, you need Sales Navigator or any other premium LinkedIn account type for this to work properly. As this filter is available only in Sales Navigator.

This will lead to people viewing your profile. But not everyone will connect with you on their own.

With this campaign, you don’t need to set up a Search to export people.

Instead, you can create a campaign straightaway.

1. Add campaign.
2. Select Inbound campaign and create blank campaign.

Here, you can add any additional actions and conditions to modify your campaign as needed.

But since we’re focusing on connecting with people here and growing your network, we’d recommend adding the following steps.

This means, Expandi will:

• Visit the profiles of people who visited your profile.
• See if you’re connected.
• If yes, send a follow up message.
• If not, send a connection request and wait for 7 days. If they accept your request after 7 days, send a follow up message. If not, like their recent post.

Here are the best templates you can use here.

Follow up message, if connected:

“Hey {first_name},

Saw you visited my profile.

Is there anything specific you’re interested in or I could help out with?

Either way, glad to catch up. Let me know how are things going on your end or what you’re working on lately.”

If not connected, connection request:

“Hey {first_name},

Saw you visited my profile.

Is there anything specific you’re interested in or I could help out with?

Either way, glad to connect or just say ‘hi’`!”

Then, if they connect with you, you can re-use the above follow-up message.

Here’s why this campaign works well:

• Targeting people who have visited your profile. So, they’re already interested in what you do or like your content. Making them more likely to connect with you.
• By using Sales Navigator, you’re also targeting people who’ve viewed your profile with LinkedIn private mode, expanding your reach even more.
• There is no hard sales pitch as you’re just inquiring on what the audience does. You’re looking to connect with people and learn more about them, not pitch yourself instantly.

5. Post engagement

This campaign is one of the best ways to connect with new people with a high acceptance rate.

Essentially, we’ll be scraping list of people who engaged with a specific post and reaching out.

You can target your own post, if it went viral for example and you want to connect with everyone.

Or scrape people who engaged with someone’s popular post (any LinkedIn influencers, for example).

Either way, the post engagement is ideal for easy personalization. All you have to do is mention something specific from the post and introduce yourself!

Here’s how to set it up.

1. Find a relevant post with good engagement and copy the URL.
   

   

2. Go to Expandi.
3. Search.
4. Click add new Search and select Post engagement.
   

   

5. Enter search name and paste the LinkedIn post URL and ID. Then, click Search. Turn on auto reload if people are still engaging with it and you want to connect with new people.
   

   

Once the search is processed, you need to create an outreach campaign.

Here, you can set up a different campaign based on your objective.

1. Add new campaign.
2. Select Connector.
3. Go to People.
4. Select Existing search and then the Search you exported above. Then, click save to export the list of people to the campaign.
   

   

5. The result should look like this.
   

   

Now, all you have to do is set up the outreach template in the Steps section.

If you’ve scraped list of people who engaged with your post, you can use an outreach template that looks something like this.

“Hey {first_name},

Glad you liked my post about the step-by-step playbook for growing your lead agency.

Just wondering, where are you in your agency journey right now?

Glad to help out in any way if I can!

Let me know.

– Stefan”

Alternatively, if you’ve scraped someone else’s LinkedIn post, you can connect with people by saying something like:

“Hey {first_name},

Saw your comment under Nick Abraham’s post about using sales assets as part of your outreach.

I’m looking to grow my network of outreach and sales pros.

Would love to hear more about what you do!

– Stefan”

Naturally, you’d change the personalization details here.

But typically, with this approach, it’s not uncommon to see acceptance rates of up to 80%.

Why’s that?

Because it’s not a hard sales pitch (everyone is tired of receiving those) and people love receiving a compliment or talking about themselves. 

Conclusion

So, that’s a wrap.

By now, you should have a very strong foundation on how to launch the most important starting campaigns for your sales teams.

Whether you’re looking to grow your network or book calls ASAP, the above campaigns have a little bit of everything for everyone.

Keep in mind, it also depends on your LinkedIn social selling index and activity.

If you’re not very active on LinkedIn, we recommend the first section of this guide, focusing on growing your network and building relationships.

Alternatively, the second half covers campaigns focusing on lead generation and sales.

The best part though, is that you can launch any of these campaigns for free and start seeing results in under 24 hours.

Meaning, the free trial for Expandi can pay for itself!

So, be sure to grab your free, 7-day Expandi trial here and create your first outreach campaign now!