Stormbreaker is an all-around digital marketing agency that provides a wide range of services, including lead generation, SEO, PPC, and cold email outreach, among other things.
LinkedIn outreach and lead generation have been a crucial part of every Stormbreaker’s growth-hacking strategy ever since its early beginnings in 2019.
That’s why its team needed a comprehensive LinkedIn automation solution from day one.
Doing LinkedIn outreach manually – especially when it’s done on a scale for numerous clients – was never an option for Stormbreaker’s founder and CEO, Matt Cretzman.
By automating tedious tasks, he’d end up having more time for doing things that matter and require a human touch, such as:
However, finding a tool that worked seamlessly and had all the features necessary for optimal results wasn’t easy since most LinkedIn automation tools were too glitchy, buggy, or lacked cutting-edge functionality.
That’s when Matt learned about Expandi linkedin automation – its powerful cloud-based LinkedIn solution with numerous cutting-edge features that cover LinkedIn lead generation from top to bottom.
Expandi’s hyper-personalization options, as well as options for targeting people based on LinkedIn groups and posts, were just some of the things that impressed Matt right off the bat.
So, he decided to give Expandi a go.
“Expandi’s always been on the forefront, leading the edge on tactics, advanced building strategies, and automation and personalization.
Its ability to target groups and posts was very big since I think Expandi was one of the first tools to be able to scrape and build a list off of a post on Linkedin. Then they also integrated LinkedIn events, which were very big to target.
And the GIFs and images in our messages were one of the things that continue to impress our clients over and time again.”
From that moment on, Matt’s agency exploded and has continued to achieve one success after another ever since.
Stormbreaker became a big player in the LinkedIn lead generation space in a matter of months thanks to the killer combo of Expandi’s LinkedIn automation solution and Matt’s team’s experience and know-how.
Some of Stormbreaker’s Expandi-powered campaigns had connection acceptance rates higher than 80%. This was a direct result of the fact that Expandi enabled Matt to target the right kind of audience and engage them with highly-personalized messages and connection requests.
Yet, the all-time winner was a simple but effective campaign with a personalized and direct approach. The result was unbelievable — a 100% connection acceptance rate for two straight weeks!
Moreover, all the campaigns Stormbreaker runs via Expandi have higher than 50% response and acceptance rates without exception.
Faith Driven Campaign
In the long run, these Expandi-powered campaigns helped Matt carve out a niche in the professional sports industry. They got him working with sales teams of several big names, such as the New Jersey Devils, Chicago Bulls, Indiana Pacers, and Golden State Warriors.
A campaign Stormbreaker ran for a team in the NBA G League team — the Texas Legends — also had an astonishing acceptance rate of nearly 70%, as can be seen below.
In the end, all of that resulted in Stormbreaker making more than $500k ARR in the first year of doing business.
Today, Stormbreaker is as successful as ever, with $60.000-$80.000 MRR.
Moreover, Expandi helped Matt build an entirely different business in 2021, in addition to Stormbreaker. He simply applied the same skillset he uses for his clients, reached out to highly-targeted leads through Expandi automated campaigns, and the rest is history.
In less than two weeks of doing LinkedIn outreach that way, Matt met with dozens of people who’ve become his business partners and even best friends later on.
For Matt, however, Expandi goes far beyond helping him grow professionally.
One of the contacts Matt made by doing campaigns with Expandi was Lauren, a business development representative at the Texas Legends. She ultimately got him working with all the different sports teams. But, it didn’t end there.
That same contact led Matt to the single most important person he ever met — the girl who is now his future wife and who just happened to be Lauren’s best friend.
“If I hadn’t bumped into Lauren when running campaigns with Expandi, I don’t know if I’d be sitting here today, getting married to this amazing person.
And some of the groomsmen in my wedding are people I also hit up through campaigns with Expandi.
So, the people that are going to be at my wedding — and my fiancé — are all a direct result of campaigns that I ran through Expandi, and then those relationships just kind of spider-webbed further.
Basically, what I’m telling you is that Expandi has radically changed my life in more ways than one.”
Finally, another close friendship was born out of Matt teaming up with Expandi.
Matt and Stefan, Expandi’s CEO, have become more than just business partners. After years of close and successful collaboration, they’ve created a more personal bond.
Matt and Stefan Smulders on a football game in Texas
The whole crowd hanging out together
Stefan always makes sure to be 100% involved with his clients, for better or worse, as Expandi’s made a policy of treating each client as family.
So, it’s fair to say that Expandi doesn’t just grow your network and expand your business. It also helps you build genuine relationships that last a lifetime.
Expandi has a number of features that help agency owners like Matt get amazing results for their clients.
One of the functions that significantly leveraged Stormbreaker’s campaigns and took them to the next level is Expandi’s scraping ability. Expandi can efficiently scrape:
LinkedIn posts – that means Expandi can target all the users who’ve liked or commented on any post;
One of the reasons why Stormbreaker’s campaigns have such high response and acceptance rates is precisely the spot-on lead targeting that Expandi’s scraping functionality provides.
Of course, the fact Expandi provides its clients with continuous training and thorough learning bases also helped a lot.
That training material teaches clients how to make the most of Expandi’s many functionalities, and includes tips on how to create the very best message sequences, depending on whether you’re reaching out to event attendees, group members, or users that have engaged with a relevant post.
Here’s a sneak peek into just one killer messaging campaign that efficiently targeted attendees of a particular event that was scraped by Expandi:
Connector message
First follow-up
Second follow-up
And here are just a few leads that were successfully generated through this campaign:
Lead #1
Lead #2
Lead #3
The campaign Stormbreaker ran for the Texas Legends (that had a 69% connection acceptance rate) was also more than well-targeted thanks to Expandi’s scraping features, as it targeted members of a particular group.
And the Expandi-powered messaging sequence had the same straightforward and right-to-the-point approach that’s become somewhat of a trademark of Stormbreaker’s:
Connector message
First follow-up
Second follow-up
Third follow-up
There’s far more to Expandi than its scraping options.
Some other Expandi’s functionalities Matt himself highlighted as really making a difference in the outreach game include:
“Expandi really just gave me a lot of tools in my tool belt as an agency owner to be able to run campaigns that are different and brand sensitive.
The transformation of my life from founding Expandi in 2019 to where it is today is unbelievable.
I attribute a lot of my success to Expandi – to Stefan, Glenn, and the entire team.”
But that’s not all.
Expandi’s team has close and personal experience with being a LinkedIn-oriented lead generation agency.
As a result, they know exactly what type of features agencies require to deliver unparalleled results for their clients. They include the following:
Moreover, Expandi’s made up of a team of people dedicated to constant innovation and upgrading of Expandi’s features, making sure that Expandi’s always up-to-date with LinkedIn trends, changes, limits, and requirements.
Finally, Expandi is one of the easiest platforms to white-label as it’s very customizable and adaptable to various business types and needs.
That’s how Expandi helped Matt go from rags to riches in less than two years, plus meet his future wife and make lifelong friends — including Expandi’s CEO Stefan.
Expandi can help you turn your life around as well if you’re keen on:
Book a free demo right now, and our team will give you a tour of Expandi’s capabilities, so you can find out whether we’re a match firsthand.
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How Expandi Helped Provoke Agency Grow from $0 to $1.8 Million ARR in Less than 2 yr.
