Video Overview
In this #2 episode of The B2B Outbound Marketing & Sales Automation Series, our guest is the CEO of LinkedAutomate, Govinda Prakash.
He talks about how he got the idea, and how LinkedAutomate fits in the big market.
Govinda is sharing the way LinkedAutomate works, and all the tips&tricks you should know about.
LinkedAutomate offers a free 7-day trial: LinkedAutomate
All the cool features included!
STAY TUNED for more success stories, tips&tricks, and more awesome tools in the B2B Outbound world!
Speakers
Interview Transcript
[00:00:07.200] – Dancho – Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the B2B Outbound Marketing and Sales Automation series. Today, I’m excited to have Govinda Prakash from India, on the call. He’s founder and CEO of LinkedAutomate.com. Govinda, welcome.
[00:00:25.840] – Govinda – Thank you, thank you Dancho.
[00:00:28.050] – Dancho – It’s so nice having you here. Let’s make things more comfortable by letting you tell us a bit more about yourself. Who is actually Govinda?
[00:00:36.450] – Govinda – I can get projects without much competition, easy. So when I was thinking about that I got the idea about this LinkedIn automation outreach that I can outreach to high-ticket clients, find high-ticket clients. So I was already developing a Google Chrome extensions for my clients. So based on that skill, I developed this LinkedIn tool.
[00:01:11.430] – Dancho – I see, I see. I also started as a freelancer, like five or six years ago. I was on Upwork, that time it was oDesk, I think it was before it was renamed to Upwork. And it’s interesting. I mean, you start as a freelancer, you find an opportunity on the market and you think, okay, I can actually build this from scratch.
[00:01:33.000] – Govinda – It’s a good advantage for us.
[00:01:35.760] – Dancho – Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of automation out there. So I was wondering actually how LinkedAutomate is positioned on the market? I mean, to which degree you do the automation? Which part? I mean, it is a big ecosystem now with data scraping, with automations and follow-up. So just wanted to see how your solution fits in the big market?
[00:01:59.460] – Govinda – Okay, so when starting I developed this, I named this tool DPZ LinkedIn tool. So so initially, you know, we were offering the basic automation like AutoView, AutoConnect, and AutoMessage campaigns. And then we developed further, we added these follow-up messages, and all. So there you can outreach to your prospect if you’re going to get response. So initially, when you send a message, you don’t get an immediate response. You need to keep follow-up the prospects. Initially, there was a feature called messaging to group members, so you would join a group that is in your niche and then contact the group members for promoting your business. Later LinkedIn limited the number of messages sent to group members. So now as the competition in the world, what happens is everyone has started sending LinkedIn outreach messages. Anyone, and a lot of people are doing it very badly, like immediately after contacting, they are asking for my product, my service and all. So because of this, a lot of people are getting annoyed. And so they started blocking unknown people. So what we do is right now we have developed a new feature that is for nurturing your prospects, to make your prospects happy before you expect something from them. So the best way to make them happy is like you can engage with them on LinkedIn post. So they already keep posting the post in their niche so if they are digital marketer they would be keep posting content about marketing and advertising. So if you like their post, share their post and comment, then they’ll become happy and a lot of people reflect on your comment and say thank you. So these are really, really effective methods. And I think very less people are using this kind of features, so if you use these features then it will be very high chance you get a good acceptance rate, response rate. So lot of people on Twitter also talking about this, like if you’re going to get a response then you engage with their posts, to nurture them.
[00:04:42.060] – Dancho – I see. Well, in BizzBee, we always say that nurture is king, and that relationship building is actually the most important, because if you just play by the numbers in quantity, and send thousands of invitations, and then pitching just after the acceptance, of course, then you’re just burning bridges with potential clients that perhaps they need just someone to start communicating, chitchatting, and see if there is an opportunity, then start doing a sales call. So I think that we all want to see how your software works. So if you could share to our audience a kind of a demo or actually to see how your solution is actually working on LinkedIn.
[00:05:24.710] – Govinda – So this is how it looks. The dashboard of the tool. The dashboard shows all the campaign he streams all the time. How many profiles you have, invitations sent and number of invitations accepted, the number of messages sent, number of messages opened, received. So this is back up, all back up that I have restored. Recent statistics are not showing. These are campaigns, sample campaigns I have created. So basically, what happens, what happens is this is a campaign based system, here you can create campaigns based on different goals. You organize your campaign on different goals. Starting from basic campaigns like viewing profiles. You can keep on creating these campaigns and also you can link them together in a sequence.
[00:06:36.640] – Dancho – I see.
[00:06:37.560] – Govinda – Yeah, let’s begin with the AutoView campaign. So this is the basic structure of all the campaigns based on the objective campaign you have different kind of options to configure. So in this sort of profile campaign, you select source for collecting profiles for every campaign. So these are available sources here, so LinkedIn people search into the source from there, you can define what the nature of your prospect by industries, keywords and many of the things that are offered by LinkedIn. So once you finish searching in this, you know, LinkedIn search, you need to copy and paste it on this field.
[00:07:40.850] – Dancho – Okay.
[00:07:42.260] – Govinda – You can also use the Sales Navigator to search
[00:07:46.670] – Dancho – It works with both, with normal LinkedIn and with Sales Navigator, right?
[00:07:50.090] – Govinda – Yes, yes definitely. So, yes, if you want to narrow down your prospects, that is a good thing in outreach because you want relevant leads for your outreach. If you outreach to irrelevant people, then it’s not good, right?
[00:08:16.280] – Dancho – Yes.
[00:08:17.160] – Govinda – Yeah. So other sources are profile warrants list. If you have a custom list of LinkedIn profile, you can also use that. You can just paste
[00:08:29.520] – Dancho – One by one.
[00:08:31.290] – Govinda – Yes. You can directly copy and paste. It’s one per line. And the next source is group members, the group members are also very good source to find that highly targeted prospects. Yeah, so there are many groups that have joined here. So, for example, if I want to promote my business, then I can select this software as a service, or if I want to contact digital marketers to sell myself, than I can choose this on marketing automation, so I can choose of any group I want to approach. And the next source would be all first connections. The difference between using LinkedIn search for all connections, that would be because LinkedIn search gives only thousand businesses per search, like no matter how many are very important, you get access to only thousands. In order to avoid that, if you have 10000 connections, then you want you may want to use this feature. Yeah, I’m moving on to another source, but this other campaign. This is an important feature of the software, that you can use to create your own sequence. Okay, so you should have created previously one campaign and then you want to, you know, target those people. Then you can use this and then select the campaign. Yes, exactly. After you select that campaign, then you can filter by the status to these tables, you can choose, for example, and this is an auto engage LinkedIn post. If you select auto engage campaign and select the state of success, then what happens, it will wait for a profiles that the previous campaign is engaged with. Once this campaign is done engaging with the profile, then it will be passed to this campaign because of the state of success. So that’s how it works.
[00:10:55.530] – Dancho – I see.
[00:10:57.000] – Govinda – Coming to the next source. This is a LinkedIn post. Okay, so for example, if you want if you find a LinkedIn post, which is highly relevant to your work, product or service and what you can do is if you go here, in your feed, you find nice posts, LinkedIn posts.
[00:11:27.200] – Dancho – Yeah, with a lot of engagement and you can actually target people that they actually either like that post or actually comment.
[00:11:35.540] – Govinda – I’m going to choose random post. So here you just click on copy link to post and if you paste it here then this campaign will follow all the people who have liked or commented on the post, depending on the source. This is really effective because when you send a connection request to this person, you can specify that you can relate to this post’s content and you can build a relationship. For the next option will be per delivery if you want to limit the number of connections then you can use this. You don’t have to run the campaign every day, you could take care of the limits and delays between those. And so these are the options, basic options. Coming to the last option is very helpful if you want to send this profile then you can use this. You have options to select this message, you can create multiple messages and you can select one of them from the list of messages. When creating a message, you can personalize the message based on these valuables like last name, location. So then if you want to send follow-up messages, you can create unlimited follow-up messages.
[00:13:51.880] – Dancho – You can send multiple follow-up messages after a certain period.
[00:13:57.910] – Govinda – You can also choose the number of delays, number of days of delivering those messages. So with this, you can maximum the response you receive. And there is also the option to avoid duplicating the messages, sending messages to those people who appear to be the best option here. So there are some two extra options here, like excluding some other campaign.
[00:14:34.980] – Dancho – Yeah, not to overlap.
[00:14:46.870] – Govinda – So here you have a new source called new connections. If you want to send messages to a new connections, you can use this. So you can also filter by from which campaign they are added, as a new connection. And auto connect campaigns are pretty much similar. You select the sorce and then
[00:15:19.130] – Dancho – For resending the invitation, but to be included in that.
[00:15:31.630] – Govinda – For the last source here is auto engaged.
[00:15:35.050] – Dancho – This is your latest feature that you said was very fresh from the oven?
[00:15:39.730] – Govinda – Yes, exactly, exactly. Similar to auto message and connect you just select a source here, before, you can I prefer I recommend using this campaign rather than the campaign before sending auto connect campaign, so that your prospect to get to know about you. So let me show you some examples here. So these are the responses I received from auto engage campaign and there’s a lot of replies, and likes. Liked your comment, liked your post.
[00:16:30.890] – Dancho – So you’re going to their profile and you’re liking their posts?
[00:16:36.440] – Govinda – Yes. I go to my profile activity and I can show you the history of activity. Here, these are the three options supported. So in case you want to choose to comment on the post, then you can specify that set of posts that you post comments on. So like this, you can keep on adding different variations of comments and the software would pick a random one.
[00:17:14.740] – Dancho – I see, so instead of sending one comment to everybody, you’re just making a mix of different posts.
[00:17:34.490] – Govinda – All the activities done by the group. So these are all the automated engagements.
[00:17:49.790] – Dancho – Yeah, so when you connect with them later, they already seen you liking or commenting on their posts.
[00:17:56.560] – Govinda – Yeah. And then share it and then comment it. Yeah, so this way, no prospect get to know about you. So here what happens is, you can also configure how frequently you want to engage with the prospect’s post. The activity of each person once in every one day, so if you want to increase three days, if you want to engage only one then you can do that. They will keep on rotating through all each of the profiles and finding posts and then engage with them. So, for example, if a person, you know, has big follows, then you might not get recognized. In that case, you might want to engage continuously for three days for one week.
[00:19:10.000] – Dancho – I see. Okay, I think that you showed quite a lot of interesting functionalities here, Govinda. And I mean, I will leave a link from your software at the bottom of this video interview. So if people are actually interested in looking at more, they can come actually to your website and give it a try. Is there any free trial that people can try?
[00:19:36.370] – Govinda – Yes. Yes, we have free trials. They can sign up for free trial for seven days or they can also try for more days
[00:19:47.060] – Dancho – So they have seven days to give it a try to see how it works, whether it’s their need. And if they like it, they can actually use it.
[00:19:55.400] – Govinda – Yes, definitely they can even if they want more then we can give that.
[00:20:03.860] – Dancho – And how did you decide to be a from extension and not an online platform or a desktop solution?
[00:20:17.850] – Govinda – But I decided to choose from extension because it’s not like other extensions that got something on top of LinkedIn pages. So in that case, it becomes risky because LinkedIn recently blocked extensions that were using the LinkedIn pages to display viewers. But our extension is not like that. It’s completely independent from the LinkedIn pages. Yeah, so we’re working on that because some features get broken then every user faces issues. But again, use the software. Chrome extension is simple that’s why we are still planning to do the cloud-based one.
[00:21:26.990] – Dancho – I see, I see. And I mean, I also wanted to ask you about partnerships because they are always interesting point. Do you have any partnership programs already with the LinkedAutomate, either some white label options or, for example, affiliates or resellers or some other things that companies can partner with you?
[00:21:49.020] – Govinda – Yeah, right now we are offering white label solutions. If you want more than 25 users and we can provide you white-label, custom, what label you like. And we have a dashboard for managing different users.
[00:22:10.100] – Dancho – I see. Well, that’s good to know. I have only one more question, and that is about the future plans about your roadmap. I mean, when you told me that today, you actually released an update with new features, it was so exciting to hear. But I’m also assuming that now is December, you also have some plans either by the end of this year or we have 2021 ahead of us?
[00:22:35.390] – Govinda – Yes, my plan is to develop cloud-based platform and upgrade team features that they can also have the teams to manage all the campaigns that they can review all the profiles individually and to filter the unwanted profiles and work on that profiles first names, because first names are also very important, like doing cold outreach.
[00:23:07.040] – Dancho – Yes, yes. By having a team, it can be more efficient
[00:23:11.880] – Govinda – Yes, team management features and all.
[00:23:14.790] – Dancho – Well, sounds exciting. I will be back when you release that part so we can actually have another look at where the software has just went to. Govinda, thank you very much for taking this call. I think that I find it refreshing. For all the listeners, I’ll put the link at the bottom, so people can actually come and give it a seven day trial. And with that, I would say thank you again. It was a pleasure talking to you. And hopefully you can come back again and tell us the additional great news.
[00:23:48.720] – Govinda – Yes, definitely. We’ll keep on improving the software.
[00:23:53.760] – Dancho – Sounds perfect.