How you could take advantage of the opportunities on LinkedIn with automation; With Guillaume Por...

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 Portelier, who is the COO and co-founder of a company called Waalaxy. Guillaume, bonjour, welcome to the show.

Hey Jim, thanks for having me.

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 sucking a huge amount of time from their lives?

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.

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, at 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?

Yeah, sure. So first of all, I'd say LinkedIn is the platform for B2B relations and to sell products 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 are actually are 2 ways to leverage the platform. And I would differentiate what we call demand gen on one side and lead gen on the other side. And so for demand gen, it's basically producing content. So whether it's via LinkedIn posts or LinkedIn articles, or even by commenting stuff on other posts, other people's 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 automation tools such as Waalaxy to automatically contact them.

So let's just think then, Waalaxy, how is it helping go? 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?

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 prospects. 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 takes lots of time. 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 2 follow-up messages, and then add those prospects into the sequence and they will automatically receive the invitations and then the different messages if they do not reply. 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?

Yes, 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're able to extract those profiles.

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.

That's it. Exactly. Exactly.

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?

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 determining whether your campaigns will be successful or not is your ability to contact the proper people and the correct people. So if you're targeting business developer and somehow you're contacting web developer instead of business developer, these are 2 different kinds of people. And obviously the people that might be interested by your products for business developer, web developer won't be interested by the same products. 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.

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. Then 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?

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, you 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 a right to sell, sort of. And so for that, because it's definitely 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, will say, hey, I'm insert who you are or your company, and then I'm selling insert your value proposition, for example. 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.

That's really helpful, Guillaume. What about the follow-up responses then? How do you do the triggers? Because that's the big I've always found that the first part is 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?

Yeah. So again, the AI is not yet so advanced that it can analyze all the messages and determine 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 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 is replying to your message, you don't want to send her a follow-up message that Has nothing to do with the previous message.

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 Piwaa, which I tried in prospecting a couple of years ago, the new platform will actually integrate with email as well. Do you want to 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?

Yeah, so if you take email and LinkedIn, you have 95% of B2B lead gen contacts and way of contacting people. And so we've integrated the possibility to both retrieve the professional email of the prospects 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, 2 emails. And then if the person does not reply to your emails, you will send an invite on LinkedIn and then 2 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. So that's for the email part. And then obviously we have synchronization 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 favorite CRM.

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 different permissions and can you delegate, in effect, the management of Waalaxy to someone else on your behalf?

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 LinkedIn in, for example, the United States, And at the same time, or almost at the same time, another person using LinkedIn with the same account 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 is 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.

And with Piwa though, and with Waalaxy, sorry, I can give my VA an account and she can manage my account for me though, right?

Definitely.

So that's, I think, the key thing. You've touched on a point about LinkedIn and their sort of protocols. What's the danger of using a platform like Waalaxy and 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 can be considered to be spam?

Yeah, indeed. So one year ago, LinkedIn actually reduced the number of invites you can send per week from roughly 500 to 100. And so there are quotas on LinkedIn and obviously we have our own quotas. Quotas to make sure you're not visiting more than 150 persons per day, not inviting more than 100 people per day, et cetera. So we have limits built 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 for us, it was important to, you know, lock the tool so that you can't really risk your LinkedIn account.

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?

Yeah, so we said we are a product-led growth. So basically by opposition to sales-led growth. So we don't have any salespeople 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 chat support that replies in less than 5 minutes, 7 days a week with very high quality. So they are absolutely master of the tool and so they can help you create your campaign, et cetera. And for us, it helped us a lot with referrals. And obviously now we have other ways. So we are doing SEO, SEA, but loads 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.

Now, it's interesting, Guillaume, you've mentioned there about the customer support 24/7. Is it 24/7 or just 7 days a week?

No, it's 7 days a week, not 24/7. I think we're like 14 or 16 hours a day. So quite a long schedule.

Okay, that's really fantastic. So I haven't heard of many companies of your size. You mentioned sort of about a £6 million turnover. So it's a sizable company, but in that wonderful sweet spot of growing. But what tools are you using for your CX? When you mentioned the online chat support, do you want to just give us some insight into what platforms you're using for that?

Yep, Intercom, and, uh, 100% recommend it. It's the key pillar, by very far the most important tool that we use.

Oh, Intercom, because I think another one is, for example, like Zendesk is another one. Why did you choose Intercom?

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 waiting for a response the next day or in 2 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 So 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 the support with internal tools that we can plug into Intercom so it all works.

That's really interesting, Guillaume. Thank you for sharing because a lot of people talk about CX, but you're one of the first companies I've talked to at this scale of a business growth that's investing so heavily in that. If people want to look at Waalaxy, where can they go to find out more about you?

So simply waalaxy.com. And for the listeners that are interested, I'll give you a link where they can have a 2-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 save you that, but I'll give you a link in the description.

Guillaume Portelier 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 Aluxy can help us to overcome the challenges And also take advantage of the opportunities on LinkedIn with automation. Thank you.

Thanks, Jim. It was a pleasure.

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.