The 55% "Absolutely" Campaign

One of my clients runs a financial services firm. When I first started talking to him, he told me that most of his deals come from referral partners. And they have a very specific type of referral partner that they work with.

When I started with him, I'd rebuilt his website for fun — to test the idea of building a website with AI. He liked it so much that he hired me.

At that time, they were using LaGrowthMachine to run LinkedIn campaigns. And they were getting relatively low response rates. Which, for all I knew, were normal.

But I had a theory. If their best 'customers' are referral partners, what if we reached out to referral partners that were engaging with other referral partners in his network on LinkedIn? The idea was that we know they're active, and we could expand his network this way.

So we built it, using n8n + apify to facilitate weekly scraping, then clay to organize contacts, enrich, and double check they're in the right location + they're the right type of referral partner.

Because initially we had lots of irrelevant people that seemed related, and we needed to test a filter multiple times until we got it right. And we kept doing this even after the campaign launched, because we didn't realize all the ways the filter could go wrong.

And after we had this list, we launched it.

About 1% of the engagers with his referral partners were qualified referral partners. Which was giving us about 50/week.

The launch was amazing. We sent 150 connection requests, and about 55% accepted — often saying yes, I'd love to connect.

And here's the interesting thing. We added a message to the connection request. Which a lot of people recommend not to do, because acceptance rates are higher if you don't.

In this case the connection request did 3 things:

1. It said hey, saw you engaged with someone's post
2. Gave a short summary of their value to referral partners
3. Politely requested to connect so they could share more.

And when someone sees it, it immediately has a name they recognize + something valuable to them, and then a request to share more.

But something weird happened. All of a sudden they were getting lots of "Absolutely."

We didn't expect this. So much so that they were immediately scheduling 5-10 meetings/week!

Turns out one of LinkedIn's default responses is 'absolutely' — and when people accept, it immediately moves that connection request to their messages, where they click the now famous absolutely.

It was a fun learning process for me, and one of the successes I most enjoyed. For something relatively simple.

If you're curious to implement something like this in your company, I'd love to help. Just click the Schedule a Call button and we can set up a time to see if it's right for you. If I think it's a good fit, I offer a guarantee that you'll get results in 60 days, or I'll work for free until you do.