Sophie Steffen, co-founder and CEO of Kunoichi, is one of the more honest voices on LinkedIn growth in the B2B space - in part because she is candid about something most growth content carefully avoids mentioning. Roughly half of her 11,000-follower base came from automated outreach. In this segment of her conversation with Patrycja Radwanska on the Let’s Talk Marketing series, she walks through the tools her agency uses, the targeting work that has to come first, and why the toolkit matters less than most people think.
Why Automation Is Not Optional at Agency Scale
The first thing worth understanding about Steffen’s approach is that automation is not a shortcut around effort. It is a way to apply the effort she has already invested - in defining her ICP, in writing connection messages that do not read like spam, in mining the pain points her audience actually has - to a population large enough to matter.
“I have 11K followers now, and half of them are from automated campaigns because otherwise I would need a lot of time to one by one ask to connect.”
The math is straightforward. A two-person agency cannot manually send a hundred well-targeted connection requests a day and also run client work, also publish five times a week, and also stay sane. Automation is the only way the volume math works. The people who refuse to automate either accept that their network will grow slowly, or end up doing nothing else with their week.
The trade-off is that automation amplifies whatever quality of targeting and copy you put into it. A poorly targeted automated campaign sends bad connection requests at scale, which is worse than not running one at all. A well-targeted automated campaign sends good connection requests at scale, which is roughly the only way to grow a focused B2B network in less than a decade.
The Two-Path Targeting Setup
Before any tool gets opened, Steffen builds the audience in one of two ways. The first is ABM - account-based marketing. A specific list of companies, with specific titles inside each company, in specific countries. This is the surgical motion. It works when the deal size justifies the per-prospect effort and when you can clearly name the accounts that matter. Twenty named companies with three target personas each is a hundred prospects, and a hundred prospects is enough to fill a quarter if your conversion rate is even modest.
The second path is firmographic. Industry, headcount, region, sometimes funding stage. This is the wider net. It works when you sell to a category rather than a named list - say, marketing leaders at Series A SaaS companies in DACH. The connection volume is higher, the personalization is shallower, and the conversion rate per outreach is lower, but the absolute number of conversations created is much larger.
The two motions are not mutually exclusive. Most well-run agencies do both, in parallel, with different tools and different messaging frameworks for each. The ABM motion gets the longer connection notes and the more personalized follow-ups. The firmographic motion uses templates that are tight enough to scale but specific enough that the recipient does not immediately recognize them as templates.
The Toolkit, Briefly
Steffen names six tools in the conversation, and they fall into two categories.
The first category is LinkedIn-specific automation - tools that connect to LinkedIn (in ways the platform officially frowns upon and unofficially tolerates) and automate connection requests, follow-ups, and message sequences. Linked Helper is her primary recommendation in this group. The alternatives she mentions are Heyreach, Lemlist (which also does email), PhantomBuster, and Waalaxy. Each has its own opinion about safety limits, cadence pacing, and message templating, but the underlying function is the same: replace the manual click-by-click motion with a scheduled, rate-limited automation.
The second category is the multichannel orchestration layer. Apollo is the tool she calls out by name here. The job is to combine LinkedIn outreach with email outreach in a single sequence, so that a prospect who ignores the connection request gets an email three days later, and a prospect who accepts the connection but does not reply gets an email a week after that. The single biggest unlock from this layer is that LinkedIn stops being a standalone channel and becomes one slot in a coordinated motion.
The honest assessment is that the differences between the LinkedIn-automation tools are smaller than the marketing for each tool implies. Pick one, learn its quirks deeply, and accept that your time is better spent on targeting and copy than on tool evaluation.
The Organic Compounding That Eventually Takes Over
The part of the story that Steffen mentions almost in passing is the most important one for anyone deciding whether to start. The automated outreach got her to a base. The content - the five-posts-a-week cadence, the consistency, the willingness to keep showing up - is what made the base compound. Half of her 11K followers came from automation. The other half came organically, and that half is growing faster every quarter.
“Now it’s growing organically because people are following me more.”
The implication for someone starting from zero is that automation and content are not competing strategies. They are sequential. Automation gives you a base of an audience to write for. Content turns that base into something that recruits new followers without further outreach effort. Eventually the organic share crosses 50%, and the automation becomes a complement rather than the primary engine.
Skip either step and the system stalls. Pure automation produces a network of contacts who do not engage. Pure content, with no outreach to seed the audience, produces brilliant posts that no one sees because the network is too small for the algorithm to notice. The combination is what works, in roughly that order.
For the full interview breakdown, see our complete Expert Insight with Sophie Steffen.
Tools Mentioned
The following tools and platforms were referenced during this conversation.
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