“With Needle on our whole team’s LinkedIn, referral partners asked us for calls within a week.”
Issac Hicks
CEO at Autonomi
10
Positive replies in the first 20 days
4
Replies heading to a call, one meeting booked
30%
Of referral partners accepted a request with no note
8x
More invites a week, from one sender to five
6 days
From the first team invites to the first call request
The problem
Autonomi is the operations group behind Autonomi Books, which rebuilds and cleans up the books of small businesses. A licensed CPA reviews every file. Many of the best clients come through people who see messy books first: financial advisors, M&A attorneys, business brokers and fiduciaries. The team started reaching them from a single LinkedIn account. Within hours of connecting it, Austin Armstrong had 739 fiduciaries in a campaign. But one account can only send so many invites. LinkedIn’s limits paused it 15 times in three weeks, and it averaged about 26 invites a week. 635 of the 739 people were never reached.
What they did with Needle
They spread the work across the team. Four more people connected their LinkedIn accounts: Issac Hicks, the CEO; Jade Wang, the firm’s CPA; Austin Ambrozi, a managing partner; and Everett Smith. The new accounts started slow, at 10 invites a day (5 for Jade) and 20 messages a day. Austin Armstrong set up the campaigns from Claude over Needle’s MCP. He pulled lists of referral partners with Sales Navigator search and gave each teammate one group: advisors for Austin Ambrozi, exit advisors and business brokers in Colorado for Issac, and M&A attorneys for Jade. A list of 711 fiduciaries was split between Austin Armstrong and Everett by a routing rule inside one campaign. Every sequence is short: view the profile, send a connection request with no note, wait for the accept, then send one message written from that sender’s role, like “I’m the CPA at a firm that cleans up small-business books.” When someone replies, the teammate who sent the request answers in person.
The result
All five senders went live on the same afternoon, and weekly invites went from about 26 to 211. Referral partners answered far better than buyers did: 30% of them accepted the connection request, against 8% of the fiduciaries contacted directly. In the first 20 days, 21 people replied and 10 of the replies were positive. Four are heading to a call: one meeting is booked, two attorneys asked for a call, and an advisor proposed a partnership. Every reply Jade got was positive. The first call request came six days after the first team invites went out.
