How to Generate More Qualified Leads Through Automated Prospecting Tools
You may have a high-quality website and well-structured product pages, yet your conversion rate remains low! You might receive a few connections on your blog, but your traffic remains limited. Prospects have deserted online stores, and they no longer respond to newsletters. Manual prospecting amounts to just a few hours a week, causing sales to stagnate. So, how can businesses generate leads online? How can they prospect effectively and create content that sells?
Prospecting is an essential aspect of your company's reputation, growth, and profitability. It is often regarded as a tedious task, commonly associated with burden and wasted time that could have been better spent elsewhere. This is an age-old debate that AI might help to resolve. Numerous digital techniques exist to meet the need for acquiring new customers online. The digital lead market is highly competitive, presenting opportunities to save time and money. However, for a variety of reasons, it is often perceived as a complex, difficult, and overly expensive program. In reality, automated lead acquisition is primarily about selecting the right tools. The rest is merely a matter of optimizing your strategy regarding which steps to automate and which ones you should handle yourself, or delegate to the marketing automation wizard, allowing you to focus more on your clients.
What is Automated Prospecting in Business?
Automated prospecting is a marketing and sales technique that involves using artificial intelligence tools for prospecting. Numerous no-code tools are available that enable you to create highly advanced prospecting chains that can contact individuals and follow up based on specific criteria such as their roles, behaviors, purchasing habits, etc.
Lead automation is also an effective solution for transitioning between channels. Often rooted in direct mailing or cold calling, sales teams can employ more subtle techniques to optimize their results. Visiting a LinkedIn profile, sending an email, adding someone on LinkedIn, following up, obtaining their phone number, etc. When added up, these actions consume a lot of time, investment, and follow-up from your sales teams. Yet, they are key to successfully converting your leads into real customers.
Lead automation is a marketing strategy that will help you grow your company's revenue. Because sales cannot be made with a snap of your fingers, they must be prepared so that the buyer genuinely wants to purchase what you offer. The goal is to establish more comprehensive systems, spread across a longer timeframe, that does not burden your teams and can yield better results.
The Main Advantages of Lead Automation
• Reduce Time Spent on Prospecting: delegation is the key to automation. By delegating a portion of your sales teams' daily tasks, you free up time for higher value-added tasks. Initial outreach, follow-ups, multi-channel engagement—all managed by your lead automation tools.
• Lower Prospecting Costs: The range of marketing automation tools available at very attractive prices is extensive.
• Do More with Fewer Human Resources: Lower recruitment and maintenance costs for the sales team.
• Multiply Your Points of Contact: website, landing page, email, newsletter, LinkedIn, etc.
• Increase Prospecting Potential: better target high-potential prospects and develop results consistently.
• Provide More Qualified Leads to Your Sales Team: only "qualified" prospects will be sent to your salespeople for conversion.
• Enhance Customer Satisfaction: receive prompt responses from the person in charge of sales prospecting.
Levers of Automated Sales Prospecting
Utilize the Reputation of Your Website
Online marketing is crucial if you want to drive more traffic to your website. You need to promote your products to highlight them and generate leads. A website must be used proactively. It contains all the information prospects need to understand who you are and your added value. To achieve this, work on your organic SEO by optimizing your site, sharing varied content, and providing your visitors with a unique experience. Use paid search (SEA) with Google Ads, for example, to appear in targeted searches and convert quickly. Discover all the methods (inbound marketing, content production, SEO tagging, etc.) that can improve your site's visibility in our article on "Optimization for Search Engines".
Create Effective Landing Pages
Conversion pages are highly effective tools in prospecting. They must address a specific issue or need with a precise solution. This way, you provide a targeted response in every action you undertake.
Implement a Multi-Channel Strategy: Email, LinkedIn, Web, etc.
On average, 7 points of contact are needed to convert a prospect, and task automation is a way to meet this need easily. Multi-channel engagement has long been a reality, but its full significance is typically not recognized by small businesses and startups that tend to focus solely on selling their products and services. If you want to stand out from the competition, you must absolutely adopt a multi-channel approach tailored to your target audience.
Most companies rely on a single channel to promote their products. This is understandable, as historically, the idea was that by pursuing only one strategy, a business could dedicate all its resources to that single avenue. However, in reality, things are different as digitalization shapes new habits and forces us to adapt.
For instance, people take smart devices (smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, etc.) everywhere they go and consume more media than ever. Therefore, businesses must find ways to reach their targets while adapting to evolving user behaviors. Marketing automation today offers the ability to switch from one channel to another using predefined automation chains. You can thus prefer email, calling, or social media, based on your sector, your target, the average age of your prospects, their habits, etc.
Target and Qualify Contacts
Sales prospecting is a science, akin to cooking. There are tons of recipes for the same dish, but the core principles remain the same: precision, careful measurements, and high-quality ingredients. These elements constitute the marketing mix of a product or service and should be treated as such to succeed in this competitive environment.
In the automation domain, there are numerous ways to achieve results in sales prospecting—from the channels or platforms through which prospects receive your message (direct mail fails more quickly than email) to segmentation or verifying the most effective days and times of the week when prospects will be most receptive to your message.
Targeting is then built through behavioral analysis of the prospect. Their various interactions with your website, reactions to advertising messages, and interest in your social media accounts are all considered in your automation chains.
Optimize and Personalize Content
Lead generation automation relies on email marketing and does not entail sending mass emails to many people with pre-established templates. Instead, a personalized email is sent by the regular sales affiliate as if it were a standard text message. In short, lead generation automation is performed carefully so that prospects notice no difference between automated emails and other types of correspondence.
The best sales experiences depend on a seller's ability to provide a unique customer experience, taking into account past interactions and future opportunities. This means that sellers must be informed of client interactions and sales opportunities, and able to process this data quickly and efficiently. Today, sales automation does this for you. Thanks to the data collected, you can truly personalize your approach and your content. You create scenarios based on the behavior of your leads, their sources, sectors, etc.
Beyond the approach, the entire follow-up can be personalized. Transition from one channel to another, from email to LinkedIn, from personalized messages to commercial offers, etc.
The Importance of Databases and CRM
The database is the number one lever for your prospecting efforts. It is at the core of your business strategy, containing all prospect and client data, as well as the evolution of exchanges, etc. To make the most of it, your database must first be complete. Numerous web scraping tools, such as Dropcontact or Waalaxy, allow you today to enrich your database with missing information. These tools can provide you with professional email addresses, phone numbers, and other useful information for your future prospecting efforts.
Your database must then be qualified. Qualified prospects are a valuable resource, representing those who have shown genuine interest in your offering or service. These individuals therefore have the highest likelihood of eventually becoming real customers.
What Are the Steps to Create an Effective Automated Prospecting Strategy?
The Process of Successful Sales Prospecting
- Define a Target: The more precise the target, the more impactful your strategy will be.
- Develop Your Automation Strategy: Determine which channels to use, what actions to take (initial contact, follow-ups, etc.), timelines, etc.
- Set Limits for Your Prospecting: Determine what will be considered a success for sending your prospect to a salesperson or, conversely, what will be deemed a failure that will exclude them from your prospecting chain.
- Measure Results: Use qualitative indicators (open rates, quick response rates, etc.) and quantitative indicators (conversion rates, bounce rates, number of views, etc.) to assess the impact of your campaigns.
- Qualify Your Prospects: Evaluating your prospects based on their potential is crucial as it will prioritize your future actions and investments.
- Enhance Your CRM: Obtain all missing information on your prospects using web scraping tools.
- Nurture Your Prospects: Integrate your qualified contacts into extended campaigns over several months, provide them with varied "non-commercial" content, and create a genuine community around your brand, offerings, sector, etc.
Automated Prospecting: Solution or Illusion?
Automated prospecting is great, significantly boosting productivity for teams, but is it truly effective? Let’s analyze the situation.
Preconceived Messages Must Be Thoughtfully Crafted
"Hello {FirstName}, we have an automated prospecting solution for {Company}!"
This is the type of message often found on LinkedIn, and it’s increasingly common to open it just to dismiss the notification. As we have seen, one of the pillars of prospecting is personalizing content. It is a misconception to think that personalized messaging is just about filling in {first name} {last name}. For your message to be truly impactful, targeting must be done in advance. The smaller your sample, the more targeted your landing page will be, your message will be personalized, your hook will be identified, etc.
Let’s not forget that an automated message is primarily a message conceived and written by a human. Automation is merely a tool for sending it at a specific time and tracking the outcome to facilitate further actions.
Lead Automation Should Be Seen As a Means and Not an End
As we have defined, prospecting automation "is a marketing and sales technique," thus supporting all other methods employed by your sales teams. Automation alone cannot convert all your prospects, but it can significantly increase the number of warm leads that will then be passed on to your sales team. By multiplying points of contact, conducting initial sorting, assigning priority orders, and managing follow-ups, these tasks can be delegated to a robot rather than your salespeople.
Digidop Supports You in Automating Business Prospecting
Technological innovation is one of the foundations of marketing. There are numerous innovative marketing automation tools available at very attractive prices. This time is therefore ideal for startups, small businesses, and SMEs to develop their activities by implementing various no-code tools.
Web Scraping Tools
- Dropcontact
- import.io
Emailing Tools
- Brevo (Sendinblue)
- Active Campaign
LinkedIn Automation Tools
- Waalaxy
- Dux-soup
Phoning Tools
- Aircall
- Twilio
Prospect Targeting Tools
- Sales Navigator
Database / CRM Tools
No-Code Automation Tools
Follow-Up Tools
- Rebump
Discover even more useful tools in the Digidop Toolbox!
