How to gain more qualified leads with automated prospecting tools  

You may have a quality site, well-constructed product sheets and nothing happens! Your conversion rate remains low. You may receive a few connections on your blog but your traffic will remain too limited. The prospects have all deserted the online shops, and they no longer respond to the newsletters. Manual prospecting amounts to a few hours in a week and sales stagnate. So how can companies generate leads on the internet? How do you prospect effectively and create content that sells?

Prospecting is a vital part of your company's awareness, growth and profitability. It is often seen as tedious work, often associated with a burden and time wasted that could have been better spent. This is an old debate that AI may help to resolve. Many digital techniques exist to address the need to acquire new customers online. The market for digital leads is highly competitive with opportunities to save time and money. But for a number of reasons, it is often perceived as a complex, difficult and overly expensive programme. In fact, automated lead acquisition is mainly a matter of choosing the right tools. The rest is just a matter of optimising your strategy in terms of which steps you should automate and which you should do yourself, or leave to the digital marketing wizard so that you can focus more on your customers.

What is automated business prospecting?

The automation of prospecting is a marketing and sales technique that consists of using artificial intelligence tools to prospect. Numerous nocode tools exist and enable the creation of very advanced prospecting chains, which can contact people and follow up on them according to very precise criteria such as their functions, their behaviour, their purchasing habits, etc.

Lead automation is also an effective solution for switching from one channel to another. Often stuck in direct mailing or call phoning exchanges, sales teams can use more subtle techniques to optimise their results. Visit a LinkedIn profile, send an email, add them to LinkedIn, follow up, get their phone number, etc. Added one by one, these actions require a lot of time, investment and follow-up for your sales teams. Yet they are the key to success in converting your leads into real customers.

Lead automation is a marketing strategy that will help you to develop your company's turnover. Because sales cannot be made in a snap of the fingers, they must be prepared in such a way that the buyer really wants to buy what you offer. The aim is therefore to develop more comprehensive systems, spread over a longer period of time, which is not a burden on your teams and which can deliver better results.

The main benefits of lead automation

- Reduce the time spent on prospecting: delegating is the key to automation. By delegating part of the daily tasks of your sales teams, you free up their time for higher value-added tasks. First approaches, follow-ups, multi-channel, everything is managed by your lead automation tools.

- Reduce the cost of prospecting: marketing automation tools are numerous and the prices are very attractive.

- Do more with less human resources: reduce the costs of recruiting and maintaining the sales team.

- Multiply your contact points: website, landing page, email, newsletter, LinkedIn, etc.

- Increase prospecting potential: better target high-potential prospects and develop results consistently.

- Bring more qualified leads to your salespeople: only "qualified" leads will be sent to your salespeople for conversion.

- Improve customer satisfaction : get a quick response from the person doing the prospecting.

The levers of automated commercial prospecting

Use the reputation of your website

Internet marketing is very important if you want to drive more traffic to your website. You need to be able to promote your products in order to highlight them, but also to generate leads. A website should be used proactively. It contains all the information prospects need to understand who you are and your added value. To do this, work on your natural referencing (SEO), bringing your site up to standard, sharing varied content, offering your visitors a unique experience. Use paid search (SEA) with Google ads for example to move up in targeted searches and convert quickly. Discover all the methods (inbound marketing, content production, SEO tagging, etc.) that can help your site rank better in our article on"Search Engine Optimisation".

Create effective landing pages

Conversion pages are very effective tools in prospecting. They must respond to a specific problem or need with a specific solution. You will thus provide a targeted response in each of the actions that you will carry out.

Use a multi-channel strategy: email, LinkedIn, web, etc.

It takes an average of 7 touch points to convert a prospect, and automating tasks is an easy way to meet this need. Multi-channel has been a reality for a long time, but its full importance is not generally perceived by small and medium-sized businesses that only have one thing in mind: selling their products and services. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you must adopt a multi-channel approach adapted to your target.

Most companies rely on only one channel to promote their products. This is understandable, since historically the idea was that by pursuing only one strategy, a company would be able to devote all its resources to that single avenue. However, in reality things are different, as digitalization shapes new habits and forces us to adapt.

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For example, people carry smart devices (smartphones, tablets, connected watches, etc.) everywhere they go and consume more media than ever before. As a result, businesses need to find ways to reach their targets while adapting to changing user behaviors. Marketing automation offers today the possibility to switch from one channel to another using predefined automation chains. You can prefer mailing, phoning or social networks, depending on your sector, the one you are targeting, the average age of your prospects, their habits, etc.

Target and qualify contacts

Business development is a science, much like cooking. There are tons of recipes for the same dish, but the basic principles remain the same: precision, careful measurement and top quality ingredients. These elements make up the marketing mix of a product or service and must be treated as such to succeed in this competitive environment.

In the realm of automation, there are many ways to get a result in sales prospecting - from the channels or mediums through which prospects receive your message (direct mail fails faster than email) to segmentation or checking the most effective times of the week when prospects will be most receptive to the message.

Targeting is then built on the prospect's behavioral analysis. Thus, his different interactions on your site, his reactions to advertising messages, or his interest in your social networks are elements taken into account in your automation chains.

Optimise and personalise content

Lead generation automation is based on email marketing and therefore does not involve sending mass emails to large numbers of people with pre-set templates. Instead, a personalised email is sent by the regular sales affiliate as if it were an ordinary text message. In short, lead generation automation is done carefully so that prospects see no difference between automated emails and other types of correspondence.

The best sales experiences depend on a salesperson's ability to provide a unique customer experience that takes into account past interactions and future possibilities. This means that salespeople must be aware of customer interactions and sales opportunities, and be able to process this data quickly and efficiently. Today, sales automation does this for you. With the data you collect, you can truly personalise your approach and your content. You create scenarios based on the behaviour of your leads, their origin, their sector, etc.

Beyond the approach, it is the entire follow-up that can be personalised. Switch from one channel to another, from email to LinkedIn, from a personalised message to a commercial offer, etc.

The importance of databases and CRM

The database is the number one lever for your prospecting. It is at the centre of the commercial strategy, because it contains all the data on prospects and customers, but also the evolution of exchanges, etc. To make the most of it, your database must first of all be complete. Many web scrapping tools such as Dropcontact or Waalaxy allow you to enrich your database with the information you are missing. This is a way to obtain professional email addresses, phone numbers, or other information useful for your future prospecting.

A database must then be qualified. Qualified prospects are a valuable resource, as they represent all those who have shown a real interest in your offer or service. They are therefore the ones most likely to be converted into real customers one day.

What are the steps to create a successful automated prospecting strategy?

The process of effective commercial prospecting

• Define a target: the more precise the target, the more impactful your strategy will be.
• Draw up your automation strategy : determine the channels to be used, the actions to be carried out (first contact, reminders, etc.), the deadlines, etc.
• Set the limits of your prospecting : determine what will be considered a success to send your prospect to a salesperson or, on the contrary, a failure to remove him from your prospecting chain.
• Measure the results : use qualitative indicators (opening rate, quick response rate, etc.) and quantitative indicators (conversion rate, bounce rate, number of views, etc.) to study the impact of your campaigns.
• Qualify your prospects: considering your prospects in terms of their potential is important as it will prioritise your future actions and investments.
• Enrich your CRM: get all the missing information about your prospects with web scrapping tools.
• Feed your prospects: include your qualified contacts in campaigns spread over several months, offer them varied "non-commercial" content, create a real community around your brand, offer, sector, etc.

Automated prospecting: solution or illusion?    

Automated prospecting is good, it is a real productivity gain for the teams, but is it really effective? Let's analyse the situation.

Pre-designed messages must be carefully thought out

"Hello {Firstname}, we have an automated prospecting solution for {company}!"

This is the kind of message that is often found on LinkedIn and that people are increasingly likely to open only to remove their notification. As we have seen, one of the pillars of prospecting is personalised content. It is a common misconception that a personalised message is simply {first name} {last name} tagging. For your message to be truly impactful, targeting must be done beforehand. The smaller your sample, the more targeted your landing page will be, your message will be personalised, your hook will be identified, etc.

Don't forget that an automated message is above all a message thought out and written by a human. The automation is only there to send it at a precise moment and to follow its evolution to carry out other actions.  

Lead automation should be seen as a means and not an end

As we have defined it, prospecting automation "is a marketing and sales technique", so it supports all the other methods used by your sales teams. Automation cannot of course be enough to convert all your leads, but it can multiply the number of warm leads that will then be sent to your sales team. Multiplying your contact points, making an initial sort and assigning orders of importance, managing follow-ups, all tasks to be delegated to a robot rather than to your sales staff.

Digidop assists you in automating your business prospecting

Technological innovation is one of the foundations of marketing. Automatic marketing tools are numerous, innovative and very attractively priced. This time is therefore favourable for stat-ups, VSEs and SMEs to develop their activities thanks to the implementation of numerous nocode tools.

Web scrapping tools

• Dropcontact
• import.io

Emailing tools

• Sendinblue
• Active Campaign

LinkedIn Automation Tools

• Waalaxy
• Dux-soup

Phoning tools

• Aircall
• Twilio

Lead targeting tools

• Sales Navigator

Database tools / CRM

• Airtable
• Hubspot

Nocode automation tools

• Make
• Zapier

Dunning tools

• Rebump

Discover even more useful tools on the toolbox Digidop!

The nocode prospecting tools are numerous and our first mission is to advise you in their selection. We build coherent prospecting strategies that meet your needs and your level of digital maturity. We train you on how to use them, to enable you to become autonomous. We program them and connect them to yours so that they are ready to be used in symbiosis.