We live in an automated world, and businesses are constantly finding new ways for automation to reshape areas of their business that had previously been accomplished by hand. A.I. is transforming the way that marketing and sales tasks and strategies are handled, allowing companies to provide a personalized experience that results in a better trip through the sales funnel for prospects.
One of the areas that is ripe for automation is in the prospecting and sales cycle processes. In B2B, it’s rare to experience a customer that does not go through a process of some sort. In fact, less than 2% of B2B customers do not travel through a sales funnel before making their final purchasing decision. In B2B buying, it can take months and many touches before a single customer makes their way through the funnel. This means that companies need to find ways to automate prospecting and keep their sales pipeline filled at all times.
Luckily, there are a number of strategies that customers can use to automate their prospecting and improve engagements with customers as they make their way through the sales funnel. Prospecting and qualifying leads can be a time-consuming task. In fact, many sales reps spend between 30% and 40% of their week on prospecting.
Automation can help you to not only increase the number of leads generated but speed up the prospecting and qualifying process for your sales reps as well. It frees up their time to focus more on closing sales than simply trying to keep the pipeline filled, which benefits a business in many different ways.
Some of the different automation strategies that companies can use to increase their B2B sales leads and connect with more prospects include:
Cold Email Automation
Cold calling is as old as the telephone itself for generating sales and leads for B2B companies. While cold calling is still a popular method, we have seen a rapid uptick in the number of companies that use cold email for B2B lead generation in recent years. A number of automated tools have made their way onto the market that have simplified the process and made it so that any company can reliably use cold email to generate B2B sales leads.
In order to automation cold email prospecting, there are a few tools that any company will need.
Email Identification Tool
You don’t want to email “[email protected]” for companies that you are interested in working with — especially if you want to get a response. You’ll need a tool that can help you to reliably look up and find the right the decision-makers that you need to speak with at any organization. Popular tools for identifying emails within companies that are out there today include Hunter, Snov.io, and FindThatEmail. They all work a bit differently from each other. Snov.io also provides the ability to look up the email address of profiles on LinkedIn through their Chrome Extension.
Email Verification
Once you identify the email of the person that you would like to reach out to, you then need to verify the email to ensure that it does not bounce. Having too many bounced emails can negatively affect your sending domain and harm the deliverability of important business emails. Make sure that you use an email verification tool to verify all emails before sending them.
Cold Email Campaign Automation Tools
Lastly, you’ll need a solution that will help you to automatically personalize and send your emails to your targets. There are numerous tools that allow you to import contacts, personalize the emails that you send, and automate multiple follow-up messages, removing the prospect from the campaign if they respond to the email.
One popular tool for cold email campaign automation is Mailshake, which connects directly to your Gmail or GSuite account. There are numerous other tools out there that can achieve a similar effect, but very few that can plug directly into Gmail in the way that Mailshake can.
Social Media Automation
Social selling is all the rage today, and for good reason — it gives sales reps a reliable way to develop rapport with prospects without them feeling like they are being sold to in every interaction. By 2021 there will be more than 3 billion worldwide social media users. Despite its popularity, social media usage continues to grow with each passing year.
Content that is shared by employees and representatives receives 8x the engagement of content that is shared through branded company channels. But, that doesn’t mean that individuals can’t use social media automation in the same way that brands could.
One way to automate social media and social selling is through the monitoring of social networks. Tools like LeadSift monitor all relevant discussions that take place on different social media platforms, forums, and comment sections around the web. You can use this monitoring to connect with interested prospects that are discussing solutions that are similar to your own.
Collect More On-Site Data
To generate more B2B sales leads, you don’t necessarily have to look toward outreach or off-site third-party data to connect with your prospects. In fact, more B2B companies should be leveraging the data that they are able to collect on their own website to identify interested prospects.
Using Triggerbee, you can turn your customer’s digital footprints into profit. It helps you to collect actionable data that helps you to identify what people within different companies are visiting your website.
Triggerbee gives you the insights that you need to approach prospects in a way that takes into account the content that they have engaged with and speaks to the biggest needs of their company. This data includes how they came to your website, what topics they expressed the most interested in, and what steps they have taken while visiting your website.
Automating this kind of data collection can help your marketing and sales teams go into conversations with prospects with more (and more accurate) information than they otherwise would. Conversations flow more naturally as you can immediately hone in on subjects that matter to your prospects and address concerns that they have expressed through their actions.
Automation Lets You Focus on Core Tasks
Over time, automation will become a necessity in prospecting and generating B2B sales leads. For now, companies that embrace automation are ahead of the curve and have a leg up on the competition.
The more time and effort that you put into building out your automation processes and tools now, the more it will pay off in the long-term. Automation allows you to focus on your core tasks while more mundane tasks are handled through your automated systems.
We live in an automated world, and businesses are constantly finding new ways for automation to reshape areas of their business that had previously been accomplished by hand. A.I. is transforming the way that marketing and sales tasks and strategies are handled, allowing companies to provide a personalized experience that results in a better trip through the sales funnel for prospects.