What is automation? “The application of technology, programs, robotics or processes to achieve outcomes with minimal human input”, says IBM. In other words, the goal is to perform a repetitive task by inputting predetermined data. So cool, right?
Also, a 2020 global survey by McKinsey found that 31% of businesses have fully automated at least one of their business processes. According to the same report, 66% of organizations are piloting solutions to automate at least one business process in the future. So, what’s stopping you from automating your business?
If you’re among the 34% of companies that are still not automating, sorry to say, but you’re slowing down your business growth and giving your competitors a chance to outdo you.
If you're ready this, it's likely that you're looking to get on the automation bandwagon. So, hold tight, this post is specifically focused on sales & lead generation automation.
In this article, you’d learn:
How to extract prospect data points with automation?
How to automate LinkedIn and prospecting?
How to find and verify email leads with automation?
Say goodbye to repetitive manual work. Here we go…
Automating Data Points Extraction
It's the process of scraping data and collecting it by crawling various sources like websites, social media, surveys, etc. — to obtain relevant information based on your predetermined pointers. Usually, data is collected to create an ideal buyer persona, understand and study user behavior or preferences, send cold emails, etc.
Why is Data Extraction Important For Your Business?
Data extraction helps your business by:
keeping you on top of the market trends.
staying updated on changing customer behavior and preferences.
making it easy to understand what customers are saying about your business.
enabling you to predict sales trends and optimize workflows.
In short, for better decision-making and analysis or even running your business, you need to extract data.
How To Automate Data Extraction?
1/ Start by determining what kind of data you’re looking for (leads, market analysis, recruiting workflows) for your business goal.
2/ Choose the right websites or data sources to obtain the information or data points from:
- your competitors’ website (for market analysis or benchmarking),
- social media (when understanding your business performance), etc.
3/ Extract the information with automation tools and convert raw data into actionable intelligence to grow your business.
Tools like Captain Data make it really easy to automate the entire process — and you don’t even need to be a software engineer or know machine learning to operate.
With Captain Data:
Extract data with automated no-code workflows easily and seamlessly.
With its pre-made automation templates, extract data with just a few clicks from sources of your choice (including websites, exit surveys, sales & CRM data).
Synchronize the available data into your existing databases.
Selectively extract which data points you require for a particular business goal — so, for each website, you select which data you want to extract in real-time.
Why Automate Data Extraction Process?
As a business, time is money. And you need to distribute your available resources for maximum efficiency and profits. By automating the repetitive process of data extraction, you can:
Improve the accuracy of data inputs by reducing human errors
Allocate available resources to other creative/administrative tasks
Collect and compile data 24 x 7 without interruption
Reduce manual labor costs, save time, and effort.
Remember, the better the data quality, the better decisions you can make. Automation helps ensure your data is of the highest quality.
Automating LinkedIn & Prospecting
LinkedIn is one of the most popular B2B social networks with more than 756 million professionals. It helps generate high-quality leads, establish your brand presence, get valuable data on your target audience, and increase your credibility as a business.
What Can You Automate On LinkedIn?
Prospecting
Sending personalized invites
Engage with prospects (reactions, comments, replies)
Find email addresses of your leads
We recommend: Before automating LinkedIn, make sure your profile is complete and optimized. Most people visit the profile before accepting invitations or replying to a message. So, make your profile worth it.
How To Automate LinkedIn Prospecting?
We know how tedious it can be to look for the right people, connect with them, and send them a personalized request every time. And you can’t be spending endless hours on this, right? This should NOT be a manual effort.
So, you automate these processes 🦾🤖 — And again, Captain Data to the rescue. It recommends combining LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Hunter.io.
Here’s what to do:
Head over to the “Automate Sales Navigator lead generation with email cascade” on CaptainData.
Copy-paste a search URL.
Configure your Hunter.io integration with a single click.
LAUNCH 🚀 … And wait for the results.
Why? Because it automates (duh!). And most importantly, because you can hyper-personalize each campaign for maximum ROI for your business.
Automating Emails
Imagine this… You wrote a compelling cold email for your prospect and sent it — just to know that the email wasn’t delivered. Because you had the wrong address or worst, it was inactive for years. And there goes your sender reputation… 😳
And why? Because you couldn’t verify the longest list of emails. Manually? — Oh forget it… Am I a human or a machine to do that? Which is why… there’s a machine to take care of that and ease your tedious task.
With automation, find and verify email leads at scale and run your marketing campaign efficiently.
Why Do You Need To Verify Emails?
Prevents deliverability issue and improves your sender reputation
Provide a reliable database to your sales team
Show accurate campaign insights
Reduce marketing costs
Increase campaign ROI
Most importantly, when sending outbound emails — you need to ensure that your email deliverability is in place. A low bounce rate is crucial to maintain your cold outreach successes. And a clean email list is necessary to keep a good sender reputation.
But before we move to verify emails…
How To Find Emails of Your Prospects?
Option 1: Manually go to each person’s profile, search for the email (and pray that they have provided a correct email or given an email at all), and do this over and over and over again for x1000 times ❌
Option 2: Scale your email search and scraping journey with Automation ✅
Automation tools help your business to find B2B leads faster. Combine this with Captain Data and you have got a solution for everything. Use tools like:
- Snov.io
- ColdCRM
After signing up on either of these websites, you’ll get an API key. Use this key directly in Captain Data to automate emails.
To generate leads, all you need to do is enter your prospect’s company name. The tool will automatically find and display all the details: including senior-level influencers, email addresses, phone numbers, and their LinkedIn profiles.
You know which option we’ll go for 😅 And now…
How To Automate Email Verification?
Use email verification tools like NeverBounce or Hunter.io integrated with Captain Data.
To accelerate the efficiency of the verification process, Captain Data uses Neverbounce & Prospect.io to double-check every email on your list — so you never get any hard bounces, save your sender reputation, and increase your campaign success.
You can even integrate them as a third-party (just provide your API key) and you’re good to go!
Why This Matters?
Automation is the key to accelerate business growth, and thus success. It helps save time, improve accuracy, and allows you to focus on other important tasks. And when you can automate routine, repetitive chores — so, why not?
Remember, the more you automate, the more efficient your processes become, and you can drive better business decisions.
So, use automation to:
Find emails of your prospects with Dropcontact.
For every lead, send them an automated email outreach with Prospect.io or Lemlist.
Automatically add a prospect that opens your sequence in your CRM.
And find all of these integrations under a single roof — Captain Data.
At The Scalelab, we provide growth consulting and help you acquire new customers by automating your sales process.
Want a free demo? Write to us at hello@thescalelab.io
Until then,
Signing off,
The Scalelab 🚀