Converting leads is the bread and butter of the sales process, yet it’s all too easy to find the juiciest prospects slipping through your fingers, or to struggle in identifying them in the first place.
This is where automating outreach with the help of AI-powered tools comes into play. The latest solutions can catalyze lead generation and optimize conversions to deliver better results, so let’s look at how this is achieved and where it works best.
Catalyzing lead generation on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an excellent place to start your search for appealing prospects that are ripe for conversion. However, having to trawl through profiles manually and establish a network of contacts to grow your brand is both time consuming and taxing.
Thankfully solutions like Salesflow LinkedIn automation can take the reins and let you run lead generation campaigns without doing all the legwork yourself.
It’s just a matter of working out what kinds of prospects you want to find and nurture, based on parameters that align closely with your business and what it has to sell. You can then let the outreach automation do its thing, creating a pool of prospects that have shared interests and are therefore potential targets for conversion.
Automation and personalization go hand in hand
One reason that you might be hesitant to embrace AI and outreach automation to generate leads and cultivate prospects is for fear that in doing so, you will lose that all-important personal touch. Surely when you automate this, you will be sacrificing personalization, and performing outreach in a way that will be transparently generic to those in the know?
Luckily the latest AI-enhanced tools have adapted to overcome such concerns, and it is now easier than ever to adequately personalize correspondence with prospects without having to hand-craft every message you send.
It’s all about bringing the power of big data to bear on the task of lead generation, as there’s ample information out there to allow for custom communication with a view to eventual conversion.
This even applies on platforms like LinkedIn, where overtly sales-focused outreach messages will typically fall on dead ears. Being able to build relationships with contacts and gradually bring them onboard with your brand, rather than bashing them over the head with a one-size-fits-all promotional message, will make the leads that you do generate all the more likely to convert and stay loyal in the long run.
Improving responsiveness to impress leads
Another concern which can stifle conversion rates is that of being responsive to replies from prospects. It’s unreasonable to expect you to be on-call 24/7, and yet if your initial interaction elicits a response and you don’t follow up swiftly, your opportunity to connect with a potential customer or client could disintegrate as quickly as it coalesced.
Automating responses is the way forward, and again the ability to implement personalization even at this stage in the process will give you the edge over the competition in terms of the sheer volume of leads you can nurture simultaneously without sacrificing anything.
This is particularly appealing in the case that you are courting contacts who operate to different schedules and live in different time zones. But even if you are only aiming at prospects in a single geographic area, the same benefits still apply.
Facilitating cross-pollination to grow your brand
The goal of your lead generation is not just to convert customers and boost sales, but also to give your fledgling brand the profile boost it needs to become a self-perpetuating sales machine.
Indeed your definition of a conversion might not be a sale per se, but could be to enhance the number of followers your brand has on social media, or to earn new members for your mailing list.
Automating outreach will let you achieve cross-pollination, by which we mean providing you with an opportunity to encourage contacts on one platform to check out your offerings elsewhere. If your campaigns on LinkedIn can lead to likes and shares on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, for example, this is obviously a good thing.
Of course you cannot expect to convert every single prospect you identify and contact. But even if a person doesn’t click with you right away, you should still see this as a success from a brand-building perspective. The more your name gets out there, the more trust and recognition it will earn.
Key takeaways
Outreach automation is here to stay, and it gives up and coming brands the ability to compete with larger competitors without the outlay and resources.
That is not to say that it is the only solution you need, but rather that it should be integrated alongside the rest of your well-rounded sales funnel.