3 ways sales representatives can find and win the right customers using automated sales prospecting

Customers today don't want to deal with generic, templated messages or conversations from sales people who know nothing about them. They want genuine and empathetic connections from businesses that truly understand their needs.

Enter automated sales prospecting. Incorporating automation into sales prospecting helps sales teams build multiple pipelines and fill them with the right leads (based on ideal customer profiles) for greater results and revenue. Normally, sales representatives have to jump through multiple internal databases, spreadsheets, or searches about leads on Google, Crunchbase, or LinkedIn for professional or company data. This process is tedious, and the final data collected could be inaccurate or outdated.

With automation, you can get a well-curated lead list that has been pre-filtered, scored, and segmented. Your sales representatives can simply start making calls, kick-start outreach programs, and connect with less hassle.

Automated sales prospecting isn't just about high-quality lead lists, lead scoring, or lead segmentation. Automation fills in the missing pieces of potential customer data: company, number of employees, addresses, public phone numbers, designation, data from web behavior (such as webpages visited and revisited and content consumed), and preferred content. With all this information, your sales representatives can skip the generic welcome mailers and reach out with more personalized messages that combine your offerings with customer pain points to offer a truly holistic solution.

Here are three more ways that your sales representatives can benefit from automated sales prospecting: 

Get more leads that fit, not just more leads

For a sales representative working for a high-end coffee machine company, the ideal customers may be large cafe chains and coffee shops, corporate offices, or celebrity homes—not mom-and-pop shops and small startups. Automated sales prospecting can easily filter out leads that don't fit your ideal buyer profile, leaving you with leads that are a perfect match for your ICP. When sales representatives reach out to these leads, they aren't just sending out random messages or emails. They already have all the background information they need—the size of the business operations, their revenue, and even their pain points—to start meaningful conversations. This helps you make the right impression from the very first touchpoint and makes selling easier, increasing your win rate.

The best part about automation is that you don't have to limit yourself to just a few potential lists; you can build multiple lists based on nuances hidden in your customer data. In the example above, if the customer list has coffee shops that are currently closed for renovation, these could be red hot leads. Since they're already renovating, they're much more likely to invest in high-end coffee machines as part of their upgrade.

Collating all this data into a single source can be a challenge. To tackle this, choose a CRM that integrates deeply with your tech stack. Connect multiple social media accounts, marketing automation software, loyalty and rewards management applications, and emails to your CRM and tie the data neatly to your leads, prospects, and contacts. Then, use the CRM's scoring system to rank your prospects based on:
 

• Intent: Get intent data from search, advertising, and email behavior. Watch out for competitor mentions, unhappy references, or anxiety in emails and score intent based on user sentiments.
• Engagement: Integrate with statistics applications to understand how users consume your web content.
• ICP characteristics: Assess prospects for demographic matches and rank them based on character traits shared with your existing customers. For example, Amazon recommends products under their "Frequently Bought Together" section—built entirely on the buying behaviors of customers who share character traits.

To top off your automation efforts, plug AI into your automation setup, and get your lists curated against historical and recent buying data. AI can comb through curated ICP lists and determine if there are any recent changes that impact their quality, like shop shutdowns or competitor buyouts.

Build meaningful conversations with potential customers

Once you have a promising list of leads, engage with them periodically and meaningfully to move them along the sales pipeline. To do this, pay attention to the finer details about potential customers to personalize engagement.

Sales automation can help maximize sales reach with minimum costs. However, personalization isn't built just because a sales representative reaches out to customers each month with a newsletter or sends them periodic updates about your products. Potential leads will require meaningful connections.

Lean into prospective customer segments and engage with diverse leads with content that appeals to them. Create curated newsletters or email sequences or send out personalized mailers such as worksheets, ROI calculators, brochures, reports, published documents, and more—depending on each potential customer's interests. It may seem daunting to build such detailed workflows, but it cuts down the sales workload. This approach makes potential customers feel like their needs are being personally addressed instead of receiving a generic sales pitch. This goes a long way toward building a positive feeling about the brand.

The biggest deterrent to implementing sales automation at scale is the lack of data on prospective customers, preventing effective segmentation. Handle this by either deploying AI to gather information about prospects or collecting details about customers from each touchpoint. Leverage automation to collect all relevant data about prospects, such as content consumed, webpages visited, mailers clicked on, offers interested in, items in their cart, items abandoned, and more. In time, you'll have enough data to personalize communications and build positive connections. 

Build a network through your connections

A simple way to grow your business is to align with a customer advocate who can vouch for your product or services, provide references on demand, and introduce you to their niche circle of business connections. Automation can help you identify such customer advocates. First, start with your community or social media. Look for customers who actively jump to your defense when someone raises a concern about your brand. Next, make a list of expected attributes in potential customer advocates. Finally, feed it into an automation system and wait for a steady stream of customer advocates to be sent right to your dashboard.

Once you have a list of potential advocates, it's time to start making personal introductions that are worth your while. Reach out to them with exclusive access to new features or updates. Get them early access to new products. Don't hesitate to offer free subscriptions—it's more important to earn their good will than calculate ROI at this stage. If these options aren't possible for your industry, use automated workflows to provide potential advocates with access to exclusive content. Show them how to use your product to enhance their productivity, give them access to market reports and findings, and offer free consultation services.

Conclusion

Once implemented successfully, sales automation will usher in and nurture far more opportunities than sales representatives can handle—which is a good problem to have. Most of the data you'll need to achieve this is in your CRM, and the rest is sitting in marketing or sales applications. The only thing left to do is connect these sources to create a unified data fabric that lets you see all customer information in a single interface.

Sales representatives often toggle between multiple apps and tabs and manually enter data. To stay efficient and productive, opt for a well-connected, highly-integrated CRM such as Zoho CRM and access all your sales data in one place. Zoho CRM connects with 1,000+ apps for marketing, telephony, sales, and services that make it easy for your sales representatives to access customer data.