Entrepreneur, company manager, marketer, salesman, prospecting concerns you.

Acquisition is not a subject that is unknown to you I bet. You must have, and certainly still have, questions about how to make yourself known to your target? How to attract prospects and implement inbound and outbound marketing strategies? Or how to convert prospects into customers?

Prospecting is inextricably linked to these topics, especially when it comes to different marketing strategies. You can find all our articles dealing with these subjects on our blog.

Multi-channel prospecting is the subject of much discussion. Not surprising since it is becoming increasingly important to diversify your points of contact with your prospects and potential future clients. This way, you make exchanges more fluid by being available on the preferred channels of each of your prospects. Some may prefer to exchange via email while others will abandon this means of communication in favor of another such as discussions on LinkedIn for example or by phone.

Prospecting, although useful and indispensable, takes time. The same is true for multi-channel prospecting. But many players and publishers of tools and software know this and are determined to make your life easier.

A few weeks ago, we talked about Waalaxy, a new tool from the company Waapi with ProspectIn under its belt and headed by Toinon Georget.

This week we take a look at the vision of Guillaume Moubèche, CEO of Lemlist, a French tool specialized in cold-emailing and now integrating LinkedIn prospecting to its offer.

Come and discover the advice of a young entrepreneur who recently turned down a 30 million euro fundraising and managed to reach more than 6 million ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

I - EVOLUTION OF EMAILING AND SAAS

According to Guillaume, there is no doubt that the future of emailing and, by extension, of prospecting, is multi-channel. It is no longer a question of choice but of necessity. Companies' sales forces must adapt to their prospects and customers. If they like to talk by phone, sales teams must master this channel. If they like to exchange by email, the sales force must follow them, and if they prefer to be approached first on LinkedIn before exchanging in person on the phone and having a follow-up by email, once again it is up to the sales teams to be able to adapt and respond to these desires of diversifying the contact points.  

Human beings are by nature lazy, so it is the duty of companies to facilitate the life of their customers. It is by responding to a need that we make our place in this world. The need here, by automating, is to save time, energy and efficiency. Thus, a multitude of tools are emerging. The SaaS curve is growing exponentially. According to Guillaume, 2 types of products will emerge in the coming years: The very broad platforms such as Hubspot or Salesforce, and the micro-SaaS that will specialize in a very specific area in which they will excel. So there will be an ecosystem of tools that will integrate everything.

The adoption rate of salestech tools will quickly increase because once customers get a taste of these tools and become more productive, they will have no reason to want to go back to a time when they took longer to do their tasks, and this is all thanks to digitalization.

II - BIASES TO AVOID

So automation is on everyone's lips, and for good reason. Imagine for a second if I asked you the following question: Would you like to make money in your sleep? It is obvious that the answer is yes. So, marketers will assure you that you need to automate. Well yes and no. Automation should not be done blindly to be effective and exploit its full potential. Many use it badly and as a result the channel is saturated with bad practices.

To address the misuse of these tools, Lemlist has created a sharing community on Facebook where members share actionable content such as templates to highlight best practices and what works.

But this does not eradicate those who misuse the Lemlist tool.

For Guillaume, those who use his product wrongly are people who don't know how deliverability works.

The old way of doing things was to buy databases thinking they were reliable when they are not.

Moreover, the estimates of this old mentality are far from those of Guillaume. By sending thousands of emails, these people expect an opening rate of around 25% and believe that this rate is good. For Guillaume, if your open rate is below 60%, then the campaign has not been done properly.

It is not enough to send thousands of e-mails because if they do not land in the mailbox of the recipients it is not worth it.

The domain has a reputation that will vary according to the returns it will get (if it is reported as spam, if it is answered, etc.). The better the reputation, the more likely it is that your message will reach the right place and therefore have a better deliverability. If the deliverability is better, the open rate will instantly be positively impacted as more people actually receive your email. Where marketers make a mistake is by focusing only on the subject line of the email without paying attention to the deliverability of the email, which should actually be the first thing to focus on.

Another common mistake is to implement an outbound marketing strategy and want to see the returns in a short period of less than 6 months. A good outbound acquisition strategy should be developed over 6 months or even a year since it takes time. If you rush things, it is at the end of the process that you will have to make up for what has not been implemented correctly, and that is when the months of trouble begin. It is always much more complex to catch up with mistakes than to do things right from the start, even if it seems to take time at first sight. It's time invested, not time wasted.

Imagine that your email arrives in spam and is blacklisted, this causes problems on a larger scale than the recipient not receiving your message. The recipient may eventually find your email and respond to it, and you, on the other hand, do not receive the message, which makes you lose a potential future customer.

There is therefore a whole technical set up upstream to see in the long term the fruits of the work done. Moreover, the network effects, acting over time, increase the results and the return rate.

Finally, automating anything and everything, without taking the time to get to know your prospects and break the ice, is not what is recommended either, and yet this is what many do. It is therefore true that because of his laziness, the human being uses these tools without making the most of them, but that leaves many opportunities for the market players who apply themselves to do things correctly. For these people, it is the road to El Dorado that opens before them, and this, for at least the next 10 years, assures us the CEO of Lemlist.

III - GOOD PRACTICES TO HAVE

It is therefore obvious to Guillaume Moubèche that pushing automation without more precision leads to a misuse of the latter process. It is essential to create a network, to personalize your exchanges and to build relationships of trust, even if it takes time.

In order to do this, you must be sincerely interested in your prospect before the first contact and do some research on him. You need to find 2 icebreakers before starting an exchange, especially if you are facing a cold prospect (who does not know you). Send a first email message with a first icebreaker about a news item concerning the prospect (for example a recently published interview), relaunch the conversation by sending a LinkedIn message that will be automated, and finally send a second email later with the second icebreaker that talks about the company.

So it's important to spend time on each prospect because usually when you get a truly personalized message that hints at something specific, the recipient (in most cases) has the decency to respond.

It is afterwards that automation must take over. It helps with follow-ups, LinkedIn profile visits, post likes, etc., but not at the beginning of building a relationship. It is used once the prospect has shown signals of interest such as a page follow and value has been provided. We also use automation to scale, but not before.  

No one really takes the time to do this and yet it is what works best. Again, it's an initial investment that will see a much more fruitful return in the long run.

It is therefore necessary to think about building a deep relationship and trust, then to think about the deliverability of emails and finally to be able to automate some of its actions. Doing things in the right order will generate much more impressive open and return rates. Marketing teams must support sales teams in their actions to build better relationships with prospects and make the exchanges more fluid. If sales and marketing teams align and work together, the return rate will be 10 times higher, Guillaume assures us. So take the time upstream, at the beginning of your conversion tunnel, so that at the end the results are multiplied, because the time used at the beginning of the process is not time wasted but time invested.

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