Dear salespeople, marketers and entrepreneurs, no matter what position you hold, this article is for you!

As a professional actor, many questions must cross your mind: How to make myself known to my target? How to acquire prospects? What can I do to convert them into customers? What to do to retain them? These are all questions on which we have based our model and for which articles are available on our blog.

Today again, it is with the aim of answering these questions as well as possible and giving you the best possible weapons, that we have taken a look at multi-channel prospecting by welcoming Toinon Georget, CEO of Waapi, to our YouTube channel.

This company doesn't speak to you? Do you know the ProspectIn tool that allows you to automate your prospecting on LinkedIn? Well, this is one of the tools they have developed. To go even further, the company Waapi is launching a paid beta test on their new tool Waalaxy. This tool aims to automate and facilitate cold emailing on top of LinkedIn prospecting to create multi-channel campaigns to generate leads from LinkedIn and via email, while also offering cold prospecting templates. They take it up a notch by adding a retargeting aspect to sales actions.

Find here the good advice of an entrepreneur who, without raising funds, has managed to generate 2 million euros in sales in a single year.

As Toinon says, the market is still growing, but what about its future and its evolution? And therefore, what are the topics to focus on and the best practices to put in place?

I - EVOLUTION OF THE LINKEDIN PROFESSIONAL NETWORK AND SAAS

LinkedIn has already seen an evolution in recent months as professionals have understood that it should be integrated into their communication, marketing and sales strategy, and not only for recruiting. As a result, many players are publishing content, and quality content at that. According to Toinon, one of the major strategic axes of the future on LinkedIn is the impossible dissociation of inbound strategies (feeding prospects with content) and outbound strategies (contacting future customers). LinkedIn is therefore increasingly solicited and is starting to be saturated. This is why multi-channel strategies are emerging to maximize touch points with customers.

As for SaaS, the market is still to be explored. The key is to maximize the customer experience and make it as easy as possible to use. We must always think customer centric. This is why integration is essential. Eventually, all tools will have to communicate with each other and only those who understand this will be able to see their products survive on the market.

It is obvious to Toinon that the future lies in the hands of those who will know how to extract the difficulty for the user and who will know, moreover, how to hyper personalize and automate without making the strategy feel robotic. Lemlist, in this perspective, offers a library of personalized images. As for Waalaxy, they offer personalized audio messages to bring a more human touch to the consumer.

II - BIASES TO AVOID

It is important to understand that automation and the use of tools is not the answer to every situation. In democratizing automation on LinkedIn, the use of it has not always been for the better. The right way to go about it is to put a strategy in place that works and then implement automation tools. If the opposite is done, i.e., implement the tool and then think about the strategy, there is an error in reasoning. These tools and software do not fix the problems of a failing strategy, they are there to scale up the existing strategy. So if the core strategy is bad, the tool will only enable the marketing and sales teams to implement that bad strategy on a larger scale. So the tools are not there to make up for a marketing or strategy that doesn't work, they are there to allow existing strategies to unfold and grow.

Another bias to avoid is the common belief that a message template is revolutionary and will guarantee a high open rate. This is completely false. First of all, if a template worked every time, all marketers would use it, which would make it instantly ineffective as prospects would receive the same message 20 times.

Secondly, and as mentioned earlier, prospects are very much solicited. So you have to be in a customer centric approach and ask yourself "What can I do to make the prospect open my email and interact with my content rather than with the content of the 20 other marketers who contacted him? So this highlights the need to have a strong brand DNA and to be original, without tipping into the ridiculous and fancy. Presenting yourself and spinning your content around yourself is surely no longer the approach to take. You have to meet the needs of consumers and show them that you can bring them something, solve one of their problems. Of course, being original does not guarantee success and it may not work, but if it does, the results will really come.

III - GOOD PRACTICES TO HAVE

As for sales teams, should they be segmented to maximize their effectiveness? Not according to Toinon. In 2021 and in view of the growth framework (AARRR model: Acquisition; Activation; Retention; Referral; Revenue), teams must be thought of in a holistic way. Since the watchword is "customer centric", we need to think in terms of the customer journey and no longer in terms of the separation of sales and marketing teams.  

Note that LinkedIn limits prospecting to avoid spamming, so if marketers prospect in support of sales on the professional network, the actions are not separated and the chances are multiplied.

For Waapi's CEO, in a team configuration of about 20 sales people, once the strategy has been thought out and the tool implemented, it would be necessary to put one person with experience in exploring prospect typologies, to have two others increase their skills in the tool, and once the best practices have been identified, to pass on this knowledge to the rest of the team.

Note that automation is not automatically the best way to proceed. It all depends on your targets, on who you are addressing. Take the purchasing managers of large accounts for example, there are not thousands of them and the way to address them, which are your big tickets, should not be the same as for a larger target with smaller tickets. Automation would be in order for this second target, but you should manually target the above mentioned managers. This will maximize your chances and at the same time your return on investment.

But best practices also depend largely on the market you are targeting. In Toinon's experience, the French, European and American markets each have their own specificities and therefore strategies are likely to vary.

The American vision is almost exclusively based on ROI. For them, the bill itself does not matter as long as the return on investment is there. They won't mind paying a lot for a tool, unlike the French who can't help but look at the price the tool costs them, sometimes at the expense of important future gains.

On the other hand, the French customer is a loyal and faithful customer. Once they have found a product that suits them, they are less likely to search the corners of the market to find another supplier. The American customer will always be on the lookout for what the competition is offering. If another tool gives him a better return, he doesn't need to think about it, he will change providers.

We also notice that on the subjects of growth hacking (exploration of new techniques and methods to generate strong growth at the lowest cost), growth marketing and inbound / outbound, France is ahead of the rest of Europe. The French are more aware of these topics, so the market needs less education.

It is therefore important to optimize your chances of acquiring leads by opting for a multi-channel strategy, where the touch points with your contacts are multiple. In order to maximize your growth, first think about setting up a good strategy and then arm yourself with process automation tools in order to reach a maximum of prospects with a tenfold efficiency. Nevertheless, think carefully about how to best use the automation tools you choose to increase your chances of positively impacting your bottom line. Always put yourself in your customer's shoes in order to take away any difficulties along the way in your conversion tunnel. Finally, go after your customers through outbound marketing but feed them with high value-added content through inbound marketing.

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