Posted by Ben Kniffen in Entrepreneurship
We’ve scoured the web for the best automation tools out there. Here are 6 that we are really high on right now for businesses looking to prospect and generate leads and opportunities.
Automation. It’s a phrase I see used in business everywhere these days. Everyone talks about it and how to use it to help scale business, to save you time, and to get more clients.
The problem is… use it the wrong way and you come off as cold and impersonal. It makes a difference when you do it right! A big part in using automation the right way is using the right tools to start with.
There are six automation tools we rely on and love because they not only allow us to schedule and plan repeatable tasks in advance, they make sure that we still appear personable and human.
Here they are:
This is a fantastic tool we use to pull additional information on LinkedIn contacts or other prospects that fit our ideal buyer profile.
You simply input your search criteria and their email extractor will provide a list of names with corporate emails, position, LinkedIn profile URL, company name, industry, website and more. It comes in pretty handy, especially if you’ve built up a targeted database and want to connect with them outside of LinkedIn via email, not just through LinkedIn messages.
Plus, for the price it's tough to beat. However, there are several alternatives. LeadFuze, LimeLeads, and BuiltWith are a few other options and some of these (BuiltWith in particular) are great if you want to find prospects based on the technologies they use.
You may or may not realize how important it is to “clean” up or scrape your email list. If you have a list of prospects (of any size) you want to be sure that the people on your list are real email addresses. Sending a large number of emails that bounce isn’t going to help your cause.
Among other things, it affects your deliverability and sender reputation. In fact, studies show that if over 10% of your emails are bad, less than 44% are delivered.
What to do to solve that?
You can go through your list and test each email one by one, but that will take a lot of time. Instead, Neverbounce is a fantastic little tool that will verify the emails on your list and clean it up for you. You’ll get less bounces and higher deliverability as result. For a cold campaign, it’s scrubbing your list is something we highly recommend.
Helpful Reminder
This list is primarily focused on automated tools to help you find prospects and develop relationships or leads.
The marketplace is full of marketing software so look at your most pressing needs first and research to determine which is best suited to help you solve that pressing need or issue.
3. Connect 365
Full disclosure: This is a product we originally built for our internal use, but have made it available to the public in recent years.
Let’s say you’ve built a list of prospects, you’ve cleaned up your list, and now you’re ready to send emails… there are a gazillion email marketing tools on the market but we use Connect 365 for one reason: it looks like a personal email in our prospects inboxes while allowing us to send emails in bulk.
Using Connect 365 we are able to:
- Automate Prospect Outreach
- Automate Sales Follow Up
- Nurture Warm Leads
- Book More Appointments
- Attract New JV Partners
- Increase Webinar Attendance
- Improve Client Communication
- Automate Collections Processes
- And more...
For us, Connect 365 allows us to use automation in a way that actually builds our business by allowing us to build relationships. As I mentioned earlier… it looks personal. That’s because there is no hint of any software being used to send it. People only see an email in their inbox that looks like it’s from a friend, not a business. Not to toot our own horn too much, but another plus? It’s so simple to use.
Want to see how we use Connect 365 to add automation to our sales process? Learn how below.
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We’ve recently switched to ScheduleOnce and we were pleasantly surprised to see a major boost in the show-up rate for our calls! We are constantly scheduling phone calls and sales appointments, and anything that helps with this process and encourages people to show up gets an A+ in our book. ScheduleOnce makes it easy, keeps everything in sync with the website, emails, and more, and it connects with a number of other apps.
Sharing a calendar link can be less personal than sending emails back and forth to find a time… (it is automated after all) so you’ll want to use it sparingly if you aren’t generating large volumes of appointments at once or simply utilize it once the relationship or the appointment has already been agreed to.
Having said that, once you are generating a high volume of calls, having a good scheduling calendar is critical.
Interested in how ScheduleOnce has improved our show-up rate on sales calls?
Read more about why we made the switch and the results we’ve seen in this post.
5. Clearbit
Clearbit is our secret data power tool. It allows us to see the full picture at a glance about our prospects. This is critical because our focus is to reach the right people, make great first impressions, and nurture real business relationships throughout the prospect lifecycle.
Clearbit gives us the whole picture and puts the relevant data we need to see (and it integrates with lots of other tools) right at our fingertips. Basically, using this kind of automation to gather the data we rely helps us know who to target, who is visiting our website, and how to personalize campaigns.
If you are generating optins for your content, but want to get a full picture of these people (rather than simply name and email), Clearbit is the perfect choice.
We use it filter our leads so that we can make the offer best suited to their business and most likely to resonate with them.
We use this tool to automate our social media content and posting, although it’s actually much more than an automation tool. Emphatic is not only a huge time-saver to automate your social media management, it ensures that we’re consistent in our social media content strategy and that we have a strong social media presence. Now, while whether or not we post social media content consistently isn’t a deal breaker in closing clients… it is a huge factor in building an audience, spreading our influence, and cementing authority in our market.
The truth is, when someone is interested in your service, your business, or you, they will look you up online. They are looking to find out who you are, what you stand for, and how you can help them. A strong social media presence, with relevant content and posts, goes a long way in addressing those questions.
Emphatic is officially a new arm of LinkedSelling. If you’d like to learn more about how you can outsource your social media posting and authority building, check that out below.
Thrive Leads Shortcode could not be rendered, please check it in Thrive Leads Section!
How to Choose Where to Start
We’ve tried and tested just many different tools on the market, and I feel comfortable in sharing these with you as some of my most recommended. They are perfect for incorporating into a lead gen strategy focused on simplicity and building relationships with key prospects. Each tool here saves you tons of time and still gives you the potential to keep you from sounding and appearing automated and distant.