Leads generator for Sales and CEOs : Expand your Company

Waalaxy is a very powerful Leads generator. 

You want to find your customers online, and prospect easily? Spend little and gain many new customers? Then you are in the right place. 😁 2 out of 3 Waalaxy users say they want to use the tool to find new customers. 💰

Yet, less than 20% say they are comfortable with automated prospecting and lead generation before they start. 😱

So it was time to release THE guide about sales lead.

To get comfortable (because it’s simple, you’ll see) and to find new customers.

The Two in One! Welcome to this micro-course that will give you all the keys to go from novice to expert in automated prospecting. It will allow you to efficiently find new customers. Without further delay. And expand the conversion rate.

Selling VS Generating a conversation

The leads generator VS the method.

When our customers stop using Waalaxy, the #1 reason is: “I don’t get results”. And for good reason, the tool is not the method.

You need to build your own tactics.

🥇 Waalaxy allows you to send prospects invitations and messages on LinkedIn. Yet good prospecting is about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time. And it’s up to you to determine the right message. The right person. And the right time. 😜

🥈 Waalaxy doesn’t know how to do it on its own (yet). But don’t worry, this article is here to help you do it. 🤗 The #1 reason customers aren’t getting results is because they’re trying to sell with Waalaxy.

🥉 Waalaxy is not just a leads generator = It’s a tool to generate responses! Engage a prospect in conversation. Create a relationship.

Not try to wedge your service or product into him at all costs. (If you only have to remember one thing from this course, it’s that). I like to compare prospecting to dating. If you like someone, and you approach them in a bar. Naturally, you’re going to be looking to strike up a conversation. Test the reciprocity of interest. Arouse their curiosity. Make them want to know more about you. But be careful not to immediately offer him to come to your place. 😜 Prospecting is exactly the same. You need to move forward step by step, you can also call it “lead nurturing“.

Know your future customer and your value proposition

Before launching your first campaign, it is fundamental to define who you are going to address and with what speech. This is pillar n°1.

The persona

The“Persona” is a marketing concept used to personify a typical customer. It gives him concrete attributes from real life, which allow you to project yourself in his place. However, any marketing or sales work requires going through a stage of empathy. To put ourselves in the shoes of our client, prospect or audience. Beyond the basic attributes (first name, last name, family situation, etc.), we will try to define here:

• What are the expectations of your target?
• What are the problems of your future customers? Their frustrations in their daily life?
• What are their buying criteria for choosing one service or product over another?
• If it’s a company, what is the buying decision process? Who is the final decision maker?
• If they were to be a customer and satisfied with your product, what positive points would they emphasize?
• If they were to be a customer and dissatisfied with your product, what negative points would they highlight?

It is quite possible that we have several personas. Generally between 1 and 4. If you have more, it is because your activity is too large and in this case we will try to narrow down by eliminating the less relevant ones. If you have more than one, you will create a file for each persona. In the following, for your marketing strategy, each persona will have to appear in separate lists and campaigns.

To go further on the definition of the persona, I recommend this article.

What is lead scoring ?

Define the value proposition thanks to the problem you solve

Two important things you should know about B2B lead generation:

• The prospect doesn’t care about features.
• The prospect doesn’t care about you.

It hurts to hear but it’s true. Humans are self-centered. He is only interested in himself. Before jumping head first into a Waalaxy campaign, it is important to define your PSD: Problem, Solution, Differentiation.

• Problem: What problem are you solving for your new leads? What pain remains unsolved in your customers before your intervention? Why or why not?
• Solution: With what solution? A software? A high-end service?
• Differentiation: Why are you the right person to solve this problem? Why are you better than the competitor? What makes you different? What social proof shows that the solution is good?

Example with Waalaxy

• Problem: Finding customers is a critical issue for small businesses or for a new business, but they lack the time, resources and skills to do so.
• Solution: Waalaxy automates prospecting on LinkedIn and by email by automatically sending invitations and messages to qualified prospects. It’s called marketing automation software.
• Differentiation: The free version allows you to contact 100 people per week in less than 10 minutes per day. And this, without technical skills. In fact, 80% of our 60k users say they are “not comfortable” with marketing automation. And yet, they rate us 4.8/5. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

We can also structure the differentiation in “key values”. Example again for Waalaxy:

• Price argument: the free plan gives access to most of the features, and allows you to contact 100 people per month.
• Simplicity argument: the tool is designed for people who do not have time/technical skills. The support answers on the chat in less than 5 minutes.
• Social proof: we are the first tool on the market with 60k+ users, who rate us 4.8/5.
• Commitment argument: no credit card required for trial, all our subscriptions are commitment-free. You can switch from one plan to another without worry, add or remove people from your team whenever you want. It’s profitable and generate leads is easy.

Optimize your profile to convert

Most prospects will visit the profile of the people who add them. So your LinkedIn profile is the first entry point in the conversion tunnel. It is already a sales page. Optimizing it is not an option. 😜

This topic has already been discussed in detail here. Here is a summary in a few points:

• A profile is built with an objective. It is different if you are looking to find a job and if you are looking to sell. The two are incompatible at the same time. The structure must lead to the desired action (getting in touch).
• The LinkedIn profile photo, the cover photo and the title represent 80% of the impact of the optimization. You have to accept to spend some time on it.
• A title must present the problem you solve or what you bring as value. If possible with figures. We will repeat what was done above on the definition of value.
• If you are trying to sell HR consulting, we don’t care about your experience as a campsite manager 17 and a half years ago in Palavas-les-flots. Stick to the basics by highlighting what makes your current expertise valuable. Do not hesitate to describe your previous experiences in this sense. No one is interested in being exhaustive. Except you.

So, your profile need to be optimized in connection with your marketing tactics!

Details in video version > it’s this way.

Find your prospect in B2b sales

There are 50% of false positives in a classic Linkedin search. If you search for “fitness coach” you will get :

• People who are actually fitness coaches.
• People who used to be fitness coaches but are no longer.
• People who are just coaches (and not “fitness”).
• People who talked about fitness in the summary (because they are practitioners for example).
• People who have fitness as a center of interest.
• People who have fitness as a skill (maybe coach but not sure).

In short, a mess of profiles that do not interest you a priori. With a few basic rules, we can reach 95% of real positives. This article explains in detail how to do it.

Key points:

• NEVER use the “Keyword” search field in the top left corner of LinkedIn.
• Use the “Title” field (the most relevant of all).
• Use Boolean attributes to refine your search. Mainly the “NOT” which allows you to exclude titles that you do not want to see in your search. For example, if you search for “fitness coach” in the title of the profiles, you will surely get “life coaches” “stress management coach”. To find out, browse the search pages and go directly to the last ones. You will get the least relevant profiles and may see profiles that do not match what you are looking for. Add “NOT life coach NOT stress management coach” to the “Title” field to exclude these profiles. Repeat this process as many times as necessary to ensure that you only see relevant profiles.
• Search for companies in the target industry and target employees. Either manually or by using a tool like Impuut (beta release September 2022). You can find your target companies on public directories and turn them into a list of employees on LinkedIn.
• Never exceed 1000 results (2500 on a Sales Navigator search). Indeed, LinkedIn does not give access to the following results. In this case, you need to break up your search intelligently. 👉 Learn more about getting around the 1000 result limit.
• Use Sales Navigator. If prospecting is a real issue for you, it’s a must. The granularity of the filters is going to offer you much more qualitative results. Here’s 👉 how to get Sales Navigator for free and 👉 our tips for getting the best results in a Sales Navigator search.
• Pull up your listings in Waalaxy. With the search filters in Waalaxy, you can further refine the relevance of your lists. The process is pretty simple, 👉 here are our top tips for cleaning up your lists

Bonus : use original lead sources: Groups, events, LinkedIn posts.

These lead sources are often exceptional because the person has a marked interest in a topic. So you can go beyond their LinkedIn title. For example, if you are targeting people who are interested in real estate as an individual, you may have a hard time targeting them in a traditional search. (No one puts “I’m an executive at EDF and I’m buying an apartment for rental investment” in their LinkedIn title 😉) But maybe they joined a group on the topic, attended a webinar on a similar topic, or commented on a LinkedIn post that talked about real estate. We shared some tips and explained the difference between “informational targeting and behavioral targeting ” in this article. You can also find out how to use these lead sources with Waalaxy in this article.

How to organize your lists?

Waalaxy works with “lists”, files of prospects separated from each other. The organization of these lists of prospects in the long term is fundamental. Here are some best practices and information on this subject:

• A marketing campaign should most often receive leads from a single list. Your statistics will be clearer.
• An import with different filters should correspond to only one list.
• A lead can only be in one list at a time. If it is in a list, it will be ignored during the next import and will appear as a “duplicate” in the import report.
• This “anti-duplicate” feature allows you to create a “Blacklist” in which you can import or transfer prospects that you would not want to contact in the future. They will then be ignored.
• The tag system is a very useful feature for managing your lists. They allow you to sub-categorize your prospects if you want to distinguish men from women for example, in order to use a Mr. or Mrs. in your approaches.

Building your approach

To build your approach, you must first ask yourself which “sequence of actions” (invitation, message, visit, follow-up) you want to use.

What is the best sequence?

You know, I don’t think there is a right or wrong sequence. There are sequences, which respond to needs. But there are some main principles to follow that will help you a lot.

1. “Ockham’s Razor.” It’s a philosophical principle that says simple things are often the best. And it applies perfectly to Waalaxy sequences. Our simplest sequences are the ones that produce the best results.
2. There is no need to spam, you have to stop at the right point. 99% of responses are obtained within the first 3 messages.(Statistical study based on several million campaigns).
3. Visits and profile follow-ups at the beginning of the campaign are of very limited interest (we have never been able to show that they are useful).
4. There are pre-completed campaign templates with sample messages. All that’s left is to customize for your target/activity/value proposition. These templates are particularly effective for getting started.

Our recommendation for getting started without too much headache:

• Invitation (with note) + 2 messages.
• Invitation (without note) + 3 messages.

How it works

So, an “Invitation + 2 messages” campaign will work as follows:

• All the prospects with whom you do not have a relationship (most often the ones we are interested in) will be added to the prospecting campaign. Those to whom you have already sent an invitation or with whom you are already in contact will immediately leave the campaign without receiving anything.
• When the prospect accepts the invitation, there is a delay in days (which you can define in the configuration) before being queued to receive the next message. Thus, the delay is always an announced minimum, which depends on your quotas and other marketing campaigns in progress. The actions of step 2 and more (here the messages) are prioritized in the queue compared to action 1 (here the invitation) in order to guarantee the best possible respect of the deadlines.
• If after 2 weeks, the prospect has not accepted your invitation, it will be considered “expired” and he will be removed from your campaign.
• If after EX days after message 1 (which you will have defined at the launch of the campaign), he still does not respond, he will receive the 2nd message.
• If 2 weeks after the 2nd message, he still does not answer, he will leave the campaign as “Did not answer”.

Reminder: if a prospect responds at any point in the campaign, they will exit and not receive subsequent messages. Sending automatic messages following a response is just what you don’t want: it won’t be responsive, will look robotic and will harm your image. Reminder 2: if your computer is turned off or in standby or no Linkedin tab is open or Waalaxy is not installed, no action will be sent to LinkedIn. To avoid this, you can enable the “Cloud” option in your settings.

Write a message that transforms

Once you have chosen the right targeting and sequence, it is the quality/relevance of the sales messages that will define the success of your campaign. I’d like to give you a template that works every time. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. The message depends on who you are targeting. Who you are. What you want to sell. And how you sell it.

Use fill-in-the-blank templates

As mentioned above, there are fill-in-the-blank templates that can give you a framework, inspire you on the structure of the messages. To access them, do “Start a campaign” at the top of the screen -> “Browse sequences”. At the bottom left you have the “Pre-filled templates”. With different use cases depending on what you want to do. Use them, that’s what they are there for!

Copywriting methods

If no template suits you (but I doubt it), you can choose to write your own message. Except that you don’t write a message to a prospect like you write a text message to your grandmother. There are two effective copywriting templates that will allow you to write more impactful messages, with better response rates. It’s all in our article“20 message templates” and the associated copywriting methods.

The key elements of a good message

To conclude, here are some general elements for writing a good prospecting message.

• Short message > Long message.

On average, a message <300 characters gets 2 times more responses than a message > 1000 characters. Prospects don’t care about your life. We’re not doing a philosophy paper, we’re looking to create a conversation. 💥

• Question > Information.

Coming in with an assumption, thinking you know everything. Nothing worse. Messages with questions work much better, as long as they don’t take the prospect for a fool. Example to ban: “Have you thought about implementing a CSR policy in your company?” Example that would have worked better: “I’m interested in companies’ CSR actions. What are some of the things you’ve implemented in yours recently?”

• The prospect > Me.

If your post contains the pronoun “I” or “We” more than 3 times, delete. 😱 And start over. You talk about yourself too much. You are self-centered. And so is your prospect. Go his way, if you want him to go yours.

• 1 call to action > 10 calls to action.

The common mistake: “you can call me, email me, read my PJ, visit my site, book an appointment with a sales rep, follow my TikTok, Facebook, MSN, Skyblog…” The principle is simple: the more options there are, the less likely the prospect is to choose one. One message = 1 call to action (CTA). It can be to book a call (avoid in the first message), visit your site or get content. The best thing is to incite to open the conversation on Linkedin by replying.

• Chat message > Boring message.

A LinkedIn message is not an email. You don’t want it to seem automated. You want it to look like it’s being sent on the fly. Not by a robot. 🤖 So we’ll ban any kind of signature: “Sincerely” “My regards” “Looking forward to reading” “Jean-François”. And any other signature that puts contact info, your box name, a link, etc. There are enough emails where you can be boring. So we avoid being so on LinkedIn. 😁

• Acceptable campaign response rate >20%.

A campaign should generate a minimum of 20-25% response. Below that, one of the parameters (target | problem | solution | messages) should be reviewed. You can see the response rate by doing “Campaign” -> Choose the campaign you want.

• Conduct A/B testing.

In Sales Leads, It is rare that the first campaign is the right one. Get into the habit of splitting your list in two and running two very different campaigns, to see the results. To do this, create two campaigns in Draft. Select the first one in the list and scroll down until you have half of the prospects on the list. Press “Shift” and select the bottom prospect. You now have half the list. You can add it to the first campaign. Then select the whole list. Add the leads to the second campaign. Those added to the first campaign will be ignored (because you can’t have the same lead in several campaigns at the same time). An A/B test is conducted on a minimum of 500 leads in each campaign.

• Originality > Everything.

As we already said, a lead generator doesn’t do all the job for you, copywriting will be your key. 🔑

Most of your prospects receive 10 messages like yours per day. They rarely respond to more than one. Your challenge is to be that message. And for that, originality is key. 🔑 Anything that makes you different, interesting, funny, innovative, increases your chances of responses. Sometimes you have to make very original messages, even if it means offending a few people but getting a much better campaign overall. And by definition, for originality, there is no tutorial.

Converting prospects into customers

The objective is to create a conversation. And it is in the exchange that we will try to determine if the solution is good for the prospect. To finally lead to a sale. For more information on closing, I am attaching an article by a specialist. Here are our tips for managing your prospects’ responses:

Automated message => Recurring questions

Many users prefer not to ask questions in their prospecting approaches because they get too many answers that they can’t handle… But that was before Waalaxy Inbox. With the improved messaging, you can create “templates” of messages, which are called “Saved reply”. With these templates, you can insert pre-recorded responses in 2 keystrokes, which can even include an image, a GIF or the prospect’s first name.

Reply to “Now is not the time”

Many prospects will respond with “Come back to me later.” The problem is that writing this info down in your CRM when the prospect isn’t even warm is a bit limiting. For that, you can use the “Snooze” or “Follow-up” feature of the Waalaxy Inbox. The Snooze feature allows you to hide a conversation and make it reappear at a given date. The follow-up allows you to automatically send a follow-up message on the given date. This is an effective method to avoid forgetting your follow-ups and to avoid losing potentially interested prospects.

Synchronize your CRM and your sales tool

This is the nerve of the war. Send the information of your interested prospects to your CRM. For this, you have two options:

1. Automatically send your prospects to the CRM when they respond
2. Manually send a lead to the CRM in 1 click from the Waalaxy Inbox.

If you don’t have a CRM yet and are looking for a simple tool, natively integrated to Waalaxy, that focuses more on “generating sales” than spending hours on data entry, go to our partners“noCRM.io“.

Use Calendly

If your activity requires you to take a prospect on the phone to go further in the sale, Calendly is a must. The prospect will be able to reserve a time slot according to your availability (and his), without having to go back and forth 17 times to find a date. If you are on the paid version, they will even receive reminders by e-mail before your meeting. A way to reduce “no-shows”.

Conclusion

You were looking for a Leads generator? I hope you find your solution right here!

If I had to summarize all the learnings from this article, I would say: Empathy > Egocentricity. Simple > Complicated. Originality > Banality. For any question, our team of support-heroes is at your disposal on the chat. Don’t hesitate to ask them, they are there for that. So, do you find our sales tool easier to use? If not, try Waalaxy!