Updated on November 3, 2021
When we started with the new project at Sales.Rocks we were eager to test out so many sales tools and we were astonished by the things they could do for the every-day sales process. There was just something missing: there were a LOT of tools to use individually, but with only one main functionality and no option to automate the whole sales process.
The leads
With forming a sales team you first need to train your Sales Reps how and where to find potential clients – the leads. And where to start? With the conventional LinkedIn Sales Navigator of course. With our Sales team we did just that, but also included our own b2b database to count the possibilities. Things were working fine, but there were still 2 tools that we were constantly manually checking for lead lists.
Once found, the leads needed to be stored somewhere and filled in with every prospect information needed for the sales rep to even start with the process – the prospecting.
When you start with the “prospecting” process you usually start searching for direct email on Linkedin, which are usually not displayed. Then you manually go to company websites with much hope that you’ll find an email, even general ones, on their “contact” or “about us page”.
This is when we came up with the idea to add an additional extension to the on-going development of the Sales.Rocks Platform – the chrome extension.
The extension to extract prospect information
Our idea was not new, but by experimenting with a couple of existing tools for extracting emails from websites, we managed to refine the quality score of the found emails. This addition to the platform added an extra value to the extensive database we were already working on.
The Sales.Rocks Chrome extension will simplify the process of extracting all the available information from a company website, not only the info that’s in the source code, but retrieving data about the company also from our database. As an input, this will give all the employee information, possible direct contact details, emails and phone numbers, hierarchy information and other important details.
LinkedIn was still an external source for our Sales Reps to extract prospect information, but with the enrichment of our European database we managed to move from LinkedIn’s limited data to our company and contact data by 80%.
The data coverage
Now our data combines the LinkedIn data and other data sources like official company registries, giving our sales reps company information for 71 Million companies worldwide in different industries and prospect information beyond just name and general info. Focusing on the direct leads, we’ve managed to enrich that European data with 6.1 Million direct lead records and that is just for the Scandinavian countries. Not only Europe was our market, but we also added USA and Canada to our enrichment roadmap.
The integrations
We then filtered our ICP and needed to export them to our Zoho CRM, which was the next needed step of the sales enablement process – the integrations. The focus was on the most used CRMs and automation tools like Zapier.
The automated outreach
We finally got 3 main sales prospecting phases covered with the Sales.Rocks Platform, but there was the next phase missing – the outreach.
What if you had all of the prospect information extracted and stored, but you would need to manually reach out to them, and through different channels? Covering this part of the sales process was crucial for developing an all-in-one hub for sales enablement.
The email sequence
This is where we decided to automate the whole process, not just to enable the outreach, but to add omni-channel automation. Sending out email-campaigns was just not enough for the latest sales trends, so we decided to add Linkedin automated reachout, Twitter engagements and WhatsApp calls and messages to the channel list. The LinkedIn automation turned out to be quite a success, when we started sending out InMails, profile visits and connection requests. The conversion rate of the actions was above 3.7%, which is higher than the average 2.5% conversion rate on the paid InMail campaigns on Linkedin. Once contacted through Linkedin, the open rate of an email campaign to the same lead list got above 74%, which was best proof for us that omni-channel automation was the key. It looks completely natural, but it’s fully automated and time-saving. With this option the Sales or even Marketing Reps, wouldn’t need to use several tools to set campaigns or get hold of clients.
So, that’s how we came up with one tool to extract prospect information and automate the outreach
After a year of experimenting, testing and combining, we’ve covered almost every aspect of the sales process with only one tool. Our mission was to help our Sales Team and all other sales teams out there, with a modern sales automation tool that will enable the sales tasks from extracting the prospect information to closing the deal.
