Introduction
In 2023, prospecting is often associated with automation, and this will continue in 2024. Some people think that automation is not a good thing, and I disagree. In fact, whether prospecting for leads or candidates, there are repetitive tasks that a human can avoid doing. By automating certain topics, your sales people or recruiters can save valuable time, which they can use to spend more time on appointments or interviews.
The main purpose of every automation tool is to help sales reps get qualified appointments: they’re not there to close deals for them. I’m firmly convinced that tools reinforce the power of your sales person, but can never replace them.
There are many prospecting automation tools on the market, and you can get lost in them. That’s why, after years of use and in partnership with Stepward, we’ve put together our top 5 sales prospecting automation tools.
The 2 best prospecting automation tools: Linkedin and Emailing
The Growth Machine
The Growth Machine is a tool designed to simplify the management of leads and conversations in marketing campaigns. It offers companies the ability to create effective campaigns while focusing on intelligent, reactive lead management. This platform is a complete solution for those seeking to optimize their communication and marketing strategy, ensuring better management of interactions with potential customers.
The Growth Machine has 5 key features:
- Contact enrichment:
Service that allows users to automatically fill in missing contact information.
This feature is designed to make it easier to adapt communication and marketing strategies to each individual prospect, based on available data.
The Growth Machine uses Dropcontact, as well as other sources such as Google and LinkedIn, to automatically enrich your contact data. This includes adding e-mail addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles and much more.
Users can also enrich their contacts using their own tools. The platform is compatible with various solutions such as Lusha, Kaspr or Capitaindata, enabling customization according to each user’s preferences.
Users can import their audience from platforms such as LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, HubSpot, Pipedrive, or even from a CSV file. Data enrichment is activated with a single click, saving considerable time and increasing efficiency.
- Automated and personalized multi-channel prospecting:
This feature is designed to optimize companies’ prospecting efforts. Automated prospecting is at the heart of La Growth Machine. It automates prospecting routines, saving precious time and increasing the chances of generating fruitful conversations, likely to convert into sales or commitments.
LGM offers the possibility of creating highly personalized multi-channel sequences, enabling leads to be reached across a variety of communication channels, increasing the chances of success. It offers ready-to-use templates, making it easy to personalize messages according to the specific needs and characteristics of each lead. It makes it possible to get in touch with targets in a relevant and appropriate way, thanks in particular to the sending of voice messages, an exclusive feature that can increase response rates by up to 50%.
The platform ensures account security by preventing detection by Linkedin. This is one of the many reasons why MirrorProfiles is such a friendly tool. Users can manually set daily and weekly limits for sending emails, messages and add requests, helping to keep Linkedin accounts healthy and avoid platform sanctions.
- Simple, centralized lead management:
This feature has been designed to make the management of leads and conversations more efficient and less complex. It offers a single interface where you can manage all your leads and audiences quickly and efficiently. This centralization considerably simplifies the management process, bringing all the necessary information together in one place. The platform makes it easy to import your leads, while avoiding duplication. It also lets you segment your audiences and synchronize information with your CRM system, ensuring seamless, integrated management of your prospecting data.
Performance analysis: Enables detailed, actionable evaluation of prospecting campaigns. Once you’ve launched your campaign with La Growth Machine, you can access a specially designed interface that gives you an overview of your prospecting progress. This overview enables you to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns quickly and efficiently, giving you an immediate overview of your successes and areas for improvement.
Integration: the aim is to make it easy to add this solution to your existing stack, without requiring major changes to your work routine. Easy integration with existing tools can be easily connected to your preferred tools, eliminating data management and connectivity issues. The Growth Machine synchronizes natively with popular CRM solutions such as HubSpot and Pipedrive.
We use La Growth Machine with our customers, who tend to be SMEs and large corporations. Their stability is remarkable. In fact, it’s the only tool to have started directly with cross-channel marketing. LGM is a tool developed by Brice Maurin, founder of the Deuxio agency. Despite its image as a complex tool, it is experiencing significant growth as the market becomes increasingly mature for automation tools like LGM.
Lemlist
Lemlist is positioned as a leading platform for the automation of emailing and Linkedin campaigns, offering advanced message personalization. Users can set up automated email sequences, while integrating personalized elements such as images, text and links specific to each recipient.
Lemlist revolutionizes LinkedIn and email prospecting by automating several key steps. The platform allows you to send invitations automatically on LinkedIn to targeted profiles, a feature that has proven its effectiveness with an acceptance rate that can exceed 50%. What’s more, Lemlist handles follow-up calls autonomously, whether on LinkedIn or by email, in the event of a prospect’s failure to respond within a given timeframe.
One of Lemlist’s major assets is its ability to create customized workflows, offering unrivalled flexibility compared with its competitors, and the possibility of multiplying “Senders” within a single campaign. Useful for MirrorProfiles customers.
Lemlist also excels in the field of prospect data enrichment. By simply providing a prospect’s LinkedIn URL, Lemlist is able to unearth their professional email and extract key information from their LinkedIn profile. This platform even verifies imported email addresses before launching campaigns, a crucial step in maintaining domain name reputation and avoiding spam filters.
The management and tagging of email responses is another of Lemlist’s outstanding features. It manages all the responses received in the mailboxes connected to the platform, focusing exclusively on responses from Lemlist campaigns. Users can organize these responses by tagging them as “Interested” or “Not Interested”, making them easy to synchronize with CRM. It’s important to note that Lemlist doesn’t yet centralize responses related to actions on LinkedIn, a feature for which MirrorChat is recommended.
Lemlist is undoubtedly one of France’s most successful automated prospecting tools. Originally focused solely on emailing, they developed a host of interesting features, such as Lemwarm. This feature allows you to warm up your email address before launching your email campaigns. Just as we do for you with MirrorProfiles for your Linkedin campaigns.
We’ve put together a complete Lemlist user guide to help you get started. Each tool has the same logic, but each has its own specific features. It’s important to know what they are before launching a prospecting campaign.
Important info: they have an impressive product development roadmap. If you’re more of a Growth profile in a startup or scale-up, I’d advise you to keep a close eye on Lemlist.
The 3 best Linkedin prospecting automation tools
Hey Reach
Heyreach is an innovative platform designed specifically for lead generation and recruitment agencies, offering advanced automation of LinkedIn accounts. With Heyreach, it’s possible to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts simultaneously, reaching over 1,000 prospects per week, a capability that increases reach on LinkedIn tenfold without requiring team expansion. You’ll need several Linkedin accounts, and for that, there’s MirrorProfiles.
The platform is already used and appreciated by over 3,400 users, and benefits from an active community of over 1,400 members.
Heyreach presents itself as a comprehensive, innovative solution for prospecting and managing interactions on LinkedIn, offering a range of powerful features:
- Automated LinkedIn Awareness:
Heyreach makes it easy to create over 10 sequences of steps including invitations, messages, InMails, follows, likes of latest posts, and more. This automation makes prospecting on LinkedIn more efficient and less time-consuming.
- Manage more than 100 accounts:
The platform is designed to manage an unlimited number of LinkedIn accounts and customers, offering an ideal solution for agencies and professionals managing multiple accounts.
- LinkedIn Data Extraction:
With Heyreach, you can export an unlimited number of leads, candidates and company information directly from LinkedIn. This functionality is essential for creating databases of qualified prospects or candidates. Note that it’s not really unlimited, depending on the number of Linkedin accounts you link to it. To understand these limits, I refer you to our article on Linkedin quotas.
- Analysis and Reports:
Heyreach offers advanced analysis and reporting tools. You can track and analyze every aspect of your campaigns, including A/B testing, lead tracking at every stage, and message effectiveness.
- Native CRM integrations:
The platform synchronizes in one click with popular CRMs such as HubSpot, Pipedrive, GoHighLevel and Close. This native integration facilitates lead management and data synchronization between Heyreach and your CRM system.
Hey Reach is the ultimate tool for Linkedin campaigns. It’s a young tool, but created by the founders of Howitzer, a prospecting automation tool on Reddit. They go fast and hit extremely hard. In fact, they’ve brought us THE feature that other Linkedin automation tools sorely lacked: automatic rotation of Linkedin accounts. Coupled with MirrorProfiles, it’s a lead machine in just a few clicks. In fact, you can launch campaigns and attach several Linkedin prospecting accounts. The tool will take care of distributing the leads for you. Believe me, after several years of prospecting on Linkedin, it saves a considerable amount of time.
If we take Lemlist out of the equation, Hey Reach is the only 100% Linkedin automation tool that offers Linkedin A/B testing directly within prospecting campaigns.
Sales Mind AI
SalesMind AI is positioned as a revolutionary platform for sales prospecting, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to transform B2B sales strategies. Here’s an overview of the five key features that define this innovative platform:
- AI Outlook Analysis:
SalesMind AI uses AI to provide detailed lead analysis. This feature enables users to gain an in-depth understanding of each prospect’s needs, goals and personality traits. By leveraging publicly available online data, SalesMind AI creates perfectly tailored messages, increasing the chances of getting a response.
- AI Business Conversation:
This feature revolutionizes the way prospect interactions are managed. SalesMind AI generates personalized messages for each conversation, ensuring fast, impactful engagement. This creates meaningful conversations that are more likely to convert into successful business deals.
- IA Sales Representative:
SalesMind AI acts as a virtual sales representative, able to manage up to 50 accounts simultaneously. That’s why it offers native integration with MirrorProfiles. This feature enables efficient, automated management of sales interactions, freeing up valuable time to focus on other strategic aspects of sales.
- AI-powered Personalized Sales Strategy:
The tool enables the creation of customized sales strategies, tailored to the unique needs of each company. By using AI to analyze market data and prospect behavior, SalesMind AI helps develop optimized sales strategies, increasing the chances of success in a competitive market.
- Automating LinkedIn Prospecting:
SalesMind AI automates prospecting on LinkedIn, enabling users to interact with over 1,000 people a week on autopilot. This feature uses automated sequences of steps, including connection requests, messages, follow-ups, InMails, and more, to maximize the effectiveness of prospecting on this platform.
Where Sales Mind AI particularly stands out is in the management of campaign responses. In fact, it’s a tool between pure automation and sales structuring. Thanks to its artificial intelligence algorithm, the tool is able to suggest answers based on Linkedin profile analysis. Extremely effective for building strong ties with your network. Unlike its counterparts, this tool is more established on the Asian market, so it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Expandi
Expandi presents itself as the most powerful LinkedIn automation tool for sales teams and agencies, offering a complete solution for boosting reach and engagement on LinkedIn.
Expandi is a LinkedIn automation tool focused on lead generation, recruitment and agencies. It enables sales teams and agencies to send up to 200 connection requests per week, improve cold lead conversions, and automate repetitive tasks. Features include integrated scraping, hyper-targeted personalization via GIFs and images, webhook integrations, and a clear analytics dashboard.
Expandi also offers specific features for agencies, such as role management, multiple account management and CRM integration. It offers a White Label model to enable agencies to use the tool under their own brand name. The platform provides detailed metrics, role and permission management, multiple account management, white labeling, unlimited campaigns, and campaign A/B testing. Expandi lets you create an account, launch your first campaign in 15 minutes, and see results within 24 hours.
To explain a little more, here are Expandi’s 3 features:
- Smart Campaigns :
Expandi revolutionizes LinkedIn prospecting by building intelligent approach scenarios. These scenarios aim to improve prospect engagement and triple response rates. By combining LinkedIn, InMail and email messages, and integrating image and GIF personalization, Expandi offers a clear visualization of “warm-up” scenarios and actions before cold messages. The platform also makes it easy to manage responses from different contact points. Users can easily build engaging multi-channel sequences, enabling intelligent automated campaigns for significantly improved response rates.
- Customization :
The hyper-personalization of messages is another of Expandi’s strengths. As previously mentioned, the platform offers the possibility of including dynamic images and GIFs in LinkedIn messages and emails, potentially doubling response rates. It lets you upload custom GIFs and images, perform A/B tests on campaigns, and offers dynamic text layers with slots for variable data. Users have access to hundreds of templates and images for extensive customization. With Expandi, it’s easy to save time and build trust, by managing the entire personalization process from a single tool.
- LinkedIn Lead Generation :
This company also automates lead generation on LinkedIn. The platform makes it possible to reach, engage and follow up with prospects in an automated and efficient way, without risking account suspension. It is particularly suited to lead generation agencies, sales teams, recruiters and business owners, helping to expand the customer base, exceed sales quotas, accelerate talent acquisition and maximize ROI. Expandi provides specific features for B2B lead generation campaigns, including automatic warm-up of LinkedIn accounts, a global inbox for all responses, and detailed reporting.
Even though this tool offers emailing, we advise you to use it for 100% Linkedin. We didn’t have the time to test it properly on the emailing side, as Lemlist does a very good job of that.
Conclusion
These 5 prospecting automation tools are already at the top of the automation toolbox. Choosing between these 5 is therefore difficult, and you’ll have to test to see which one suits you best. For our European and American markets, we have chosen to use Hey Reach and Lemlist.
What they have in common is that they don’t allow you to override Linkedin quotas to ensure the security of your Linkedin accounts. If you want to multiply your prospecting capacity and reach your goals, you can couple each of these tools with Linkedin MirrorProfiles accounts. A large majority of our customers were already using these prospecting automation tools, but had run out of available Linkedin profiles, so they called on MirrorProfiles to equip their sales reps with 3 to 10 additional Linkedin accounts.
