This is David from Yantle, and today I want to quickly talk about prospecting and more specifically, the difference between automated and manual prospecting and also what are the factors you should consider when you start making this decision in your business and when you start putting together a prospecting process for your sales approach. So before we jump into the contents, if you have a second, please hit the subscribe button. So you are aware of more videos like this in the future.

I think a good place to start would be by defining what I mean by prospecting and simply prospecting is the process of getting the right information on your prospects so you can reach out to them. This means the name there, the website, their phone number, the email address and so on. So it is essentially all the data you need to reach out to your prospects. If you didn’t pay a lot of attention to prospecting in the past, I have three good reasons why you should start doing it right now.

So firstly, prospecting is a fuel for your lead generation. Of course, you’re not able to book all the calls and close the deals you want if you are not able to supply your lead generation process with top of funnel numbers. Secondly, doing an effective prospecting can be extremely costly. Some research shows that 35 percent of the average sales reps time is spent on revenue generating activities, and by this they mean the meetings, the follow ups on the prospecting.

So that’s only thirty five percent split into three different categories. This is a small portion of a small portion. So if you’re not efficient, how you prospect you’re wasting even more time. And lastly, I think you should pay a lot of attention to prospecting and also how you set up your process, because a lot of the information that is out there is pushed by the vendors that create different prospecting tools. All the different software companies will try to tell you in their content that their approach is the best on their tool, is the best for your prospecting efforts.

So that’s why I think it is important to listen to someone, for example, like us at, Yantle, because what we do specialize in prospecting for our clients and also when we run cold emails campaigns for our clients. And that’s why we are focused on efficiency. We are trying to get as much quality data as quickly as cheaply as possible. OK, so now let’s move into automated prospecting. And simply I define this as the process of getting all the information and all the data with as little human input as possible.

This will include databases or scraping tools on different platforms would simply allow you to get a lot of data extremely quickly. Of course, the positive of using these automated tools is that you are able to get a lot of data very quickly and relatively cheaply. It is, of course, cheaper to pay let’s say monthly or yearly subscription than to pay full time person or someone, maybe on a part time basis or VA that is going to do it for you.

Simply, you have the data almost instantly. The second benefit of using an automated tool and this is that you are able to integrate your prospecting tool to your sales outreach tool and very often you are able to get data and make it flow directly to your outbound tool and send emails or send LinkedIn invites and so on. So you don’t touch the data a lot and you are able to, with a couple of clicks, go from prospect to cold email.

This is, of course, extremely efficient. If you are trying to scale your outbound  sales process. The fact that it’s so automated is actually also the disadvantage. The fact that you’re not able to touch your data or manipulate means that you are not able to personalize your messages. One of the biggest conversion levers you can have is being relevant and being personalized sales. So taking this element away is, of course, going to decrease your conversions. The second disadvantage of using these automated tools is that the quality of data is usually not there.

So if you are trying to reach out to someone, but the information you include in the email, for example, is outdated. Maybe you are trying to reach out to someone, but they stopped working in the company. Of course, the conversions are going to decrease and overall be ineffective because you are targeting the wrong person. And so this is not only going to damage your conversions, but also this can damage your brand long term. For example, if you are sending a lot of emails that bounce, you can damage your domain reputation.

And any time you send emails to your customers or potential clients, the emails will end in the spam box. If you’re interested to learn how to prevent this and also how to set up a new email address when you’re starting with Cold emailing. I made the entire video about how to warm up and prepare your email address and you can find a link in your description. OK, so now let’s move into manual prospecting and quickly bioprospecting. I define it as simply doing the research by hand.

So this can be looking at the company website, maybe Googling for the name, but also you can use a little bit of technology to get the information. The point is you are really specific about who you want to target. So, for example, you find someone on their company website, you know who they are, you know the name. You go to their LinkedIn profile and you use some tool to individually get their email address. I would say the benefits and drawbacks are almost opposite of automated prospecting.

So of course, it is going to be a little bit slower. It is going to be probably more expensive because you have to do it manually or you have to pay someone to do it. But on the other hand, you are able to personalize and also you can be sure the data is accurate because it’ll be up to date on the website or let’s say on their LinkedIn. Now, the big question, which one should use should you go for automated prospecting or manual prospecting?

And of course, the answer is it depends. But I would say in general, the advice is to go for an approach where you can combine both. And that’s what we do. That’s what we do for our campaigns. That’s what we do when we run prospecting campaigns for our clients and also when we do done for you lead generation in our agency. So the way we combine these two approaches is that we are able to create targeted filters to get the data en mass, for example, we are able to get data from LinkedIn and then we have a team of people who will go in and do the research by hand.

The question then really becomes how much time and how much energy and how much money should really invest into the manual element. And I think this depends on three things. And firstly, of course, it depends on your budget. If you don’t have the money to pay someone to do it for you, of course, you have to rely on automated approach or you have to do it yourself by hand. So I think the second element and more important element is that what is your selling price and also how big is your market?

Ultimately, the more expensive your product or service is, the more time and resources you should invest into the manual research. And this is simply because it is going to be worth more to you and to your business. On the other hand, if you are selling something which is not very expensive, then of course it doesn’t make sense to do some elaborate research on all your prospects. But simply, you should invest the money all the time into checking if the information is simply correct and if your automated process didn’t mess up along the way.

I think the combination of both is the best simply because you are able to get a lot of data cheaply and then also check if the data is accurate and necessary. Also personalize. And even if you are selling something which is not extremely expensive, I still think you should do manual research just because you want to send information and cold emails that are accurate. And also you want to protect your long term reputation of your domain and of your brand. You don’t want to be sending a lot of emails which are simply irrelevant because people will start to associate with spam and also they will start marking your emails as spam and Gmail and different email providers are really not happy when this happens.

So we talked a lot about prospecting. And if you are interested to learn more or perhaps if you’re interested in outsourcing prospecting to us, simply go to Yantle dot com to learn more. And also, if you’re interested in sales campaigns on Cold emails, we have this resource. It’s called the twenty, sixty, twenty rule of Copywriting, and it’s completely free. And it describes the methodology we use when we write cold emails campaigns. And this methodology is able to get us consistently between 20 to 40 percent reply rates.

So if you’re interested to learn this, simply go to the description box below. There’s a link and you can get it for free. So I hope you enjoyed this video. And again, if you want to see more, simply subscribe. And I’ll see you next time. Thank you.