In less than 10 minutes a day you could be Prospectin to over 722 million contacts on Linkedin us...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. And today I'm delighted to have Guillaume Portalier, who's joining us all the way from Montpellier. Bonjour, Guillaume.

Hey there, thanks for having me.

Now, you're more than welcome. Now, you are the co-founder of a company called Prospectin, which is a tool that allows people to automate LinkedIn prospecting. Now, as we all spend more and more time on LinkedIn, that sounds really valuable. So Can you just share with us what problem are you helping business owners to solve?

Yeah, sure. Basically, every business leader has loads of things to do and very little time to do it. So, and usually one of the things business leaders have to do is generate leads, right? And to generate leads, there are plenty of ways. But in 2021, there's really only a couple of channels that are effective to generate B2B leads. Namely LinkedIn and then emails. Sending emails is something that has been automated more than a decade ago, but LinkedIn automation is a relatively new thing. And the principle of LinkedIn automation is, is basically email automation but using LinkedIn profiles instead of emails. This has 2 major advantages. First, you don't have to buy a huge email database. You just need to leverage the LinkedIn platform that has more than half a billion users with very detailed information about them. And second, the open rates and response rates are typically 10 times those of emails, in part because you receive dozens of emails per day and only a few LinkedIn messages. But also I think that social media platforms such as LinkedIn are more engaging than an email inbox. So that's the goal of Prospectin, automate the outreach on LinkedIn. No technical skills required, we totally abstracted the technical complexity. And so something that could be done manually that would require dozens of hours can be done automatically in less than 10 minutes per day.

Wow. Okay. As someone that spends at least an hour a day on LinkedIn for myself, but also for clients, I'm interested to know then, Guillaume, when you are creating a prospect list, you need to both look at industry, job title, but also at the content that you're going to send these people. And of course, that's over time changing. Just share with us, how does that work? How does prospecting automate the sort of list segregation and content production?

Yeah, yeah, sure. You're absolutely right. When you prospect, one of the key things is to make sure that you're reaching to the right person. So it's really important to segment your campaign and segment your lists. And for that, so prospecting is really based on LinkedIn. So you go from a LinkedIn search, so either a standard LinkedIn search or a Sales Navigator LinkedIn search, which is the premium plan of LinkedIn. And so first your job is really to identify who will be your targets. So for example, as you said, you can filter by industry, by location, and then once you have your search, you use Prospectin to basically export this list of profiles into the Prospectin CRM. And once you're— once those profiles are exported into the Prospectin CRM, you can start your campaigns from Prospectin CRM.

Now you talked there about a couple of things. One is that you have had to export your data. Does that mean using the function in LinkedIn which is to export to Excel, or is it simply linking and giving authorization to the Prospectin application to access your data?

You can export your data in a CSV file, but it's not the usual way to go. Prospecting will indeed allow you to simply export a whole list of contacts based on a search just thanks to the application. You just click on a button and then it will export all the profiles.

Okay, great. So it really is easy to use because interface-wise, the last thing we need is another part of workflow because many of us are also working with virtual assistants. So that makes it more complicated. So this is a browser-based Guillaume, or is it a plugin? How does that work from a practical point of view?

From a practical standpoint, this is a Chrome extension, a Google Chrome extension. So The prerequisite is to have Google Chrome as a browser, and then from there it's very simple. You just need to download the extension and it automatically syncs with your LinkedIn account.

If I've got this plugin on Chrome, how much instruction do I need to give it, Guillaume? Am I managing it daily, or am I, if you like, setting it up for automation at a certain time every day?

So if I take the standpoint of a sales manager, for example, typically you will— so first you will set up a campaign. So again, you export the contacts that you want to target, and once they're in the prospecting CRM, you will have to set up a campaign. What is a campaign? A campaign is basically a sequence of actions, and a sequence of actions on LinkedIn is— you have 4 main types of actions on LinkedIn. You can visit a profile, you can follow a profile, you can send a connection request, and you can send a message, right? And so a scenario or a campaign is one of those, is using those actions in the form of a sequence. So for example, you will send a connection request and then one day after the person has accepted the invitation, you will send a message and then maybe you will send a second message 2 days after if the person has not replied. So you set up your, just to set up your scenario, you set up the message you want to send and you can use personalized variables such as first name and last name, and it automatically uses the first name or the last name of the person that you're trying to contact. And so if I take the example of the sales manager, so once the campaign is set up and the prospects are exported from LinkedIn into Prospecting CRM, you just sort of— sales manager just click on a button, so start the campaign and then all actions are carried out automatically. There's no, there's no additional step, there's no additional work. And what it will do is basically all actions will be sent into a queue and then actions will be sent progressively. So obviously one of our main focus is also making sure that The tool is perfectly safe regarding LinkedIn and we want to simulate human behavior. We don't want obviously robotic behavior. So every action will be sent with a delay between each action. So for example, you send a connection request and then 2 minutes later you send another connection request, etc. But this is all done automatically. There's no additional work. from the person running the campaign.

Now, one of the things that takes time is looking for the prospects. So Prospectin by its name, is it helping me with the search itself? Because that would seem to be one of the time-consuming aspects, is looking for people by job function, by industry, by country. Whereas, do I put those parameters into Prospectin And then it's finding that name, that set of names for me and bringing them into prospecting.

This is work that is done prior to prospecting. This part of the job, which is sort of the first thing to do when you're trying to launch a prospecting campaign, is actually done directly on LinkedIn. So for example, if you're trying to contact social media manager in the UK, what you will do is look for a social media manager in the UK on LinkedIn thanks to the search, LinkedIn search feature. And then it will give you a list of social media managers in the UK and you will automatically export this list of contacts into ProspectIn CRM.

Okay, I've got you. So you don't drive LinkedIn from prospecting, you do the research from LinkedIn and take the subset.

Exactly, exactly.

I've got it. Okay. And then what about the danger of duplicates? Because I often am sent emails from the same person saying, I contacted you, like they forgot that they sent me one. So I know obviously it's a robot. Do you have some kind of protections there to avoid the user actually getting blacklisted by other users and LinkedIn itself?

Of course, it's— we totally prevent duplicates. So if one prospect, one profile is already in ProspectIn CRM, it will automatically be skipped when you try to re-export this prospect. So it's totally impossible to have duplicates within a prospecting CRM. So that's when you have— when you handle one account. But what is interesting is that we also have an enterprise feature where a whole sales team can use prospecting with loads of accounts. And we also have anti-duplicate protection to make sure that within the team of, let's say, 20 people, every person has its own prospects and there's no risk to contact one person that has already been contacted by one other member of the team.

That is very useful because we at ESO SBR, we manage the LinkedIn for a company, we manage multiple executives. and the danger is multiple executives contacting the same person, right, and causing disappointment and annoyance. Then tell me, with, um, with the system, do you have some kind of statistics of the impact that prospecting can make? Because the leads, one thing sending them out, but what about conversion rates? Are you helping To improve conversion rates?

That's interesting. The whole idea of prospecting is really, we work at the beginning of the funnel. So if you think acquisition, we really, the goal of prospecting is to generate leads, is to have people, it's cold, it's like cold You want to generate an interest in a prospect and then the idea is that the person replies on LinkedIn and then you take over. So it's not Prospectin that will automatically reply but it's you. And so yes, we do increase conversion rates when you when you think response rates, for example, compared to email automation, that the conversion from prospects to clients will appear via direct message that you will write, not automated message. However, there's also multiple usage of prospecting and we have seen very different usage of the platform. So indeed some people use it in a purely outreach way where they're sending prospecting campaigns selling a product or a service and so here the idea is really to generate leads and then having those leads reply to you and then you take over. But we also have seen clients that use the software to nurture their user or their clients, for example, or their prospects by sending them useful content such as blog articles, white papers. And so in that case, it can indeed help increase the conversion rate when you are at the prospect stage.

So can I then send content to my existing customers, my existing LinkedIn connections?

Exactly. That is, that is a usage of the platform. You can automatically, well, you can import all of your contacts into Prospectin CRM and then set up a message sequence where you send white paper, for example. So yeah, of course you can also contact your user base or your contact base.

And on the back end, presumably I've got statistics to show connection rates and how successful my templates are being. There's some metrics like that, Guillaume?

Yes, we have a dashboard that allows you to track your results. Where you can filter by date, by campaign. You have an overview of your response rates, your acceptance rates when you think of connection requests, and you can, yeah, you can filter by campaign to see which campaign works the best, for example, and you can perform A/B testing A/B testing with regard to the notes or the message that you send. Just to clarify, when I refer to the notes, the note on LinkedIn, the note is the short message that you can send to a contact when you send a connection request. It's maximum 300 characters, but it allows you in a quick way to sort of present yourself and why you contact the person, and it can be helpful to increase your acceptance rates.

Now, speaking of acceptance rates, one of the barriers to people accepting new software is pricing. Guillaume, you want to share with us what sort of pricing do you have?

Well, we basically have a free trial that gives access to all the features. And then we have a free subscription that gives you access to some features. And then it's totally scalable. We have a— if you want to go for a premium plan, we have a plan that costs around $12 per month and another level that costs $24 per month. And then for enterprise features, we have a plan that starts at $120 per month.

And Guillaume, if people want to find out more about prospectin.fr, where can they go?

So they can go to our website, which is prospectin.fr. We have an embedded chat where people can contact us at any time, and we have a dedicated team that will happily reply within 5 minutes. Quite quite reactive, quite quick. And also, if people want to reach out to me personally, they can contact me directly on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Speak PR podcast today.

Thanks, Jim.

Okay, merci. So you've been listening to Guillaume Portelier over there in France in Montpellier and testing my French, my schoolboy French. Sounds like a great way to save a lot of time using one of the largest business platforms. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and I hope that you have the best of health, that you are enjoying at least a sustainable business, and that if you're going to use LinkedIn, think about saving yourself some time by using an automation platform like Prospectin. Thank you so much for listening.