In less than 10 minutes a day you could be Prospectin to over 722 million contacts on Linkedin using this Chrome browser extension.

Jim James: 0:00

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

Guillaume Portalier: 0:11

Hey there. Thanks for having me.

Jim James: 0:14

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 share with us? What problem you're helping business owners to solve?

Guillaume Portalier: 0:33

Yes, sure. Basically, every business leaders 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 in 2021, there's really only a couple of channels that are effective to generate b2b leads, namely LinkedIn, and 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 two 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 so on the open rates, and response rates are typically 10 times those of emails, in part because you received dozens of emails per day, and only a few LinkedIn messages. But also, I think, that social media platform, such as LinkedIn as are more engaging than an email inbox. So that's the goal of Prospectin, automate the outreach on LinkedIn, and no technical skills required, we totally obstructed the technical complexity. And so something that could be done manually, that that would require dozens of hours can be done automatically, in less than 10 minutes per day.

Jim James: 2:27

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 it Prospectin and automate the sort of list segregation and content? production?

Guillaume Portalier: 3:02

Yeah, yeah, sure. You're absolutely right. When you when you prospects, one of the key thing is to make sure that you're reaching to the right person. So it's really important to segment segment, your your campaign and segment your lists. And for that, so Prospectin is really based on LinkedIn. So you go from LinkedIn search. So either a standard LinkedIn search or Sales Navigator LinkedIn search, which is the premium premium plan of LinkedIn. And so your 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, 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.

Jim James: 4:21

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?

Guillaume Portalier: 4:40

You can you can export your your data in a CSV file. But it's not it's not the usual way to go. Prospectin will indeed allows 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.

Jim James: 5:05

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 yome, or is it a plugin? How does that work? From practical point of view?

Guillaume Portalier: 5:28

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's it automatically syncs with your LinkedIn accounts.

Jim James: 5:50

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

Guillaume Portalier: 6:07

So if I take the standpoint of a sales manager, for example, typically, you will so first of all set up a campaign. So again, you export the contacts that you want to target. And once they're in the Prospectin CRM, you will have to set up a campaign. What is a campaign, a campaign is basically a sequence of action in a sequence of action on LinkedIn is you have four main types of action on LinkedIn, you can visit a profile, you can follow a profile, we can send a connection requests, 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 requests, 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 two 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 use the first name, or the last name of the person that you're trying to, 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 Prospectin 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 don't want, we want to simulate human behavior we don't want obviously robotic behavior. So every actions will be sent with a delay between each action. So for example, you send a connection request, and then two minutes later, you send another connection request, etc. But this is all done automatically. There's no there's no additional work from the person running the company.

Jim James: 8:51

Now, one of the things that takes time is looking for the prospects. So prospecting by its name, is 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 Prospectin?

Guillaume Portalier: 9:20

This is a work that is done prior to prospective this this part of the job, which is sort of the first thing to do when you're trying to launch Prospectin 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 social matters Social Media Manager in the UK on LinkedIn, thanks to the search LinkedIn search feature, and then it will. It will gives you a list of of Social manager, Social Media Manager in the UK and you will automatically export those lists, this list of contacts into Prospectin CRM.

Jim James: 10:11

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

Guillaume Portalier: 10:20

Exactly, exactly.

Jim James: 10:22

I've got it. Okay. And then what about the danger of duplicates? Because I often send 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.

Guillaume Portalier: 10:49

Of course, it's we don't only prevent duplicates. So if one prospect, one profile is 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 Prospectin CRM. So that's, 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 a whole sales team can use Prospectin with loads of accounts. And we also have anti duplicates protection to make sure that within the within the team of let's say, 20 people, every every person has its own prospects, and there's no reason to contact one person that has already been contacted by one other member of the team.

Jim James: 11:53

That is very useful because we at EastWest PR 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 with the system, do you have some kind of statistics of the impact that Prospectin can make? Because the leads by one thing, sending them out? But what about conversion rates. So are you helping to improve conversion rates?

Guillaume Portalier: 12:31

That's interesting. The whole idea of Prospectin is is really we we've worked at the beginning of the funnel. So if you think acquisition, we really the goal of Prospectin is to generate leads is to have people it's cold, it's cold, it's like cold, you want to generate an interest in prospects. 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 and so for. And so yes, we do, we do increase conversion rates when you when you think response rates, for example, compared to email, email automation, but the conversion, the conversion from prospects to clients will appear will appear via direct message that she will write not automated message. However, there's also multiple multiple usage of Prospectin. And we have seen, we have seen very different usage of the platform. So, indeed, some people use it in a purely outreach way, where the same prospective campaigns selling a product or service. And so here the 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 contents, such as blog articles, white papers.

Jim James: 14:34

And so in that case, it can indeed help increase the conversion rates when you're at the prospect stage. So can I then send content to my existing customers, my existing LinkedIn connections.

Guillaume Portalier: 14:48

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

Jim James: 15:17

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

Guillaume Portalier: 15:28

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 rate when you think of connection requests. And you can Yeah, you can filter by campaign to see which campaign works the best, for example.

Jim James: 15:57

And you can perform AB testing, AB testing with regard to the notes, or the message that you sent. Just to clarify, when I refer to the notes, and the note on LinkedIn, the note is the short message that you can send to a contact when you send a connection request, and it's maximum 300 characters, but it allows you in a quick way to sort of present yourself and why contact the person and it can be helpful to increase your acceptance rates. And speaking of acceptance rates, one of the barriers to people accepting new software is pricing Guillaume. Do you want o share with us, what sort of p icing

Guillaume Portalier: 16:51

Well, we basically have a free trial that gives access to all the feature, and then we have a free subscription that gives you access to some feature. And then it's totally scalable. We have 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 feature, we have a plan that starts at $120 per month.

Jim James: 17:24

And Guillaume if we want to find out more about Prospectin.fr where can they go?

Guillaume Portalier: 17:30

So they can go to our websites, which is Prospectin.fr. We have an embedded chats where people can text us anytime. And we have a dedicated team that will happily reply within five minutes. Quite quite reactive, quite quick. And also if people want to reach out to me personally, they can contact me directly on LinkedIn.

Jim James: 17:58

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

Guillaume Portalier: 18:00

Thanks, Jim.

Jim James: 18:01

Okay, I see. So you've been listening to Guillaume Portalier 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 a automation platform like Prospectin. Thank you so much for listening