When we mention lead generation, the single department that most closely-relates or uses lead generation most is sales and marketing. Lead generation is a huge headache for people in sales and marketing. Though there are many channels for finding potential prospects, however to approach quality prospects and get good responses is a high call. Not mentioning the amount of work needed to go into setting up your lead generation structure, follow up, etc.
This is where Proxycurl's powerful APIs and datasets come into play. Automate the whole lead generation process from start to end, get creative in how you can generate leads, warm up prospects, automate tracking even months and years after knowing them, all to increase the chance of conversion. This post will do exactly that, laying out the few ways our clients use our products that could inspire you for your businesses.
Step 1: Get Leads & Identify Buying Signals
This is part 1 of 2 of this blogpost, with 4 automated ways of getting leads. Within this section is a bonus section with some out-of-the-box, creative ways of lead generation using our products.
1. Get Direct Quality Leads
This is the most straightforward way: to get direct leads from our APIs and LinkedIn datasets. Most importantly, quality leads. How? Filter and shortlist the specific profiles of leads that you are looking for, down to the company, experience level, employment role, locations & more using our suite of 21 powerful APIs. You can also get thousands if not millions of leads immediately with our LinkDB LinkedIn Database that has more than 401M people and company profiles. All the data and profiles from us are of quality and ensured with certain level of deliverability.
2. Find The Right Decision Makers or Teams In A Company
Straight away, with our Role Lookup API, identify the right persons in a company to reach out to, instead of spamming non-relevant persons and hope to land somewhere - wasting your resources and efforts. E.g. developer-focused SaaS to identify all software engineers as leads.
If you are a B2B business, use Proxycurl’s Company Profile API to find a list of B2B clients, and then use Role Lookup API or Employee Search API to find the right decision makers or teams in those companies to reach out to.
3. Track Customers When They Leave Or Join New Team
If you are in the sales industry, you know that building a network is crucial to your long term success. Once a customer, always a customer, this applies even if that customer is leaving to join another company of a similar industry. Instead of losing the relationship that has been built over the months or years, or finding out only much later when the customer has moved, you can automate the tracking and get notified immediately using our API.
With Proxycurl People Profile API, track any job changes of your customers. Don’t lose these valuable relationships!
4. Identify Newly Promoted Personnel Turned Decision Makers
You can monitor a list of companies and their employees, and identify any change in roles i.e. promotion and reach out to these contacts. Our Employee Listing API allows for tracking role changes within a company, or like the tip before this, use Proxycurl People Profile API to observe promotions of certain prospects turned decision makers.
Bonus: More Creative Lead Generation Ways
Below are just 3 interesting ways to generate leads, with our suite of many APIs, the sky is the limit in how you can use them for your business purposes. Think this way, our APIs are like lego bricks, together they can be used to build so many different structures limited only by your creativity.
1. Observe Online Posting Activities For Opportunities & Pain Points
Do you know our People Profile API & Company Profile API can track online posting activities and status updates of individuals and companies on LinkedIn! Big data is synonymous to the investment industry, but why not implement them in the sales & marketing industry too if it works? With our API, do social listening on their online activities and identify unspoken/subconscious needs. Act before they even know they need your products!
Even better, using Proxycurl Contact API you can even get the social media accounts and handles of your prospects to add onto your social listening strategy.
2. Track Employee Growth: Growing Company = Need For Services
Sometimes, your leads might quote “Your products are amazing! But I’m afraid our team has no need for your products at this stage”, or in other words their team is too small to make purchasing your product a good business sense. Mitigate this objection by tracking the employee growth of your B2B prospects. Continue to follow up and warm them up, and once they’ve grown to a certain size they will be ready to a deal with you. One way is to track employee growth or hiring velocity. Simply, employee growth signals that the company is doing well and growing revenue or slated for future growth, thus they could more likely be warmed up to deals.
You could also include their hiring potential in your selling strategy, but only if it makes sense. For instance, if you notice a company is ramping up its hiring efforts, it may be an opportune time to pitch implementing HR software for companies. Understanding their need for efficient onboarding processes could make your HR software product a valuable asset to them, opening the door to a potential sale.
3. Get Notified When Companies Get Fundings = More Budget
Sales roles always involve talking about budget, and oftentimes budget discussions with clients (placed at the very end of the sales pipeline) will make or break the deal. Instead of being at the receiving end of clients’ budget, you can prospect for clients who have the right budget for your services. Our powerful Company Profile API enriches company profiles with valuable funding-related data such as funding rounds, funding amount, investors count, acquisitions and exits, IPO status and more. Know when your prospects received fresh funds and warm them up immediately!
Step 2: Actual Outreach With Contact Info
Now that you have a myriad of ways of getting leads creatively and efficiently, this part 2 of 2 is an equally important step of your sales process - in actually contacting & reaching out to the leads.
Getting emails and phone numbers is the simple part of equation, the challenging is for the contact info to remain accurate and deliverable - see this post for API accuracy rate.
1. Outreach Via Work Or Personal Email Contact Info
Get emails of leads, send them cold email campaigns (yeah, cold email campaigns still work super well today - see how we got $83333 MRR with just $124 spent on cold email tools), build relationships with them from the early stages. If they changed jobs, you can continue to keep in touch via their personal emails.
You can also get generic emails of companies via our Company Profile API to reach out to relevant teams.
2. Outreach Via Phone Numbers Contact Info
If your business involves more B2C relationships and dealings, you can get phone numbers of leads and give them a call for outreach using our Contact API.
3. Run Facebook Marketing Ad Campaigns With Lookalike Audience
Instead of waiting for your ad campaigns to generate enough leads to scale which might take months, get thousands and millions of curated profiles from our LinkDB LinkedIn Database, upload them onto Facebook and generate lookalike audience to scale your ad campaigns.
4. Reach Out Via Social Media
Finally, you can follow and engage with prospects on social media platforms to build a network. Our Contact API allows you to discover Facebook, Twitter and Github accounts of your prospects.
Follow Proxycurl & Our Clients’ Footsteps For Effective & Quick Lead Generation From Day 1
Having seen some ways (and creative ones) that you can generate leads for your business and company, it's time to try it out. We've made it simple by offering free trial credits of our APIs, either by signing up on our website here or accessing sample snapshots of our LinkDB LinkedIn database. And when you like what you see, our API pricing model offers flexible options - purchase ad-hoc credits starting at just $10 with no expiration, or opt for a monthly plan starting at $49 with even more credits.
We look forward to working with you, and grow your business with quality leads from the get to.
