How To Generate Qualified Leads Using Web Scraping
The management processes that you need to run a successful business can be condensed into 3 processes: getting leads, qualifying leads, and converting leads. In other words, the success (or failure) of your business depends on how many leads you can get. But, what exactly are leads?
A lead is a potential sales contact, someone who has developed an interest in your business (or is likely to develop one in the future) because your product or service solves a problem for them or someone they know. Simply put, a lead is a potential customer. Knowing where to look for leads and how to obtain those leads is probably the most important skill a sales team needs to have to be successful. But getting the leads is not enough. You need to get qualified leads. Sometimes, people can show interest in your business for reasons that have nothing to do with becoming a paying customer, such as conducting research, making comparisons, etc. And this is what gives a lot of sales teams (and other people that need leads) a headache.
I remember the first time I ran a lead generation campaign for my freelance writing business. Out of the 60 leads that I generated, about 30 were no longer at the company I was trying to reach. Another 15 had been promoted to new positions. So I ended up with only 15 actually useful leads. While your experience with getting useful leads might be better or worse than mine, one thing is certain: web scraping can improve your data collection methods and help you generate qualified leads that are actually useful to your business.
In this article, we’ll further explore the differences between ordinary leads and qualified leads, the major reasons why sales teams struggle to get qualified leads, and the best way to optimize your lead generation process for generating useful leads.
Table of Contents
Ordinary Leads vs Qualified Leads
Like I said earlier, not everyone who shows interest in your business actually wants to become a paying customer. Ordinary leads include every member of your audience that shows interest in your business. Getting this first set of leads is an important first step. It allows you to further streamline and define your audience and also helps you to define your ideal lead persona further. Your ideal lead persona is a profile of your ideal potential customer, that person for whom your product or service is an answer to their prayers, if only you could get it in front of them. However, when it comes to the actual conversion of leads into paying customers, this first set of leads has limited usefulness. And here is where lead qualification comes in.
Lead qualification is the process of confirming the validity of the interest a lead has shown in your business. In other words, it is how you determine whether they actually want to or will want to buy from you, or if their interest in you is for other purposes. A qualified lead is a lead that has been confirmed to have a genuine interest in purchasing your product or service, now or in the future. Most sales teams take pride in the number of leads they can generate, but the true value of a good sales team lies in the usefulness and relevance of the leads they generate. For example, a sales team that generates 100 leads in one month with a 40% conversion rate is better than a sales team that generates 300 leads in the same month with a 10% conversion rate. The major difference is in the quality of the leads generated.
Why Is Your Sales Team Struggling To Get Qualified Sales Leads?
So why exactly is your sales team struggling to generate qualified leads? The answer is data. The number one reason why most sales teams find lead qualification very difficult is data. They have too much data, and at the same time, they do not have enough data.
I know that might sound confusing, so I’ll explain. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are being produced every day, according to experts. This is a huge amount of data, containing data sets on nearly every topic under the sun, including your ideal leads.
However, the volume of the data also makes it very difficult to process. Trying to sift this data for information on about 10,000 people that constitute your ideal leads is much like looking for a needle in a stack of hay the size of New York City. Even worse, this is an amount of data that is being generated daily. So while trying to process the data that has already been produced, you also need to keep an eye on the new data being produced to monitor any evolution in your ideal lead persona. Successfully diving into this ocean of data and come out with useful data requires more than just knowing what you want. You need a specialized method of data collection, which is where web scraping comes in.
How To Generate Qualified Leads
The very first step in any lead generation process or campaign is lead definition. You need to know who your leads are and who they are not. Where are they found? What do they do? Where do they live? In what age bracket do they fall? What are the related needs they could have to the problem your products solve that you can leverage? To successfully define your leads, you need data to answer all of the above questions. And the easiest way to collect this data is with web scraping. But what exactly is web scraping? Let’s look at this scenario.
There is an easier and faster way to do it, and that is with the use of web scraping bots. Web scraping bots work by parsing through the code of a given webpage and extracting data according to some preset parameters. The extracted data is then downloaded and organized into a spreadsheet for easy use. By using a web scraping bot, Mike can collect all the data he needs on his new leads in a matter of seconds. Even better, he can configure the web scraping bot to scrape leads from New Jersey only. Or to only scrape companies above a certain net worth.
How to qualify your leads with web scraping
With web scraping, you can easily collect all the data you need to define who your ideal leads are properly. But that’s not all. Web scraping also gives you a straightforward means of qualifying your leads. By scraping the social media activity of your leads, you can easily determine their wants, their needs, and where their interests lie. Social media activity can tell you what your leads are talking about online, the posts they are interacting with, the trends they are participating in. All these show you if they have any commercial leaning towards your business or their interest is purely academic.
You can also use web scraping to eliminate poor leads. If you sell condoms and a 10-year old kid shows interest in your business, there is a high probability he isn’t going to become a paying customer anytime soon (lol). However, without adequate data telling you his age, you might not know. Web scraping can easily provide this data for you. You can also scrape data on your competitors to identify who their customers are. If they are patronizing your customers, then they can definitely patronize you also. Web scraping can get you qualified leads in any industry you are in; you can get qualified leads in the medical industry, qualified leads for financial advisors. If you are in the startup space, you can use web scraping to generate qualified investor leads to investing in your startup.
Using Scraping Robot To Get Sales Qualified Leads
At Scraping Robot, all we want to do is give you all the data you need to properly qualify your leads.
Our scraping service uses APIs, allowing you to automate your web scraping process, which in turn will enable you to automate your lead generation process and qualify leads effectively, without having to monitor your process 24/7. With our API, you can literally generate leads when you want without having to spend hours trying to figure out proxy resources and development time. Our web scraping service also uses multiple proxy addresses, allowing you to send an unlimited number of scraping requests without getting blocked. Once we’ve scraped the data you want, it will be delivered to you in an organized format using a spreadsheet. That way, you can easily analyze the data and import it into your data management strategy and lead management process.
When you sign up for our modules or API access key, you get 5000 free scrapes to scrape any website of your choice. Every scrape you perform after using your free scrapes costs only $0.0018. With our service, you can scrape leads from any website on the internet.
Conclusion
Getting qualified leads can be a really stressful process, especially if you happen to be using a manual process. However, web scraping simplifies the process greatly, and at Scraping Robot, we aim to simplify the process even more. Just send us a message, and we can get started right away.
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