Data is now one of the most critical assets that your organization can have. Data is influencing every decision that successful businesses make across all departments.

This is no different for a sales team. The correct data can tell you how to sell your product or which demographics on which to focus. For non-technical teams such as the sales team, the problem comes with collecting the correct data. How can you collect enough data but also find insights to make your team more effective?

Web scraping is one solution. This article will look at how lead scraping and web scraping for sales teams build a more effective team.

 

Wait… What Is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the automated process of collecting data from other websites. A script or program will search through the HTML source code of a website to find specific information, and this is possible for almost any website that you can generally visit through your web browser.

Some common uses include scraping for stock prices or scraping for future weather data. Almost anything that is accessible on the web can be scraped. This includes names, email addresses, and images.

By using automated scripts, gigabytes of data can be collected with relative ease. This data can then be used in other programs for analysis.

 

Reasons for Web Scraping for Sales

1. Find New Leads

Web scraping is a popular way to find contact information for other people. Information such as email addresses, websites, and phone numbers are easy to find on the internet – especially on social media websites such as LinkedIn.

With websites and LinkedIn profiles, you can also find information such as someone’s job or business, which is valuable information for determining if someone could be a potential lead for your business.

The advantage of using web scraping is that you can scan thousands of web pages at once, which allows you to build an extensive list of leads in a short amount of time instead of weeks of crawling the internet yourself.

 

2. Understand Your Leads

Once you have found some leads, you also need to convert them into sales. Understanding the needs and wants of your leads is essential to starting a conversion. While you can discover all of this during the initial phone call, finding it out before you even make contact is even better.

Web scraping of websites or social media profiles is a great way to find out about your lead. Website metadata will contain information such as their industry and products. Social media data can tell you the size of the business and with whom they routinely interact.

More information is available through scraping that you wouldn’t ever find by searching the web manually. Dig deeper into your leads by utilizing lead scraping software.

 

3. Understand Product Mentions

Your organization is likely to have already met some market researchers who can tell you how customers and potential clients perceive your business. What are your perceived strengths and weaknesses? Has an internet crisis happened for your product?

These are essential things for your business to know, and your sales team should be aware of these things. But you can go one step further by reading the same mentions of your product and business that your leads do. Your leads might see a new article about your product, and so it can help in your conversations if you have seen these articles too.

With web scraping, you can find mentions of your business and product across the different corners of the internet. Some companies can do this for you, but a cheaper and more targeted approach would be to use web scraping.

 

4. Keeping Up-To-Date On Existing Clients

If your sales team is also concerned with retention, then you need to have a good understanding of your existing customers too. In the same way that you can better understand your leads, you can gain insights into your current customers.

This can include building a profile of your current customers by scraping their internet presence, looking at such things as changes to their industry and how they are interacting with their clients.

This type of web scraping is also crucial for keeping your CRM up-to-date. Between 30-40% of employees will move to a job each year, meaning that your databases will quickly be out of date. Frequently looking out for new information on clients will help you spot changes, giving you the most recent data for your meetings.

 

5. Saving Team Time

All of the approaches we’ve reviewed above will take a lot of time away from your sales team if you manually do them.

Want to search through LinkedIn to check who works at a company? That could be a day’s work. Want to find articles from the last month that mention your company? Well, Google might help, but web scraping makes the job much simpler.

The reality is that your sales team only has so much time in their day. Web scraping is one of the top ways to save time in this data-centric, modern working world in which we find ourselves.

 

Web Scraping For Sales

Web scraping is the process of using automated tools to find public information on the internet. Sales teams are commonly using it for a variety of purposes.

Web scraping for lead generation is one of these reasons. With lead scraping software, you can quickly find contact details, business information, and employee relationships for new businesses. This approach can also be done for existing clients and keep on top of your own company’s mentions.

Web scraping for sales teams is the perfect way to cut out laborious tasks and allow your sales team to work on more critical tasks – such as closing deals and retaining existing clients.

If you are looking to start your own web scraping project, some companies can assist you – and possibly help keep the costs lower. Companies such as Umbric give free consultations so that you can get started today!