Max Altschuler
If you want to learn more about start-up sales, read Steli Efti's short book, The Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales, (Location 334)
The main things that matter when you are managing a pipeline are the following: Total number of deals in the pipeline Average deal size Percent of deals that move from stage to stage until they are closed Average time a deal stays in the pipeline (Location 378)
Building strong lists to generate leads at the top of your pipeline is arguably the most important part of the sales process. Without leads or “Nets,” as Aaron Ross calls them, you have nothing. So start where your customers are. This is also called finding your ideal customer profile (ICP). Your ICP is a prospect who will most likely and most easily enter into a transaction or a business relationship with you. To get started, ask yourself the following questions: What products are my customers using that I compete with, complement, or could translate into interest in my product? (Location 441)
When my business was recruiting instructors to create courses on Udemy, my salespeople wouldn't have been successful if we hadn't relentlessly worked on nailing our ICP. To sell an expert on making money by teaching an online course, what did we look for? (Location 462)
Some good places to look for information about potential buyers are the following: (Location 473)
Two pieces of software that I like to use for scraping lists off the Internet are Import.io and Kimono Labs. (Location 485)
This approach was developed by some of Import.io's earliest users, and it is both ingenious and simple: Find a website where your ideal user can be found. Build an API to that website (using Import.io, naturally) and extract as much data about each lead as you can. Pull that data into a spreadsheet. That's it. Three simple steps and it takes about 10 minutes, after which you will have thousands of quality leads to work with. (Location 501)
Datanyze fits into the first half of the sales cycle by helping sales development reps (SDRs) find more opportunities. Using the Datanyze platform, sales reps can uncover new high-potential companies to reach out to, find the right contacts, and get their e-mail addresses—all in one shot. (Location 543)
Followerwonk Followerwonk is an analytics tool on Twitter. It has many features, but one of its most popular uses for business is “audience targeting.” (Location 585)
If you're somewhat technical in basic Ruby on Rails or Python, or you think you can learn quickly, check out the blog posts of Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Scripted, Ryan Buckley, on Scraping CrunchBase. (Location 724)
Owler Owler is like a souped-up version of CrunchBase, with a better ability to sort companies, get alerts, and surface information more clearly. (Location 730)
Socedo Socedo allows you to pick conversations, keywords, hashtags, and handles to track prospects. (Location 748)
Node.io Node.io understands and triangulates the relationships between people, companies, and keywords on the Web, with the goal of connecting interested parties. (Location 828)
DataFox DataFox enables the creation of targeted lead lists with accurate buyer contact information through suggestions of new companies that resemble your best customers and the surfacing of conferences attended by your prospects, and then DataFox alerts you when new prospects enter your territory. (Location 833)
Using Twitter to Generate Warm Leads Industry experts began using the term social selling when social media became big and salespeople who adjusted and embraced social media became masters of generating new leads. Now there's a new tool out there that automates most of this. (Location 879)
Toofr Toofr is the best tool I've seen for finding business e-mail addresses and building a massive list of potential contacts, as long as you have a first name, a last name, and a domain name. Toofr can verify or find thousands of e-mails at a time. Just upload the CSV (comma separated values) file, and then retrieve the export file. (Location 916)
For example, let's say my goal is to contact the vice president (VP) of marketing at 200 target companies that have just closed Series B round of funding and are on CrunchBase. I can scrape the company information (first name, last name, domain) into a CSV file using the tools from earlier in this book and upload that neatly organized CSV file directly into Toofr. The final result should be a CSV file with verified e-mail addresses alongside the information I imported. (Location 920)
Capture (by RingLead) Capture is a wonderful new tool from RingLead that allows you to go to any site or social profile and pull data from it using a Chrome browser extension. (Location 946)
E-mail Verification and Enrichment Once you've built massive e-mail lists from various data sources, be sure to do the following: Make sure the e-mails are verified and don't bounce back. High bounce rates can lead to blacklisted domains, which will send your e-mails to the recipients' spam folder. Bad e-mail addresses will also throw off your e-mail optimization efforts and ruin your conversion pipeline. (Location 955)
BriteVerify BriteVerify is a data verification service that can be used to verify data such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. It is extremely simple and easy to use. Its service allows you to verify e-mails one-by-one or to upload lists to verify multiple e-mails all at once. Its API is the best part. It allows you to connect your CRM, (Location 962)
Clearbit Clearbit is an easy-to-use enrichment tool with an API that you can pass a lead through, and it will tell you everything you need to know about that lead. You can pass numerous domain names or e-mail addresses through the API, and Clearbit will fill out a full profile based on that information. Clearbit released a very good Google Docs plug-in that allows you to build (Location 969)
For subject lines, check out fun and insightful articles from Copyblogger, HubSpot, Buffer, and Quick Sprout. For the body of the e-mail, I recommend that you check out The Boron Letters and Neville Medhora for AIDA copywriting help. See SalesFolk.com and BreakthroughEmail.com for help on writing cold e-mails. (Location 1208)
The numbers will vary by whom you ask and the type of business, but you'll want to aim for numbers like the following: Open rate: 30–50 percent Click-through rate: 20–35 percent Response rate: 15–30 percent Meeting set-up rate: 10–20 percent (Location 1253)
Tawheed Kader, the chief executive officer (CEO) at ToutApp, calls his cadence the “five by five” (five contacts, or touches, over five days). Kyle Porter, the CEO of SalesLoft, calls his cadence the “seven by seven” (seven contacts, or touches, over seven days). (Location 1281)
Most outbound reps give up after one to three attempts to a lead, but statistics from www.InsideSales.com and Velocify show that you'll need six to nine touches to establish contact and qualify the lead. Once you've made your six to nine touches over a three-week period, only then should you put your lead into a Nurture Queue for follow up at a later date. (Location 1285)
I think the best salespeople are very persistent. In sales, “no” is the second-best answer. “Yes” is the first, but a “maybe” or not receiving an answer at all are by far the worst. (Location 1291)
Sell to the Individual, Then the Employee, Then the Company (Location 1495)
Reactivating Leads With regard to nurturing existing leads, there's one tool that I like for reactivating leads that have slipped through the cracks or aren't getting the attention they deserve for one reason or another: Datahug. (Location 1800)
E-Signature Solutions Wonderful—you've closed the deal! Now let's get the customer to sign the contract quickly. A few good integration tools to look for are e-mail client and CRM. (Location 2135)
E-mail Signature For starters, too many people throw a bunch of images into their e-mail signatures. (Location 2273)
Sigstr will allow your marketing team to create and change signatures across the entire sales team. (Location 2310)