In this interview, we will talk about lead generation in IT using not quite standard methods.
My guest today is Max Makarenko, founder and CEO at Docsify, a sales & marketing growth hacker. Max has been in B2B sales for over ten years.
After four years of outsourcing, he moved into the grocery business. Now he is also engaged in the fact that he shares his experience with outsourcing companies.
Sergei
Max, please tell me, why did you leave outsourcing for a product? What was the reason? Is outsourcing a good business too?
Max
Well, it’s not bad from the point of view, probably, of obtaining some kind of stable income, but, from the point of view of what is more “for the soul”, nevertheless, the soul lies in where the last chain is already – providing value. That is, when we work and make products for someone, and then we look and see how they don’t always take off, but most often they don’t take off, it’s very disappointing, because you put your whole soul into it.
And, accordingly, we simply came to the conclusion that, even at the level of internal sensations, we really wanted to make our own product and that no one would influence how it would develop, so that we ourselves could influence it.
Sergei
I follow you online and see that the topic of outsourcing does not let you go, after all, outsourcing sits somewhere in the depths of your soul, and very tightly. Why?
Max
The fact is that at the moment when I was outsourcing, I now understand that I did not see the whole picture. When I switched, so to speak, to the other side, when we started to make a product, on the one hand, they began to perceive us as an object “to whom to sell”, and we constantly receive some offers, and it just turned into some kind of madness, those. we all offer outsourcing services.
I saw it from a slightly different angle. And on the third hand, we have many clients - outsourcing companies, including not only, by the way, in the Russian-speaking space, there are a lot of foreign clients that provide such services.
And when we take root and try to understand their sales processes, we see a lot of interesting things that could be applicable, and, in fact, that's why I want to share with outsourcing companies how it could be better than it is now in most cases.
Sergei
That is, often the problems of an outsourcing business are not visible from the inside, but when you get out of it and look from a product point of view.
Max
One hundred percent, they become visible directly. When I was doing it, there was no awareness of a large number of things that I now perfectly understand.
For some reason, many people are fixated on the fact that outbound is what needs to be done right now, because it works faster, and the inbound channel needs to be developed for a very long time and this is such a thankless task. In fact, this is a big misconception, because, firstly, it needs to be developed in parallel, and secondly, here is a simple example, when some kind of lead comes to us in inbound, he already has some kind of need formed, since he I saw our site, understood what we were doing, left a request.
On outbound, most often we have to write to such leads, who often do not have a need formed, and just this process of generating a need takes a lot of time.
Therefore, I, in fact, do not recommend considering working with any one channel, we always say that it should be some kind of combination, where we develop both channels in parallel. But today we will talk more about outbound and what practices exist and how it generally works.
Now there is a lot of controversy on the topic of outbound or inbound. In fact, when it comes to sales, we cannot just talk about the lead generation channel. Both outbound and inbound are just a channel from which we get new leads, and, accordingly, we cannot argue that, here, we are doing outbound or just inbound.
This is always a kind of relationship between outbound and inbound, because when you write even cold letters to your clients, you in any case give a link to the site, people come in, look and either see some elements of trust there or don’t see it, depending from this, they decide further on whether to answer the letter or not.
Many with whom I communicate are for some reason fixated on the fact that outbound is what needs to be done right now, because it works faster, and the inbound channel needs to be developed for a very long time and this is such a thankless task. In fact, this is a big misconception, because, firstly, it needs to be developed in parallel, and secondly, here is a simple example, when some kind of lead comes to us in inbound, he already has some kind of need formed, since he I saw our site, understood what we were doing, left a request.
On outbound, most often we have to write to such leads, who often do not have a need formed, and just this process of generating a need takes a lot of time.
Therefore, I, in fact, do not recommend considering working with any one channel, we always say that it should be some kind of combination, where we develop both channels in parallel. But today we will talk more about outbound and what practices exist and how it generally works.
Probably the very first misconception that I encounter when communicating with people is that outbound should always be mega-cold and it always looks like spam, that is, if we write a cold letter, it is always spam.
In fact, this is, in fact, the approach that is outdated, which I spoke about, when we just take some leads from obscure resources or even from LinkedIn, we just take some thousand leads, the geography of the United States, such we send such and such a role, and, of course, it will look like spam to the recipient, and I can assure you that your such recipients receive several such letters a day and very often they simply delete them without reading them, at least I've been doing just that lately, because it's outright spam.
And the expedient approach is that we should, in principle, not write spam to anyone, and even if we need to write a cold letter, then as much as possible, before contact, we need to warm up the person. I will talk about how you can warm up before a cold letter, including during this master class.
How to start?
It doesn't matter which channel you develop, it's inbound or outbound, it doesn't matter, you always need to start by understanding what kind of company you are and what services you sell.
I won't go in cycles, I think that this is a fairly obvious fact for everyone, but when communicating with many companies, very few people can really articulate how they actually differ from the services of companies located one floor above or one floor below.
It basically boils down to, "Well, we do quality projects." Others also say that they do quality work. "And we do projects on time." Others also say that they do it on time, therefore, it is very important, when you start working on any channel, to understand what your company is a professional in, how you can set yourself apart from competitors.
Naturally, adjusting the price is not an option, because this feature, let's say, is already occupied by Asian countries, i.e. they are already well tuned in price and very often they offer me $ 8-10 to develop something, so the strategy must be comprehensive, it must be based either on some business domain or on some deep technical specialization, for example , some specific projects with blockchain or machine learning.
When you formulate these criteria, it will be much easier for you to communicate with clients, because, again, if, for example, I need a developer - an outsourcing company, then I always communicate with one, two or three and always choose among them, because what they tell me.
That is, it already affects when you made contact with the client, and what you tell him. Having analyzed about a hundred of these phone calls, the first contacts with clients, I can say with confidence that no one can answer the question of why you are better, how you really differ in business and in detail.
And this is a very big problem, and first of all, what you need to start with, what to do is to formulate your advantages in such a way that it is clear to customers why they should choose you. I will be able to give examples later in our class.
The second point also swings outbound and inbound, but in this case we are talking in terms of outbound. Before you write to someone, you must be very clear about who your target audience is. Accordingly, if you write a thousand letters to companies, people who are not included in the portraits of your target audience, then you will simply make spam and will not receive any answers.
Very often I see situations in which the head of the company comes and says: "We are starting to engage in outbound, let's try." Some first mailings are made, the second campaign, the third campaign, as a result, after some time, zero answers or one are obtained, where it says: "I'm not interested, unsubscribe me."
And after a few months, a decision is made that this channel simply does not work and "let's not do this, it's not for us." In fact, almost any channel works if you properly prepare for working with this channel and directly implement it.
Therefore, point number one, which is incredibly important, is the creation of detailed so-called buyer persona, when you clearly understand what problems these people have, why you can help them solve it, you can justify it. The most important rule I would formulate in working with outbound is to be relevant.
If you are relevant to the people you write to, then, firstly, you will always have a higher respontrade, and secondly, no one will call you spammers, because very often, as I said, I repeat that it is simply there is no need for the people you write to at all, and this is clear even from their LinkedIn profile.
For example, they often write to me: “Can you subcontract projects to us?”, despite the fact that LinkedIn shows that I have not been outsourcing for several years.
Therefore, a detailed study of who you are writing to, next, the next step is the segmentation of these target portraits, that is, who these people are, and segmentation should eventually end with the number of people on the list up to 50 people. You have chosen some niche, let's say travel, you have taken some geography, let's say Germany.
You collect your portraits and you can collect them not only from LinkedIn, there are many other resources that allow you to target, some of them are listed below.
Plus there are also many very targeted groups where your target audience can reside. Therefore, it is precisely on the basis of these factors that you make micro-segmented lists of your target audience, and when you have one campaign for 30-40 people, it is much easier to personalize the letter and show that you are really writing, understanding what it is about, to whom you write and why.
There are resource sites that are not very popular, these are some narrow target communities, this is what is working very well now. Let’s say you are in insurance or you have some cases that you can show in some business niche, you can search for such target groups, they usually contain from 100 to 1000 people maximum, but at the same time these are people of very high qualities that will best suit your portrait.
MQL (marketing qualified lead) is the lead that matches the portrait of the target audience you described. How to get them? First, determine the criteria by which you are looking for them, starting from geography, ending with where you found the person.
If you found him in some group, then we can make a variable during personalization that we found him in this Facebook group, and accordingly, this will affect, let's say, more personalization, better reply rate.
How do many people now collect data in order to write cold letters?
Usually it looks like this: there is LinkedIn, most often some kind of sales navigator on LinkedIn, and there is some kind of application like snov.io that allows you to get e-mail from a LinkedIn profile, or get a list of emails from a list of profiles.
We save all this in a csv file, then we send letters using some platforms, which we will talk about later. This is the approach that everyone is doing now, and I can say with great confidence that personalization, which works at the name-company-position level, is no longer personalization, it already works very poorly, everyone is personalized this way, so these letters are already in a crowd in the inbox of people, and no one reads them anymore.
The second approach, which is more unique, which, I think, not everyone uses, but at the same time, it is not very complicated.
For example, if your target audience is startups in some area, it doesn’t matter, there is such a platform as angellist.com, where there is a list of all startups and besides that there is still a lot of data about these startups, including which round investments they are in, who their investors are and a lot of things that can be used as variables for personalization.
We take this site, connect Data Miner, which allows you to collect unstructured data on a web page in a structured form and, accordingly, we enrich with this tool not just a profile, as in LinkedIn - company, position, name and everything, we add a lot more variables that allows you to add the same angellist.com or crunchbase.com, and these variables will be used for personalization in the future.
In the same way, we add e-mail using the same snov.io and similar tools, we get a more enriched file with lead data that can be used to write more personalized letters to narrower groups. This is exactly what allows you to be as relevant as possible.
And the third approach, where there is even a case in which we managed to get a reply rate of about 90%. How it works? On Facebook there are a lot of groups or some kind of events, where each event on Facebook, each group on Facebook has a list of participants.
With the help of certain tools listed below, one of them is called Phantombuster, where you can gather all the members of a group or event automatically.
And then automatically find their profiles on LinkedIn and with the help of Dux-Soup is a program that helps to automatically send invites and messages, send people a very personalized message.
Sergei
How many variables do you have in one letter?
Max
It really depends on what kind of letter, what stage it is in, but in general, for the first letter, I would take 4-5 good quality variables.
Sergei
Is it possible to start from the feedback received from certain market segments based on the results of a test marketing campaign, and not from the initially planned client portrait?
Max
If the feedback is appropriate, then you just need to adjust the portrait from this feedback and then work on the portrait anyway, that is, feedback is what allows you to hone the portrait of the target audience in more detail.
Sergei
That is, in any case, at first there is a portrait as a hypothesis, then a portrait polished by practice.
Max
And I can say that work with portraits never stops, that is, if we started with a small number of portraits, now we have segmented a lot of them, there are already a large number of them, and every day each portrait is refined and refined. Therefore, of course, this is a permanent work that will allow you to gather your target audience more and more clearly over time.
Sergei
Another question: the LinkedIn sales navigator adds the output of those who are not even close to interesting, maybe there was a bug, or maybe the algorithm is too complicated and crooked? Have you encountered such things?
Max
Yes, we have come across, of course, and this is not only a sales navigator, it is, in principle, in the usual LinkedIn. The problem is this: very often this is due to the fact that when we, for example, enter keywords in the search in the sales navigator, LinkedIn truncates the results very much. Its algorithms are far from perfect, and in this case I recommend not using any keywords at all, but making selections for specific fields and then the output will be better.
I will tell you an example, which, I hope, will show how to use this tool correctly. Let's take our product. One of the portraits that we have identified is the users of the Pipedrive CRM system, that is, those who can actually be our customers.
We found a group on Facebook, it was called “Pipedrive users” or something like that, and with the help of Phantom Buster we gathered all the members of this group, then with the help of the same Phantom Buster we found their profiles on LinkedIn automatically and further with the help of Dux -Soup sent messages to LinkedIn in which we wrote: “Hi, I found you on Facebook in such and such a group, in connection with this I had a question, can you tell me such and such ...”
And we had a very high reply rate. Of those who got legal, there were about 90% of the answers, and this is the case that no one would ever have thought in their life that we automated it, it looked like I found a person somewhere, I saw that he was in what group, found his profile on LinkedIn and decided to write.
It looked very personalized, so there was a very high reply rate, plus it was quite relevant, because indeed in this group there were those users of the CRM system that we needed, and they could give us answers to questions.
And after we had already entered into a dialogue, we began to ask how they solve such and such a problem, they say that there is no way, and we further offered them our tools as options. Therefore, finding such approaches to outbound is something that will be actively developed over the next few years, I'm sure.
And this is just one of the use cases of the same Phantom Buster, this is a very large API for marketers and sellers that can be used. A little later I will tell you what other cases he can cover.
Regarding channels, we all know that there is e-mail and LinkedIn, and we work with them. The question, probably, is that it is necessary to change the approaches to working with them, this is the first thing.
And secondly, you still need to pay attention to Facebook as a source of communications, despite the fact that many say that FB is a personal space, it’s better not to write there for work. But it depends on who your target audience is.
I can say for sure that if your target audience is startups, whatever they are, wherever they are, then Facebook is a great place to communicate.
And if you, for example, look for some narrow FB groups, almost every geography has its own FB group, for example, start-ups in Berlin, start-ups in London, etc., in any city, in any country, you can find some narrow community, groups of people who communicate with each other.
The only thing you need to be very careful there, I very often observe in such groups when some John or someone else appears and writes: “Guys, I’m now considering a contractor for myself who will do my front end and I am looking for a developer. Tell me, is $90 an hour a normal price or not?”
And they begin to write answers, someone writes that if this is a company, then this is an okay price, if a freelancer, then it can be a little cheaper.
And as a result, after some time, Vasya Ivanov appears, who breaks into this topic and writes: “But here, in principle, we can do 40, easily.”
In general, this is the wrong approach to sales, it is more a decrease in the value of what all companies do in relation to customers, so if you are already in these groups, then you should at least make your offers more correctly.
Accordingly, pay attention to Facebook too, there are also leads there, all people under the age of 40 are your target audience, it is much easier to get them on Facebook.
Now let's talk about each of the channels separately.
Firstly, everyone knows that emails do not need to be sent manually, companies do this through social tools for email outreach. I think that you have heard about some of them, but not about some, I want to focus now on one tool - this is lemlist.com.
What is its competitive difference, in my opinion, this is the competitive difference that you should have in front of your customers. For lemlist, it lies in the fact that they can personalize, that is, insert variables not only as text, but also as an image.
How it works? Let's say I take a white cup in my hands, allegedly drink tea, take a picture of myself, and the client's logo is substituted on this white cup as a variable. Or I am photographed against the background of an empty board, and some text is automatically inserted on this board, supposedly written by hand, where I write, for example, the name of a person, etc. This allows for a very high level of personalization.
When we switched to this tool, I can say that after AB-tests, we had a hundred percent increase in the reply rate for different campaigns from 20 to 100%. Why is this happening? Because people most often do not imagine how this could be done automatically, respectively, they get a clear impression that I did it manually, and if manually, then this is not spam, and if not spam, then, in principle , you can think, look, perhaps something to answer.
Many directly write to us: “Guys, I have never received such a cold letter”, but the main thing is that we started communication, so I advise you to consider this tool as an option as well.
About the main points to consider when you write cold letters and compose email campaigns.
First, of course, no one reads very long emails. Sometimes they send me a huge list of all the technologies that the company owns, then they write another two-page introduction, it's just not readable, so any of your letters should be short and relevant to the person. Short, this means that a person is very likely to read it in full, if it is relevant, then with a high probability he will also answer.
The second factor, very important, is to write from a business domain. I sometimes meet companies that tell me: “And we create specially gmail mail and write from it.” I say: "Why are you doing this?" They say: "Well, what if our domain gets spammed." This is exactly the difference, i.e. you don’t need to engage in spam, you need to make high-quality outreach, let’s call it that, and really be relevant, help people in what can be useful to them.
Therefore, if you do this, it will not give any results at all, you can just stop and calmly go to your business address, write from it and write in such a way that there is no chance that people will send this letter to spam.
Everyone already knows that a campaign should have at least 5-7 stages, I think that in some cases there may be more. There are official open statistics about cold emailing, which can be found on the Internet, that more than 50% of all responses come after the fourth letter in the chain.
At some point, I even conducted an experiment, when they started outreaching me and writing letters to me, I watched who would reach what stage. And in fact, there were an average of 2-3 letters, this is what is enough, after that everything calms down. Therefore, you should try to do at least 5-7 stages in the mailing list.
Sergei
Max, just a question about the subjects of these letters. The question immediately arises, what to write in these seven letters? Well, okay, the first letter: “Hi, John, everything is OK, I found you in the group”, the second, there, I came up with something else, on the third the fantasy dries up, and on the fourth it’s completely zero.
Max
Here a very important point is to look at the involvement of people in general, that is, it is not necessary to write the same message that was in the first letter. Very often this problem arises when we wrote the first letter with some specific message or proposal, and then we try to push all seven letters in the same direction.
You just need to switch. We, for example, how we do the first letter - it’s understandable, we very often do the second letter in such a way that, for example, we throw a link. Typically, the purpose of a cold email is to set up a meeting or phone call. The first letter is directed to this, in the second we write: “Sorry, I forgot to add a link to calendly, choose a time when it is convenient for you.” Third letter: “Here I sent a letter on such and such a date, I want to make sure you saw it or not, can you give some feedback?”
And then we change our approach. This is where the understanding of the portrait is very important. When we write, for example, to some narrow group, we understand that this narrow group can get sick, and we write: “By the way, we have written an article on this topic that may be useful to you, here is the link, look ".
In principle, probably, the whole outbound is built on first giving, and then asking for something, not like we immediately take and ask, but first we need to give something.
Therefore, here this is exactly the place where inbound and outbound intersect very tightly and partly the content that we write for inbound, as it were, we also use it in the outbound channel when we write letters and send specific content to specific target groups, which we We understand that it should be useful for them. Therefore, you need to build these chains in different ways, you need to experiment.
Sergei
Please tell me, did you manage to create these chains on the first try, or did you suffer, try, experiment?
Max
Creating something here is not a problem, it is necessary that they work. We managed to create something the first time, yes. The question is what they have earned, of course, far from the first time.
We have tried a lot, we need to test everything. It happens that you find some approach that works, it worked for you for a month and that's it, after that it no longer works, although you write for the same target audience.
Therefore, this is the thing that must: a) constantly change; b) constantly tested, that is, there is no limit to perfection.
We take and start by taking two topics, looking at where the open rate is better, then taking the topic that has a better open rate and taking another one, came up with it, looked it up, and now they are compared.
The same with letters, we change letters and see if the open rate changes, we do it with such personalization, with such personalization. That is, this is a very large amount of work that is done on an ongoing basis.
I have not yet seen a single case where you can find some option that you can save, click "constantly use" and it will constantly bring leads.
Everything is constantly changing, especially since we have moved away from this mailing list when we send thousands of emails, and now these groups are narrowly targeted, so the texts for them are constantly changing.
Sergei
5-7 stages. For what period of time are these stages calculated, how much approximately in time?
Max
There may be custom intervals, that is, between the first letters 2-3 days, between those that are closer to the end there may be a week interval. That is, in general, up to 1,5 months for it to be. Again, outbound is a topic where it takes time to form a need, even if a person doesn’t have it now, if you give him the right information, the right content, then over time, when this need appears, he will remember and turn.
Sergei
Is chain modification done automatically, based on comparison, or manually?
Max
We make several variations, and in the same tools there is an A / B testing function, we just turn on the A / B test and see which modification works best.
GIFs can be used, although they should be used sparingly, we have noticed that the reply rate goes up when we use some kind of gif that can cheer up a person. That is, it is important to work with how it looks in general, this is certainly not a panacea, these are small things that can be used.
Another important point, if you send your letters through such systems, then for the first letter turn off the tracking of the opening of the letter, because the tracking pixel that is added for tracking adds html code to the letter, and if for the first time something like this comes to the inbox email, it may end up in spam.
Therefore, deliverability increases significantly if you simply disable this pixel for the first email. There are a few more moments, for example, when we write a letter, at the bottom we make a couple of mistakes, not grammatical, but typos that T9 usually makes and add “sent from my Iphone” below.
This adds such personalization in terms of the fact that I seemed to have just been sitting, typing, making a mistake, and this really increases the reply rate to some extent as well.
There are a number of technical issues that are more for the domain administrator to set up the correct SPF-signature, DKIM-signature. DMARC is what keeps emails from getting into spam. Once they called me, they said: “We have a problem, we first sent letters for a month, there were no answers at all, then they began to analyze, it turned out that they did not reach.” And we looked, and there these signatures simply were not configured and everything fell into spam by default.
If you work with native English speakers, for example, the United States or the UK, then it is very important to proofread letters from professional readers who understand the mentality and can correctly reframe the letter for you in other words, leaving the same message.
Sergei
What are the weekly plans for the number of emails sent?
Max
It depends very much on what goal we need to achieve, they are not permanent. It all depends on the funnel, there is a funnel, there is a CRM system, we look at the entrance of the funnel, if we see that, in terms of lead generation, a subsidence began at the first stages, then we send more letters.
If we don’t have time to work out these first stages, then on the contrary, we suspend campaigns and wait for leads to pass through the funnel, so I can’t give a specific recommendation on how many letters to send, you need to build on the specific situation.
Now some interesting secret stuff, maybe someone uses some, but I think it will still be very useful. There are tools, they are listed below, that allow you to find out from which company a person came to your site.
How do we use it? We write letters to those whom we outreach, we know which companies we write to. And we look at which of them visited the site, and if we see that we wrote, for example, to the Disney company and two days after we sent the letter, there was a visit to our site from the Disney company, then we understand that, most likely, this person or his colleagues came in.
Accordingly, we can personalize the next letter in the chain, and if it was on the page with prices, then we write that we can call and tell in more detail how our pricing works, etc.
That is, there are a lot of approaches, they are probably different for each business, but it is always useful to know this information and, based on it, make some kind of personalization.
The second interesting tool. Before you start writing to your leads, show some activity on social networks, for example, like, comment, share their posts and be sure to do this on behalf of the name from which the newsletter will be sent.
Thus, a person sees that some Vanya liked him once, liked him a second time, commented on something, shared something, and then two days later a letter comes from him with the same photo that is on Facebook, with the same name .
This is such a mini-warm-up before we write, so that the letter is not so cold and there is a feeling that he already knows this person.
By the way, one of the cases, how you can use Phantom Buster, so as not to do it all by hand. We just drive the list of leads, and this thing itself likes, shares, does some things that are set up and you don’t need to do it manually, it’s very convenient and this way conversions to answers increase.
Sergei
Doesn't Facebook calculate that it's not a person, but some program does?
Max
No. Let's just say, this tool is for "handy", there you need everything to be done clearly under vpn, then everything will be fine.
The third approach is before we do outreach, we take a list of emails that we plan to outreach and run an advertising campaign on them on Facebook, where you can run ads on a specific list of emails.
And before writing, a person sees your ad all the time, maybe you even filmed yourself and tell something.
It greatly increases trust when a letter arrives to him, and he is even glad that such a famous person wrote to him. We also encountered this, it works well to increase the same reply rate.
All these things are aimed at optimizing as much as possible the outbound that you are doing.
About LinkedIn just a few words. Don't send standard invitations, I think that's understandable. The same rules apply here that you need to automate everything and do the minimum number of actions by hand.
To do this, there are tools such as Dux-soup, Linkedhelper. We, in principle, use both, but LinkedIn is very serious about such things so that they can be automated as little as possible, so they constantly try to “pin their fingers” on these tools, and they constantly dodge and come up with new approaches.
Therefore, it happens when it does not work very stably, but in general it works out very well by 90% and saves a huge amount of time for those who do this outreach.
Now a few words about why this happens, that salespeople very often work inefficiently, spend a lot of time getting some tasks into the CRM system, contacting incomprehensible leads who have not been qualified, then to write follow-ups manually, etc.
Many sales departments are faced with a similar problem and the main nuance is that there are no correctly assigned roles and responsibilities within the sales department.
This is how it should ideally look like:
There is a book, perhaps many have read, Predictable Revenue, the author of which worked in Salesforce, and he actually developed a new approach that he implemented in Salesforce and now this approach has become quite popular.
Its essence lies in the fact that if we exclude the head of sales as a role, inside the operational sales department the roles are divided into lead generator, SDR (sales development representative) and Account Executive (closer).
Why such a distribution of roles and how is it useful?
First, it is very clear to formulate and set kpi for each of these roles. If we are talking about the Lead Generator, then the output should be marketing qualified leads and actually the first generated responses from potentially interested customers.
And this is his kpi both quantitatively and qualitatively. If we talk about SDR, then at its input there are answers of those interested and MQL, and at the output it should have sales qualified leads and they should already pass according to certain criteria at the output.
And the task of the Account Executive is to take that lead who is qualified, who has a need and conduct proper negotiations with him, sign a contract.
Such a system within the sales department saves time for those who used to focus on everything and most of the time were engaged in non-seller activity, let's say so.
How to get sales qualified leads? There is a very good BANT framework, which consists of four criteria, the first criterion is the budget, that is, we need to understand that a person understands what kind of budget he is talking about, not that he already agrees with it, but at least he is aware of this budget. The second criterion is the decision maker.
We must understand that we are not talking to someone who finds out for someone, but to someone who is already making a decision. The third - needs - we understand whether a person has a need for the solution that we offer or not.
And the fourth - time - where we actually determine whether he needs it now, urgently, or in six months or completely indefinitely. So it is the job of the SDR to qualify and pass on to the Account Executive a lead that meets these four criteria.
And the Account Executive, in turn, focuses on working with precisely such leads, and accordingly, the results of his work also improve, because he does not waste time on those who do not pass this qualification.
From what I see in the sales funnels of different companies, a lot of leads do not reach the qualification stage and merge somewhere along the way. Why is this happening?
Very often this happens because, firstly, we do not always measure in general when we write letters to people, how much they open them, how much they read them.
And second, very often we just forget to followup. This is a very important point, especially when inside the funnel. That is, in fact, when you complete a live communication with a client, you should immediately set the task of calling him after a certain period of time, after two or three days, as agreed.
Very often I see a situation where clients are simply forgotten, or when a huge number of tasks accumulate and as a result a person simply gives up.
This is just a big problem, which is primarily due to the fact that sales does not work in a CRM environment. When a sales person has CRM as his main work environment, he understands very clearly that this is the entire list of my tasks, I don’t do anything else, I go about my tasks.
When it happens that CRM is somewhere on the side, and I have 80 tasks there, but I think that now it is more priority to do something else, this is where this problem begins. These tasks accumulate like a snowball, and this leads to the fact that the CRM system as such does not work, but rather serves as a database for recording what is happening with the client.
About how to make proposals/estimates depending on the situation. There are a few simple rules here, and the most important thing, probably, is to make good, high-quality proposals/estimates. We conducted a small study, we have about 80% of people who prepared estimates, they simply did it in google docs and made a google table where they entered the number of hours, the amount, and this, in principle, is enough.
This is a big problem in general, probably in the IT industry, when we treat the creation of such documents very, shall we say, sloppy. This is what the client sees, on the basis of which he makes a decision, and he very often compares it with other proposals / estimates that he receives at the same time. Therefore, your option should be significantly different from others. I highly recommend allocating some time and even a budget once in order to make a very good quality template that not only adds estimation results, but also adds some elements of marketing and sales.
Let's say if we send this to a client, a travel company, then we show what relevant cases we have, what results the travel companies we worked with achieved, what we gave them.
At the stage when a person most often sees numbers, and if he sees the same google doc from sales from India, naturally, they look the same, only the price there is three times lower, and he has a question why this is so, you need to be very careful prepare proposal/estimate, add trust.
And there's a nice tool called Useloom that lets you embed your video right into your email when you send an estimate. Instead of writing an accompanying text in the letter, you simply attach a video, and this greatly increases trust.
A person receives an estimate, it is beautifully designed, everything is clearly written there, there are cases, plus there is not only text, but an accompanying video that shows the face, tells what benefits there are, you immediately understand that this is a living company, living people, they they speak English well and so on.
These things have a very good effect on personalization, they give a good result on customizing your offer. I highly recommend giving something beyond expectations. If you make an estimate, then do something else that others will ask for 100-200 dollars, some additional calculation or a small TK, do it for free, it always pays off. Give more than what is expected of you, and you will always come and return.
Where to get leads? If, for example, you do not consider the outbound and inbound channels, during your work in CRM you have accumulated a certain number of leads that you did not close, but they are your target audience. For some reason, everyone categorically forgets about them.
My recommendation is the following. First, absolutely all the leads that you have, to renew and at least once every six months to find out how they are doing, plus it is very important to ensure that if this is a lead that you had before, and he, to for example, changed jobs (you can track them on LinkedIn).
Perhaps someone else has taken his place, and you can turn to him and say that we used to work with this person, we can continue to communicate with you.
And, on the other hand, the person who left has a new place of work and, perhaps, there is a new need there and this is an additional reason to contact him and clarify.
You can track this using google alerts, or on LinkedIn, but in general, you can track specific people, if something happens, immediately respond and be the first.
The first mistake that I have already mentioned is that many people use the CRM system as a database and do not automate their work in any way. This, of course, is already good, but this is not what the CRM system as a whole was created for.
In my understanding, the CRM system is what allows you to really define priorities for employees, understand what tasks to do, when to do them, how much time to spend on it, and to some extent, we can say that the CRM system should give direction .
All this to implement and configure is a rather complicated process that makes you take a deeper look at the processes that take place inside the sales department. And if there is chaos in the processes, then by automating them, we will get automated chaos.
Accordingly, you must first understand how the process itself works, and only then automate it in the CRM system. How to create autotasks in CRM systems depends on what the goal is, at what stage this client is and there are a lot of different options.
You probably use a CRM system, mail, and some other services for sales, it is very important to combine them into a single infrastructure. Now there are tools (Zapier, for example) that allow you to integrate various services with each other and transfer data between them.
I can give an example of how we automate the creation of tasks in our system. We have several types of autotasks.
One of the types of tasks is when we send a proposal to our client, as soon as he opens it, we immediately send a hook through Zapier, and a task is set in CRM for the manager that the client has opened a commercial offer, you can contact him.
Because it often happens that we send a commercial offer, the client has not opened it yet, and we are already calling two days later, panicking why there is no answer.
This greatly simplifies the work and, again, sets the right priorities. There are a lot of such opportunities for creating autotasks in a CRM system, but they are almost always associated with other services. Let's take the same outreach systems, such as reply.
There, in the same way, the CRM system connects through Zapier, and if a response arrives, the responsible person is immediately given the task of contacting or creating a deal, if necessary.
There are many different cases, and there is no one right flow, according to which you need to automate CRM. It very much depends on the company, on the processes that exist within the company, on the goals that the company sets for the sales department, on the structure of the sales department, etc.
Therefore, it is very difficult to say which specific bundles to use and how to automate. But now there are just a huge number of opportunities for automation, and CRM systems themselves do a lot for this.
Metrics need to be tracked in order to be able to influence them and measure the results of this influence, otherwise they are simply not needed. What to track with metrics? To do this, you need to understand what is important for you at the moment, but in general, we set the following metrics for ourselves:
And finally, three useful outbound books that I recommend reading, here they are:
Source: habr.com