Learn Enterprise Marketing with GovindaRaj Avasarala

This podcast of Masters Of Sales features GovindaRaj Avasarala, Head Enterprise Marketing at Vodafone Idea Limited.

GovindaRaj Avasarala aka Govind, is a consummate marketing professional. He has been working with Vodafone, now Vodafone Idea Limited for over a decade as the Enterprise Marketing Head. In addition to it, he has over 19 years of work experience from working with start-ups, mid-size enterprises to large size enterprises.

His expertise is B2B marketing, Business Strategies, Product Management, and C level engagement. Moreover, he left his commendable impressions in the companies like Siemens, Deloitte, Microland, Wipro and IMImobile.

Moving towards Govind’s studies, he has done his B.Tech in Electronics & Communications from NIT Warangal. Afterwards, he completed his MBA (PGDM) from IIM-Ahmedabad.

Govind is also a member of the Assocham National Council for Marketing & Branding, TiE Mumbai and the Advisory Board India. He generally talks about 5g, telecommunications, digital and IoT. However, during the LinkedIn Live session hosted by Nitin Bajaj, founder & CEO of EasyLeadz, he shares his journey from a small city to IIM Ahmedabad.

Mr Avasarala, who feels that marketing is both, art and science, is experimental and full of curiosity. Therefore, he keeps pushing himself to try new things in his personal & professional life. However, in terms of sales, he focused more on Account-based marketing.

Marketing Tips From GovindaRaj

Speaking about the experience while working with Advisory Board India, Govind revealed that his urge to get in touch with bright minds out there took him to be a part of Board member. For him, it is an opportunity to get exposure to various industries and different methods. He also added that you do not need to be experimental always, you can also learn from others.

On B2B sales for export marketing, Govind advised that before directly making sales, one should focus on marketing. As firstly one should try marketing campaigns to build a brand. After this, go with the marketing tools, test it out, try marketing automation. If this will provide good results then it will surely make good sales too.

GovindaRaj, an inspiring business leader, revealed some core concepts of Enterprise Marketing during the session. These concepts are definitely going to help you out in your marketing campaigns. Not only this, but he also shared some of his marketing experiences when he was working with SMEs and big companies.

Hoping that Govind’s marketing experience & wisdom leads the upcoming Entrepreneurs and Start-Ups to be a Big Brand.

Watch this LinkedIn Live Session with GovindaRaj Avasarala, Enterprise Marketing Head at Vodafone Idea Limited – a telecom company and learn how to do enterprise marketing.

B2b Sales

B2bmarketing

Lead Generation

LinkedIn Live

MastersOfSales

Podcast

Telecom

Vodafone Idea

The Top 5 Essential Elements Of A Successful Lead Generation Strategy

“Persistence is probably the single most important skill that you will need to make your business a success. Almost nothing you will try will work on the very first attempt.” – Alex Genadinik

Generating leads and creating profitable sales opportunities can be easier than you think. Learn the secrets of lead generation to create a strategy that helps your business grow. 

B2B sales are very easy!……….. Alright!….. I am just kidding.

Lead generation is a bit tough if you don’t the technique, however, with the right strategy and tactics you can rock the market, Boom, you got it! 👍 

There are a number of Softwares available in the market which we are going to talk about later in the article but before that let’s understand what lead generation actually is and how it is important to understand it in depth.

What is lead generation?

A lead typically is the contact data and at times, segment data of a client who is keen on a particular item or administration. There are two kinds of leads generation market: sales leads and marketing leads.

Sales Lead A sales lead is a person or business who may eventually become a client. Sales lead also refers to the data that identifies an entity as a potential buyer of a product or service. Businesses gain access to sales leads through advertising, trade shows, direct mailings, third parties, and other marketing efforts.

A sales lead is not really a sales “prospect” per se because a business would need to examine and qualify the potential new client further to determine their intent and interest

Marketing leads are brand-explicit leads produced for an extraordinary promoter offer. In direct differentiation to deals drives, marketing leads are sold just a single time. Because transparency is a necessary requisite for generating marketing leads, marketing lead campaigns can be optimized by mapping leads to their sources. 

An investor lead is a sort of a potential customer. An investor lead is the personality of an individual or element possibly keen on taking an interest in speculation and addresses the main phase of a venture deals measure.

 Investor leads are considered to have some extra cash that they can use to partake in suitable venture open doors in return for profit from interest as revenue, profit, benefit-sharing, or resource appreciation. 

Investor lead records are typically created through speculation studies, financial backer pamphlet memberships, or through organizations raising capital and selling the information base of individuals who communicated an interest in their chance. 

Investor Lead records are ordinarily utilized by private companies hoping to finance their endeavor or essentially requiring extension capital that was not promptly accessible by banks and conventional loaning sources.

How important it is to understand lead generation?

To sustain in the market you have to plan accordingly or better to think one step ahead, after prediction is the only thing which you can do for free, lol. 

Behind the complexity and vision of many promoting activities and missions, for the most part, sits a similar goal: producing new leads through various securing methods. Leads (also called prospects or potential clients) inside the promoting climate are clients that have given their data to an organization and, as a result, are currently essential for that association’s data set.

 As per an examination by BrightTALK, over half of showcasing subject matter experts (53%) devote in any event half of their proposition to lead age as it were. This gives us a thought of its significance.

First of all, you need to realize that a lead indicates to any individual or organization that is conceivably intrigued by your item or administration. Leads that show interest initially are called procured or warm leads, while drives that have no earlier information on your business are called sourced, or cold leads.

Lead Generation Process

Step 1:- Search for B2B leads

Step 2:- Pitch the leads

Step 3:- Proceed with a high prospect lead

Step 4:- Close leads

“Making your prospects feel like they have an exclusive membership in a club makes lead generation a positive customer experience.” – Eric Bower

Lead Generation Tools

In today’s era, everyone is dependent on tools be it for any business owners, students, or for the house purpose and it’s valid too I guess. After all, it’s the 21st century.

In the marketing world, you have to collect and interpret the data on a colossal scale, and there is the possibility of mistakes. Why take that risk? 

Let’s have a peek at the tools-  

Drift: live chat, calendar scheduling, landing pages

Prospect.io: email lookup, email followup

Outreach.io: sales engagement

Leadfeeder: identifying who’s browsing your website

Lead Generation Strategy

It may sound stale saying that content is the king but it’s true, content is not only the king but the lifeblood of the lead generation effort. While an incredibly broad term, content marketing encompasses every type of format imaginable. 

The key to a sound content material advertising and marketing method is mapping messaging to an income funnel. For instance, even though interplay with case research and product sheets may additionally be indicative of a sales-ready lead, that doesn’t suggest an advertising group ought to lead with this kind of content, as these sorts of belongings are generally added similarly down the income process.

So, the place does content material advertising and marketing earn its recognition as a lead technology magnet?

10 points to be remembered in lead generation

1. Use SEO for organic lead generation

3. Reach out to customers of products related to your niche

4. Use live chat for B2B lead generation

2. Get featured on review websites

5. Build a brand community on Facebook

6. Create a free tool

7. Do highly personalized cold outreach

8. Use Facebook Ads to generate leads

9. Utilize LinkedIn lead generation

10. Amplify lead generation with affiliate marketing

I hope you have an idea of how you can increase your lead generation skills by following these elements. It is not necessary that all of the tips work perfectly fine for your business as every niche has a different set of audiences and has different goals so you need to make sure of all.

You can check our startup, Mr. E, for Startups in case you need any help. We are more than welcome to help you.

B2b Leads

B2b Sales

Business

Cold Calling

Content Marketing

Investor Lead

Lead Generation Strategy

Lead Generation Tools

Marketing Lead

Sale Prospect

Startups India

Need leads for your CRM software? Try 5 powerful methods

There are literally thousands of CRM application software providers. A lot of them sell their own tools while others resell and distribute someone’s else CRM tool to other businesses.

Everyone has the same challenge, more or less.

How to find high quality leads for their CRM software?

Even after running a lead generation aka B2B database company ourselves, we still have to think hard about lead generation for our own business.


So, it’s natural to go nuts when it comes to lead generation.

Let’s talk about a CRM application first and see how a sales development representative can generate high-quality leads for their CRM application software.

Let’s take the example of a car dealership.

What is a CRM tool?

Customer relationship manager (CRM) is a tool or an online software on which you can manage and communicate with your existing or potential customers.

The moment you took your car to the service station, the service manager asked you your car details and entered that information in their CRM tool along with your contact information.

He also entered the next expected service date.

The CRM tool will now remind the service in charge that your car service is due in 5 days. All he needs to do is to call you and remind you that.

Once you get a call from that service in charge, you will be thanking him and you will also take your car again to the same service station.

This is what CRM does. It stores data about the customer and lets you manage their relationship with your business.


What kind of businesses use a CRM tool?

Every business that deals with customers can use a CRM tool. But you cannot target every customer as not every customer or perhaps CRM tool can serve all the applications or use cases.

A lot of CRM tools are specially designed for B2B businesses and a lot is designed for a use case like serving car dealership businesses.

Focussed CRM helps businesses serve their customers well.


How to generate leads for a CRM business?

Every CRM business is hunting the market and trying to generate leads from the same pie.

How will you try to be different and create a niche for yourself so that customers who are underserved can get benefit from you at the right time?

I am going to share 5 powerful lead generation techniques that you can adopt for your CRM tool business.


Target companies that have recently raised funding

Companies that have recently raised funding are the ones who invest in building their sales team, adopting technologies like CRM, ERP tools.

They invest in people and infrastructure.

So reaching out to these companies right after they have raised funds gives your sales team a lot of opportunities for pitching your CRM tool application.

In order to track the recently raised funding, you can always check Google alerts or use EasyLeadz.

Once you have identified the company to target, you can simply look up their decision-makers on Linkedin and connect with them or you can find their emails using any email finder tool.

If you want to save time, then you can directly procure a high-quality B2B database list of recently funded startups along with their decision-makers verified contact data through companies like EasyLeadz.


Target companies that are hiring for sales roles

Most CRM tools are used when there is a sales team in a company. The sales team interact with their prospective customers or existing customers.

These are the companies which are more relevant to pitch for CRM tool application.

Now, if a company is actively hiring for roles like inside sales, corporate sales, business development, enterprise sales then that means the company is growing and have money to spend on sales growth and probably on CRM infrastructure as well.

Reaching out to these companies will improve your chances of getting high-quality leads.

You can track these companies by setting up alerts on Google Jobs or job portals like Indeed, Naukri, Linkedin etc.

Once you have the list of accounts aka companies to target, next step is to reach out to the decision-makers for which you can either connect with them through Linkedin or cold emails using an email automation tool.


Target companies that already have sales roles

A company that already has a large sales team becomes a relevant prospect for a CRM tool application.

It might be the case that this company have already adopted a CRM by now in order to support their existing sales team.

But you can always increase your lead generation campaign performance by targeting the pain points for large sales team use case.

This will help you focus on companies with high ticket size and low volume through relationship selling.

The best way to identify such companies is by using both Industry and company size as a filter to narrow down companies.

Companies in B2B industries like ITES, Computer Software, Staffing, Logistics with more than 1000 employees will have a large sales team to support their growth.

EasyLeadz B2B database can help you find those companies along with their decision makers contacts or you can simply use Linkedin to narrow down your companies.


Target companies with a large customer base

If you are into a B2C CRM business then targeting companies with large consumer base or companies in B2C space that are growing fast will optimise your lead generation.

Companies like MakeMyTrip, UBER, OLA Cabs, OYO Rooms have a large consumer base.

A lot of startups that have recently raised funds like CRED will also be growing at a rapid pace.

All these businesses interact with their customers on a daily basis and they either build their own CRM tool or will integrate a third party CRM tool.

Finding such companies is easy. Simply go to Linkedin and choose industries like Travel, Internet etc and narrow down your search to specific companies. Within those companies find the right decision-makers.

Either find their emails using any email finder tool or you can simply get a quality targeting list using EasyLeadz sales prospect tool.


Target companies with a global customer base

Companies that have a customer base globally also need a CRM tool to communicate with their existing or prospective customers.

The use case becomes a niche since the time zone comes into the picture.

All the reminders, follow-ups etc, need to be scheduled according to the customer time zone.

This creates an opportunity for companies who do support such features in their CRM tools.

You can always search those companies using both headquarter location of companies as their primary location and person location secondary.

Let’s say companies that are MNC’s and are either into B2B or B2C business both will have the need for a country-specific CRM application.


Now that we have the above methods, it’s important to understand that reaching out right companies at the right time is an art.

If you simply just focus on finding the right niche for your CRM tool, half of your sales efforts will be reduced.

As a next step, I would recommend you to go through with this cold email guide and few cold email templates that have created for you.

B2b Leads

B2b List Building

B2b Sales

CRM Leads

Lead Generation

List of 10+ best cold email outreach tools in 2023

Lead generation via Cold-emails is still one of the most popular channels used by the sales and marketing teams across B2B businesses. Creating an Ideal customer profile and building an email list is only half the job well done, what message should be sent out and how it should be sent is as important. 

Email outreach tools make the “How” part easy by helping you not only personalize the content for each recipient but also deliver emails into the inbox at scale. Tools allow you to schedule and automate follow-ups as well.

We reached out to the makers of these tools and in this post, the makers themselves share what makes their tools unique and why you should try them. 

If you have not yet, you ought to start using one of these email outreach tools to maximize revenue from your outbound lead generation efforts.


Woodpecker.co

Mary Siewierska – Content Marketing Specialist at Woodpecker shared her thoughts

Woodpecker is there to help B2B companies reach their prospects, customers, partners, or whoever they would like with a personal, 1-on-1 message sequence that looks as if it was sent manually. 

The main goal is for companies to strike business relationships via email which results in their company growth. In order to achieve that, the tool is kept easy to use and it focuses on scaling emails in such a way that they get delivered to the main inbox.

What customers love about Woodpecker.co?

One of the unique features of Woodpecker is the Woodpecker Agency Panel – if you’re an agency that sends emails on behalf of your client, I encourage you to try this. With that panel, you can keep your client data separate and safe. Not many people know about the agency panel because it’s sold only through a demo call. But it’s worth a sneak peek.

Key Features – 

  • Automated follow-up scheduling.
  • Reply detection
  • Track campaign progress, open, reply, link, and bounce rates.
  • A/B testing Email templates.
  • Contact management.
  • Teamwork security to ensure a single prospect is not contacted by different email addresses.
  • Unique dashboard for Agencies to run client campaigns.

Free-Trial – 14 days free trial during which you can send 150 emails (including follow-ups) 

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $40 per month for 1 email address. They offer 2 months discount on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange, MailGun, Sendgrid, IMAP/SMTP              

App Integrations –  Native integration with Pipedrive. App integrations are available via Zapier

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.4


Reply.io   

AJ Hussain from Reply.io shared his thoughts. 

The reply is a multichannel outreach automation platform, focused on best-in-class deliverability and maintaining a high level of personalization. Designed to achieve the highest possible conversion rates.

What customers love about Reply?

Customers love that Reply is Software + Service, as we work with you one-on-one to make sure you have every resource available to make you successful.

Key Features – 

  • Drip campaigns with automated follow-ups.
  • Campaign dashboard for tracking open, link, bounce and reply rates.
  • Pre-defined email templates in the editor.
  • Email template quality check.
  • Email list validation.
  • Built-in and custom variables for personalization.
  • In-built Inbox and Outbox feature for complete visibility.
  • Plugin to add contacts into already running sequences from Gmail inbox.
  • Allows direct and triggered calls.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $70 per month for 3 email addresses. They offer a 20% discount on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange, IMAP/SMTP              

App Integrations –  Native integration with Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close.io, Slack, Workable and more. App integrations available Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.5


Lemlist

Vukasin Vukosavljevic – Head of Growth at Lemlist shared his thoughts. 

Email outreach tool unique in its ability to automate and personalize cold emails at scale. With Lemlist, you can insert custom screenshots or logos onto images in your emails, add dynamic landing pages to your outreach funnel and warm-up email addresses automatically to maximize the deliverability.

What customers love about Lemlist?

Being able to add a much-needed personal touch without sacrificing the ability to send emails and automated sequences at scale. Awesome customer support is a cool bonus

Key Features – 

  • Automated follow-up scheduling and custom variables for personalization.
  • Personalized Images and Videos in emails.
  • Email warmup feature for new domains.
  • Campaign wizard for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and replies
  • A/B testing feature for email templates.
  • Recipient monitoring. 
  • Email list validation.
  • Real-time slack notifications.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $29 per month for 1 email address. They offer a 20% discount on the annual subscription

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange, IMAP/SMTP              

App Integrations –  App integrations available via Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.5


Mailshake 

Mark Lindquist – Marketing Strategist from Mailshake shared his thoughts.

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform that allows salespeople and entrepreneurs to perform personalized, scalable sales prospecting campaigns via email, phone, and social media. 

Mailshake allows you to set up a campaign with text replacement fields to personalize emails in bulk, and schedule automatic follow-ups based on whether a recipient opens, clicks, or replies to your email. You can also set tasks to engage with prospects via phone and social in the same sequence, managed on one dashboard.

What customers love about Mailshake?

Customers love how easy Mailshake is to use. Once you sign up for Mailshake, you’ll be able to start using it in minutes, not hours.

Key Features – 

  • Campaign dashboard for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and replies
  • Automated follow-up scheduling and custom variables for personalization
  • Sending controls that sync with the calendar.
  • Lead catcher lets you configure what qualifies as lead and respond from within the tool.
  • A/B testing and conversion tracking
  • Email cleansing

Free-Trial – No free trial but they offer a 30 money-back guarantee.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $39 per month per user. They offer a 25% discount on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite and Outlook          

App Integrations –  Native integrations with Salesforce and Pipedrive. App integrations available via Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.6


Yesware

Doug Ellinger – CMO at Yesware shared his thoughts.

Yesware helps real salespeople develop lasting business relationships. Many sales engagement tools today try to automate as much of a rep’s activity as possible, which leads to outbound email activity that is highly impersonal and undifferentiated. 

Yesware gives busy reps time-saving features and relationship insights in their inbox, freeing them up to focus on crafting high-quality emails that delight prospects and customers alike.

What customers love about Yesware?

Ease of use. Anyone can get up and running on Yesware in 60-seconds or less and start realizing value immediately. Because Yesware is seamlessly integrated into Gmail and Outlook and not deployed through a separate app, customer-facing business professionals can experience its easy-to-use features where they prefer to work – in their inbox.

Key Features – 

  • Sits right in the Inbox.
  • LinkedIn sales navigator integration.
  • Campaign dashboard for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and replies
  • Automated follow-up scheduling and custom variables for personalization
  • Template sharing across teams.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $15 per month per user. They offer a 20% discount on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite and Outlook           

App Integrations –  Native integration with Salesforce, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Docsend and Clari.

Developer API – No

G2 Rating – 4.4


Prospect.io

Forster Perelsztejn – Head of Acquisition at Prospect.io

We built Prospect.io precisely because we hate prospecting. It’s tedious and repetitive and we wanted to change that so we built a tool that allows users to easily master the 4 pillars of prospecting: finding emails to build well researched and segmented lists, reaching out in a personalized way, managing their leads in their favorite CRM and keeping track of all the relevant KPI’s

What customers love about Prospect.io?

Customers love that they can build multi-step campaigns and let the software take care of everything so they can focus on having conversations. Even if they have a multi-channel approach; if they need to take action, they can set up a task in the campaign and we will automatically remind them. Just set it and forget it!

Key Features – 

  • Email mail finder and verification extension.
  • Drip Campaigns.
  • Campaign dashboard for tracking opens, clicks, bounces, and replies
  • Automated follow-up scheduling and custom variables for personalization
  • Reports dashboard to monitor team and individual performance.

Free-Trial – No free trial, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $45 per month per user. They offer a 20% discount on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange and SMTP/IMAP.           

App Integrations –  Native integration with Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close.io, Hubspot, and Slack. App integrations via Zapier and Pie-Sync.

Developer API – No

Capterra Rating – 4.5/5


Rebump 

Aaron Jacobs – Founder of Rebump shared his thoughts.

Rebump is an automated email follow-up service for Gmail and G Suite. Rebump is extremely easy to use and at the same time really powerful. Rebump users report an average of a 30% rescue (responses to emails that were followed up on) rate.

Rebump will send customizable personalized bumps (follow-up messages) at intervals of your choice until the recipient replies. The bumps automatically stop once they reply.

What customers love about Rebump?

Our users love us for many reasons. However, if I needed to choose 2 I would maybe say that they love how Rebump is so simple and ease of use and great customer support.

Key Features – 

  • Automated follow-up scheduling.
  • Same thread follow-ups.
  • Easy monitoring of the progress of each email.

Free-Trial – 30-day full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $5 per month per user. 

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite

App Integrations –  NA

Developer API – NA

Chrome store rating – 4.9


Smartreach.io

Prateek Bhatt – Co-founder of Smartreach.io shared his thoughts

Smartreach.io is an email automation service that focuses on getting your emails delivered to the primary inbox of your prospects. Further, the tool is straight forward and simple to use with a killer customer support team.

The tool is super scalable and is built with several features to enhance usability for large organizations and agencies. Smartreach.io is continuously evolving to become a top-notch solution to all email outreach needs

What customer love about Smartreach.io?

Smartreach.io enjoys a very high amount of customer loyalty. They absolutely love our deliverability features, which in fact are a result of talking and engaging with our customers to understand and remove their pain points.

Key Features – 

  • SPAM check and email validation to ensure high deliverability.
  • Domain Warm-up – Builds the sender’s email id reputation by algorithmically ramping up the number of emails sent by that email id over a period of time.
  • Campaign dashboard to track progress, open, reply and click rates.
  • Automated follow-up scheduling and timezone personalization.
  • A/B testing of email sequences.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $24 per month per user. Save 20% on the annual subscription.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange, Mailgun, Sendgrid, and SMTP/IMAP.

App Integrations –  App integrations via Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.5 


Autoklose

Shawn Finder – Co-founder and CEO of Autoklose shared his thoughts

Autoklose is an all in one sales engagement platform that allows you to not only automate your outreach but also tap into our B2B database with over 28M prospects to filter. If you are looking to fill your calendar with qualified appointments, Autoklose is the way to go.

What customers love about Autoklose?

Clients love that we have combined both the Sales engagement + B2B database all in one place for sales professionals.

Key Features – 

  • Drip and regular campaigns.
  • Email campaign management for tracking open, bounce, reply and click rates.
  • Contact Management
  • Personalized and automated follow-up scheduling
  • Ability to save email sequences as templates 
  • Smart lead scoring.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $49.99 per month per user with unlimited contact uploads.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365, MS Exchange, and SMTP/IMAP.

App Integrations –  Native integrations with Salesforce, Salesflare, Vidyard and Calendly. Other App integrations via Zapier.

Developer API – No

G2 Rating – 4.5 


SalesHandy

Dhruv Patel – Co-founder at SalesHandy shared his thoughts

SalesHandy is known for helping users get better email deliverability and open rate. It ensures your cold email is landing in the recipient’s primary inbox instead of the spam or promotion tab. 

It has a variety of features like personalized mail merge with auto follow up to 9 stages, email scheduling, smart email templates and document tracking which ensures that your cold email campaigns provide actionable data on recipient engagement and reduces your workload by automating follow-ups. The cherry on top is that we have a freemium version that gives users free email tracking and scheduling forever

What customers love about SalesHandy?

Apart from easy to use interface and cost-effective solution, customers love the customer support service, which assists them in executing a hassle-free email campaign to achieve a higher open rate.

Key Features – 

  • Document tracking.
  • Personalized and automated follow-up scheduling.
  • Free chrome extension for email tracking and scheduling.
  • Email Verification.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $20 per month per user.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite and Outlook, and SMTP/IMAP.

App Integrations –  App integrations available via Zapier.

Developer API – NA

G2 Rating – 4.1


Klenty

Ashok Kammara – Head of Growth at Klenty shared his thoughts

Klenty is a Sales Engagement Platform that helps sales teams automate email outreach and communication with prospects at scale.

The tool automates all the repetitive parts of the top-of-the-sales funnel activities like sending cold emails, follow-ups, tracking engagement metrics, etc – to help sales teams focus more on meaningful activities such as building relationships, finding solutions and closing deals.

What customers love about Klenty?

One thing that customers love most about Klenty is achieving better email deliverability rates. 

Key Features – 

  • Campaign dashboard for tracking opens, replies, bounces, and clicks
  • Personalized and automated follow-up scheduling.
  • Gmail Plugin
  • A/B Testing
  • Contact Management
  • Click to Call.

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial.

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $30 per month per user with unlimited contact uploads.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite and Outlook, and SMTP/IMAP.

App Integrations –  Native integrations with Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, Freshsales, Slack and Hubspot. More app integrations available via Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.5


TruCadence

Keith Jeffries – Marketing Manager at ConnectLeader shared his thoughts.

TruCadence provides sales teams with thoughtful, structured multi-channel (voice, email, social, and text) sales cadences that integrate with Salesforce and other leading CRMs to reach out to prospective customers and increase the velocity at the top of the funnel.

Our advanced dialers (power dialer and agent-assisted power dialer) enable you to execute the multi-channel follow up strategy at scale to have your volume of phone calls keep with the emails. You can build industry- and persona-specific cadences to improve message effectiveness.

What customers love about TruCadence?

Customers love that they are able to increase their sales rep and business development productivity by up to 800% using TruCadence with agent-assisted dialing.

Key Features – 

  • Personalized and targeted Email and Call sequencing.
  • Advanced dialer stack.
  • Enriched contact data with ZoomInfo
  • Dashboard to measure sales rep activity.
  • Lead Scoring.

Free-Trial – NA

Pricing – Pricing on request.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail, Office 365, and Exchange.

App Integrations –  Native integrations with Salesforce.

Developer API – No

G2 Rating – 4.6


PersistIQ

Daniel Ahmadizadeh – GM at PersistIQ shared his thoughts 

PersistIQ makes your outbound sales more effective. Launch personalized campaigns with multiple touchpoints in minutes to get more conversations started from your cold leads. Eliminate common mistakes that plague outbound sales; leads falling through the cracks, misformatted emails, crossed lines of communication, forgetting to follow up, or getting the dreaded reply, “You reached out last week and we already scheduled a demo… #fail!”

PersistiIQ’s powerful platform integrates into your existing workflow, CRM, and marketing automation systems. Personalization is key in selling and automation is key in productivity. PersistIQ lets you do both.

What customers love about PersistIQ?

Customers love that PersistIQ is self serve and that it has safety-checks to ensure that the correct emails are going to the correct prospects 

Key Features – 

  • Drip campaigns with automated follow-ups
  • Campaign dashboard for tracking open, link, bounce and reply rates
  • Safety checks to ensure the correct emails, with the right data, is being sent to the correct prospects
  • Hunter.io embedded within Chrome extension
  • Bi-directional syncing with Salesforce and Copper 
  • In-line prospecting (via chrome extension) to allow prospecting and sending of emails from any website on the internet
  • Built-in and custom variables for personalization
  • Dialer to make calls as part of a campaign
  • 24/7 live chat support

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial, no credit card needed

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $40 per active seat 

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite, Office 365

App Integrations –  Native integration with Salesforce, Copper. App integrations available Zapier.

Developer API – Yes

G2 Rating – 4.6


Wavo

Anton van Rhyn – Founder at Wavo shared his thoughts 

Wavo sends personalized cold emails from any email account with automated follow-ups. Helping users to scale up their outbound email efforts. Each campaign step can be A/B tested to dial in the highest success rate. Unlimited custom merge fields and calculated merge fields make your emails warm and natural for recipients.

Wavo integrates natively to Gsuite and Office365, resulting in the highest deliverability in the industry compared to tools using SMTP behind the scenes.

Many agencies use Wavo to productize their lead generation and SEO link building services as it can be completely white-labelled. Agencies invite clients to view their campaign results in real-time. Giving clients the ability to only view or even edit their own campaigns. It’s like having their own cold email platform.

Free-Trial – 7 Day free trial of the white-label pricing tier. The team tier is free to use until you start sending a cold email.

Pricing – $29/month per email account used to send a cold email. $199/month for the Whitelabel plan.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/Gsuite Native Integration, Office 365 and Exchange Native Integration, IMAP/SMTP

App Integrations –  App integrations available Zapier.


OutreachPlus

Muskan Goel – at OutreachPlus shared her thoughts

OutreachPlus is a cold email software solution that focuses on sending personalized cold emails that can help get replies. It helps users to generate leads, build strong relationships, and conduct automated follow-ups. OutreachPlus offers tons of features whose existence can add value to your email activities.

What customers love about OutreachPlus?

Key Features – 

  • Onboarding experience is excellent
  • Traffic increases with the right use of link building
  • Auto follow ups are great

Pros:

  • Checks prospect temperature and send emails at the right time to help you get better results
  • Runs A/B testing to help select the best emails
  • Conduct campaign actions with email experts

Free-Trial – 14 days full-featured free trial, no credit card needed

Pricing – Solo- $11/month, Multi user- $24/month, Agency- $54/month

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail, G-suite, Outlook, Office365, MS Exchange, Custom Host Support (IMAP)

App Integrations –  Salesforce, Close.io, Pipedrive, Copper CRM and Base CRM native integrations

Developer API – No

G2 Rating – 4.6


Right Inbox

Sujan Patel – Founder of Right Inbox shared his thoughts

More than 250,000+ professionals have added Right Inbox to Gmail for next-level email productivity. Right Inbox saves you time on repetitive tasks and helps you to send better emails, in less time consistently. 

With Right Inbox you can send follow-up messages until the prospect responds. Once a prospect replies then the sequence stops.

What customers love about Right Inbox?

With 11 features in total our users favorite features would be email scheduling and email reminders for follow ups. 

Key Features – 

  • Send Later – write emails now to be sent later. 
  • Mail Merge – scale your cold outreach quickly without losing the personal touch.
  • Sequences – enable you to send follow-up emails depending on whether the last email has been opened or not.
  • Private Notes – need to keep track of particular details alongside an email contact?
  • Email Tracking – know who is opening your emails and who isn’t.
  • Signatures –  flip between email signatures quickly.
  • Recurring Emails – Use the recurring emails feature to send them at intervals that suit you.
  • Reminders – never lose track of your most important emails.

Free-Trial – Freemium version

Pricing – Basic subscription starts at $7.95 per month per user.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite

App Integrations –  NA

Developer API – No

G2 Rating – NA


SendBuzz

Shah Arpan – Founder of SendBuzz shared his thoughts

SendBuzz is a Multi-channel sales and outreach platform, that helps you convert prospects and improve the sales cycle. Design a converting campaign with customized touchpoints with SendBuzz and target your audience on emails, text messages, phone calls, and social media. Grow your revenue and hit inbox with smart outreach automation.

What customers love about SendBuzz?

Clients love this Sales engagement platform due to its multi-channel outreach solution and CRM acceleration.

Key Features – 

  • Provide templates to break the boundaries
  • Automate sales tasks with Triggers
  • Personalize your approach and customize your scoring criteria
  • Setup smarter sales sequences
  • Conduct Sales From CRM 
  • Filter Sales-ready Leads

Free-Trial – 14 days free trial, no credit card needed.

Pricing – Pricing on request.

Mail Box integrations –  Gmail/G-suite and SMTP/IMAP.

App Integrations –  Native Integrations with HubSpot, Slack, Pipedrive CRM, Zapier, and Zoho CRM

G2 Rating – NA


Here is what to do next

In case you are interested, read this Cold Email Guide to get more responses

B2b Sales

Cold Emails

Lead Generation

How you can boost B2B sales

[Guest Post by Kinga Odziemek -Founder Brainybees]

boost b2b sales
Source: Pablo

Working in B2B sales nowadays is a great challenge. Not only that prospects are simply tired of being sold to consistently, but stiff competition does not make this job any easier. In the constantly changing industry (every industry), what worked a few years ago can be expired now. That is why you need to update your b2b sales strategy.

On the other hand, new technologies deliver solutions that help sales teams to improve their actions. Do not hesitate to try new ideas and test them on your organization. Take advantage of automation and artificial intelligence to facilitate workflow and make it more efficient.

Once you have a great product or service it is time for crafting an effective sales strategy. One of the most important things to understand before that is to realize that sales strategy not only influences your company’s return on investment (ROI) but sales strategy is actually everything your company does to sell products or services.

That is why below you can find tips on boosting b2b sales, that does not concern only the sales team. Read on!

Understanding the sales funnel

It is a total must-have. Analyze your strategy and check if it fits your sales funnel. Your actions should be adjusted to customers’ needs at a particular time.

As a reminder, sales funnel usually includes the following stages:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Decision
  • Action

Content Marketing

Use content marketing to increase awareness of the industry and your brand. A content plan should be strongly correlated with your sales funnel. That way you not only deliver suitable content to the right customers but also attract the right prospects. Create helpful articles and videos (do not be pushy) and use the language of benefits while talking about your products or services.

Take a holistic approach. Today, a business has to focus not only on closing the deal but on the whole customer journey. Identify touchpoints between your brand and customers. The next step is to improve the customer experience during every interaction.

The customer journey does not end on finalizing the transaction. Equally important is the post-purchase phase. Remember to thank your customers for choosing your brand, as well as provide them with valuable content and stay helpful in case of unexpected issues with your products. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, like Livespace or Hubspot, that will enable you to streamline the b2b sales process and even forecast future sales. A CRM helps gather information about clients so that you can make data-driven decisions.

Optimize your website

A web page is a crucial aspect of sales nowadays. It is usually the source of information about the company and what it has to offer. Not only that it is supposed to be discoverable via the search engine page results (for the right keywords), but also it should include valuable content and be useful. That way your potential clients can find your website easily and get the information they are looking for.

Replay sessions of your website’s visitors and analyze them with tools like LiveSession or Hotjar. Find pain-points and unintuitive elements. That way you can improve the user experience and get more leads to drive sales.

Social media

Social selling can be an effective method of building relationships with customers. On LinkedIn, your sales reps can reach the right prospects directly and work on their personal branding as well. But social networks have more to offer. Social media marketing can be successfully used for promoting valuable content. Focus on the interaction with followers – schedule your posts in advance via Kontentino or Buffer to have more time for daily moderation and engaging discussion.

Use retargeting to reach prospects in the right stage of the sales funnel. With tools like  RocketLink you can add pixels to any links you share. That way you can retarget your ads to people who have already clicked your link. Remember to always share content relevant to your audience.

Do not cross-out phone calls

Cold calling seems like a time-consuming and over expired sales method. Nevertheless, talking over the phone is a more personal and emotional form of contact. It can be effective if you contact the right prospects. Services like Easyleadz can help you build the contact list of the right decision-makers as per your ideal customer profile. Further, help yourself with tools that can make calls more efficient. Tools like CloudTalk or Aircall enable post-calling automation and calls recording. You can analyze calls that result in closing deals and improve the whole process.

Integrate your cloud phone system with other tools, for example, a CRM system. That way you will have all client’s information gathered before at your fingertips and you can provide your prospects with a personalized offer.

Appreciate face-to-face meetings

Even though we have a lot of other forms of contact with customers, there is nothing more personal and effective as a meeting. Take your time to close the deal with the most important clients. When your prospects are located in different time zones online meetings can be as effective instead of just audio calls. Tools like Harmonizely and Zoom help you with scheduling meetings without having to exchange tons of emails. 

Improve Internal communication

While external communication is important, do not forget about the role of cooperation inside your company. If you wish to boost sales efficiency you need to think about the unhampered flow of information. As mentioned several times before, sales do not only depend on sales representatives. For better communication and understanding between sales, customer support, and marketing departments you can use workflow tools such as Stackfield and Slack

Create a dedicated channel where everyone can contribute ideas for sales improvement. For example, a customer support team can notify you what are the most common issues so that you can work on them.

Once you are familiar with the tips mentioned above you are set and ready to boost your sales! 

Implementation of tools takes some time, as well as getting used to them by a team. Nevertheless, it is worth to try some new methods to improve processes for a long-term profit. 
Do not forget, that every organization is different and has specific needs. Not every sales technique will work well for every company. You need to test different approaches and optimize your performance to get the most of your sales team. Good luck!

B2b Leads

B2b Sales

Lead Generation

How to write better follow up emails using the AIDA framework

AIDA is a widely used term in Marketing circles. You can use it as effectively in your follow up emails like how it is used in building marketing funnels. Let’s do a little recap of what AIDA stands for.

AIDA is used in advertising and marketing for taking buyers through 4 stages before they ultimately make a purchase – 

aida in follow up emails

1. Awareness/Attention – This step involves making buyers aware of your product, service or brand based on the understanding of their pains, challenges, and interests. 

2. Interest – Second stage involves generating interest from the buyers. This step involves holding their attention by talking to them about their pain points or making their pain points apparent and how it is having an adverse impact on their business.

3. Desire – This is the stage where you generate a desire to purchase your product. You talk about the benefits of using your product through features, social proof, case studies, etc.

4. Action – Action stage involves creating the urgency to buy or making the transition to take an action such as booking a call, making a purchase or filling a form seamless and easy. 

How does the AIDA model apply to write follow up emails

First of all, if you are sending cold emails and not following up, you are only doing 10% of the job required to generate leads through outbound email campaigns.

Secondly, if you are following up only once or twice, you are still leaving money on the table.

Steli Efti, Founder at Close.io advises on following up once every month after first 4 followups in a week until you get a response.

close.com
Courtest – Close

I hope now that we are on the same page that follow up emails move the needle in your favor, let us dive deeper into how we can apply the AIDA framework in writing follow-up email copies.

Generally, there is a tendency to either 

  • Provide too much information in the first email itself, create information overload and leave the prospect confused.
  • Or there are followups where only subject lines vary but the underlying message is the same without adding any value on top of the previous communication.

A subtle approach would be to take your prospect through the 4 stages with each follow-up written specifically to move the prospect to the next stage.

Depending on how many follow-ups you want to schedule you can keep each stage as much long or short.

To co-relate with advertising think How many ads of a particular type (stage) would you like to place for an individual buyer across different channels.

1. Cold Email/First E-mail – Attention Phase

The first email in the sequence is about getting attention and creating awareness by introducing your product/service. Go with the assumption that your prospect would be hearing about your product/service for the first time and it’s the start of a possible long-term relationship.

Think like how you don’t ask someone out on a date the first time you meet, you introduce yourself, share a few interesting bits without telling your whole life story. 

At the same time, leaving them curious enough to know more.  

Talk about what your product is and how it can benefit, with one of the following call to action- 

  • Nudging reader to visit your website  
  • Watch a demo video
  • Sharing a link to a personalized landing page 
  • You can even ask a simple question to which they can reply quickly without putting too much thought.
first follow up email - attention phase

2. First Follow up – Interest phase 

Continue from where you left off and build a connect, for e.g. you can start by asking whether they had a chance to look at the information you shared in the previous email.

Pique their interest by 

  • Sharing an article or blog that talks about solving their pain points or
  • Highlight their pain points and how your product/service can help

The goal is to generate trust by talking about their pain points and that you are reaching out with a solution that alleviates the pain.

At this stage, you can add social proof by giving reference to a competitor who faced similar pain point or by mentioning the names of companies which are similar in terms of stage of business.

One big mistake people often make is giving the wrong name as a reference, for e.g. mentioning the name of an enterprise company while reaching out to a mid-size company.

While enterprise names are great to hear but an insight into how you helped a mid-size company which faced similar challenges would be much more valuable. 

Keep the call to action as a link to a blog or help article that explains about tackling specific pain points.

second follow up email - interest phase

3. Second Follow up – Desire Phase

Keep building on the previous follow-ups, this time shifting attention to an industry-specific use case with a domain-based case study or white paper, that appeals directly.

Quantify the benefits so the reader feels the desire to reply back and know more details.

Think about how you made the other person feel as if you have known them forever and they are more than happy to go out on a first date.

Keep call to action either as a link to the specific case study or booking your calendar for a call/demo.

third follow up email - desire phase

4. Third Follow up email – Action Phase

Ideally, desire should lead to an action in itself, this followup should take care in case it does not happen and your prospect needs a bit more push. 

Ask about feedback on all the information you have shared previously and make it more of a goodbye prompting them to take action with a reply if they have not responded previously.

Capitalize by adding a bit of humor to improve your chances.

fourth follow up email - action phase

Capitalize by adding a bit of humor to improve your chances.

fourth follow up email part 2 - action phase

Although, we have demonstrated the framework by using one follow up email in each stage, however, you can use multiple follow-ups in each stage to nurture your prospect towards a reply.

Write the content of follow-up emails keeping in mind the stage you are writing them for.

We also recommend reading this article by Sales Hacker community on Step by Step guide on Sales Call Follow-ups with templates.

Here is what to do next

B2b Leads

B2b Sales

B2bmarketing

Cold Emails

Top 5 sales triggers you can track easily and sell more.

sales triggers

Whether you are looking for a new deal or figuring out how to move existing deals forward quickly, tracking sales triggers adds momentum to your efforts.

What are sales triggers?

Sales triggers are events that signal an opportunity for cross-selling, upselling or new customer acquisition. 

In sales, timing is everything, as per Craig Elias, author of Shift Selling, your odds of closing a sale improve by 74% if you reach out to the decision-makers at the right time

Tracking sales triggers provide sales reps with unique business context to initiate highly personalized conversations at the right time. 

Sales triggers help you uncover actionable insights both at the account and prospect level.

Getting the information about an event is only half the job done as your competitors might also be receiving similar information. How you use the insights to make a conversation relevant to your prospect gives you the real edge. 

Here are 5 sales triggers you can track easily. We will also cover how to track and effectively use them.

1. New Funding round or Additional Funding.

2. Geographical Expansion/New Market Entry.

3. New Product/Service launch.

4. New Hirings.

5. Management changes


1. New Funding or Additional Funding round  

Any company raising funds is an indication of an increased budget for spending across functions. Companies’ focus areas of investing fresh money may vary depending on the stage at which they have raised new or additional funding.

An early-stage company might plan to spend more on product and services that help accelerate growth from a marketing and sales perspective, whereas, a late-stage company may look to expand to a new market or geography or build a new product line.

Based on the stage identify which companies can benefit most out of your product/services. 

How to track – 

Globally on an average 1000-1200 companies raise new rounds of funding and there are multiple sources you can use to stay fully updated – 

1. Using Google Alerts, you can set daily funding alerts globally or any specific geography.

funding alert

2. Use Easyleadz to access recently funded startups and contacts, list is updated on a regular basis and download needs a small share and love from you.

recently funded startups

3. You can use Crunchbase Pro to set alerts for receiving regular updates about funding.

funding

How to personalize messaging

Your prospects would be getting Congratulatory messages left, right and center. Congratulate them but go beyond just congratulating and immediately making your ask. 

Use insights from funding information to share how exactly they stand to benefit from your product/services at this point in time. Create urgency without being pushy.

For e.g.

It takes persistence to build a thriving and growing business, on top of it getting the validation from the investment community is commendable. I wanted to congratulate you for the recent funding round.

At this phase of the growth, businesses start adopting processes to build a scalable customer services team, with it comes to the need for implementing a scalable customer service software.

We at X  helped companies like {similar customers to the one you are approaching} at the same stage {benefits}.


2. Geographical Expansion/New Market Entry

An existing customer of yours might be having plans to start pitching their product to a new market or a foreign entity may be planning to move into the geography you already serve.

In such events budgets are already lined up for expansion and the time is right to make a move and engage the decision-makers early. 

This is also the time when companies start making new hires. 

How to track –

1. Business expansion news via Google Alerts

2. LinkedIn sends Daily Rundown every morning and covers majors Industry and Company events. Follow target company pages and any company related mentions or news will appear in your feed.

news alerts

3. Twitter is another free source where companies send out such announce via their official handles or you can use Twitter’s advanced search functionality to search for specific keywords.

twitter search

How to personalize messaging

Expansion to any geography or market brings its own set of challenges like identifying new vendors, hiring locally, looking for new office space, etc. 

Identify the pain points your product/service stands best to address. Be specific with how you have helped other companies post-expansion. 

If you have helped a competitor and it has been a success even better.

For e.g.

I came across the news of your companies plans of expanding to X {location/geography/market} and having an immediate conversation would be valuable.

We at {company name} have helped companies like A, B, and C in building a talented team of software developers by connecting them with top-notch talent in X {location}


3. New Product/Service Launch

Whenever new product or services are launched or about to be launched, there are budgets and resources already allocated. 

For e.g. An e-commerce company moving to an omnichannel retail strategy by opening up a line of stores.

Generally, there are two types of opportunities that open up – 

  • When there is an announcement of an upcoming launch.
  • When a company has recently launched.

Depending, in which scenario your product/service could benefit you can track either or both.

How to track

1. Use Twitter to get information about upcoming and recent launches using keywords like “recently launched” and “launching soon”.

2. Google alerts

3. Follow company pages on LinkedIn for updates.

How to personalize messaging

Product/service launches present a short window of opportunity. It’s important to do your homework before reaching out to your prospects as to how exactly your product/service can make the launch successful.

For e.g.

With the launch of your new upcoming stores across 5 major cities, I thought to drop by and ask if we can connect and discuss, how we can help furnish your stores.

We at {company name} have helped companies like A, B, and C during their pre-launch phase of expanding their stores across the country.


4. New Hirings

Information about hiring patterns of a company can uncover a lot of insights which would otherwise be hard to find. All you need to do is access job boards regularly mostly free of cost.

Tracking hiring can help you identify – 

  • Fast-growing companies. If any company in small-mid size range has a lot of job openings across different functions that is your cue.
  • Technologies used by companies. Not all technologies used by a company can be uncovered from the outside, either you ask someone or look at which roles they are hiring for and indirectly identify. For e.g., If a company is hiring for Salesforce admin (given the company is not a hiring agency or technology services provider) they ought to be using Salesforce.
  • Product/Services they may need. Depending on the role a company is hiring for and growth in a particular function will help you identify if there could be an arising need for the product/service you are selling. 

We at Easyleadz have used New job hiring for prospecting and sending cold emails to companies hiring for B2B sales, Inside Sales and similar roles. Using this approach our response rates increased by 30-40% across all our campaigns as compared to targeting companies who are not currently hiring.

job hiring campaign

For one of the campaigns, we targeted startups hiring for Inside sales roles via Angel.co and got a 28% response rate primarily because we reached out at the right time while they are expanding their sales team and trying to drive more revenue.

How to Track – 

1. Set up customized job-alerts via Angel List For e.g., If you help companies in providing talent for Data analytics, set up job alerts for the hiring of Data analytics, Big data analytics, data science, and other similar roles.

angel hiring alert

2. Use LinkedIn Job search to track the number of open vacancies for particular accounts you are looking to target and more filters to create a targeted search.

linkedin job search

How to personalize messaging

You can use new hiring as a conversation starter, it also shows your prospect you are making efforts to know more about their company than just being generic.

For e.g.

My army of robots told me that you are hiring for Inside sales at @companyname. 

I thought of dropping a quick note about how we can help your expanding sales team by providing contact details of right decision makers for lead generation campaigns.


5. Management Changes

Whenever senior management changes take places, it leads to changes in how decision making is done at any organization. Creating an immediate impact at a new job is a top priority on every new hire’s agenda and more so at the C-level. 

If you can make a new VP make a positive impact at the start of their stint through your product/service, you not only have a loyal customer but also an advocate.

Track these changes – 

  • When a new senior-level management shift happens at your existing customer.
  • Senior-level management shift happens at an account you had been targeting. 
  • A senior-level manager at an existing customer moves to a C-level position at a new firm.
  • Promotions, a bit underused but you can use it to great effect with someone in your existing network or when you come to know of a new prospect moves from managerial to executive level.

Initially build a relationship and start pitching about your product/services down a few months into their tenure. Don’t pitch just when they have joined/moved as initially mostly it is about settling down and getting familiar with the new workplace. 

Decisions worth making generally start to take priority 2-3 months down the line. It is the most opportune time to close the sale.

How to Track – 

1. Set up Job alerts for senior-level executive positions relevant to you via Linkedin or Angel List

2. Use sales navigator to track job changes at positions you want to track along with other targeting criteria applicable. Linkedin also gives you a notification when someone in your network gets promoted or starts a new 

linkedin navigator

How to personalize messaging

Don’t just congratulate your prospect, everyone would be doing that instead take this opportunity to show your prospect how you can help them make an impact in their new role.

Keeping the conversation only to a congratulatory note would be the waste of an opportunity. 

For e.g.

I wanted to congratulate for assuming the responsibility of the VP of sales at @companyname. 

Hope you are settling down well in your new role and thought of sharing a few articles which might be helpful for getting started in your new role.

[links]

Wishing you success!


Here is what to do next

1. Tell us which sales trigger you have used and how

2. If you are curious to learn more about sales triggers. You can read more in this post by Hubspot

B2b Leads

B2b Sales

B2bmarketing

Lead Generation

Sales Intelligence

How to select the right B2B contact data provider in 6 steps

b2b contact data provider

Don’t like hopping around and renegotiating with different B2B contact data provider every now and then? Read on, this post is for you.

B2B contact data is the backbone of any outreach campaign be it cold emails, cold calls or social. Although accurate and targeted data helps in generating qualified leads, building accurate contacts lists is a time-consuming process. 

As per 2018 Salesforce State of Sales report, 50% of sales reps feel they spend way too much time finding the right contact information.

Hence, the right B2B contact data provider can take on the hard work leaving your team free to do the most productive task, i.e. reaching out to prospects and closing deals.

On the outside, all contact data providers may look equal but some may be more equal than others for your specific use case. They should be able to work with you as business partners rather than mere providers of contact information.

Here are the 6 steps you can follow to select the right b2b contact data provider for your company.

Step 1 – Define your lead generation process 

First, you need to work with all your internal stakeholders – outbound sales reps, inside sales team, and marketing team to identify how your lead generation process will be set up. 

Consider these key points in your discussion

  • Work out a well defined Ideal customer profile on which everyone is aligned. You can have a few variations to find the sweet spot.
  • Decide what channels you will be targeting for lead generation activities. Your ideal customer profile will give you an idea as to where your prospects are spending most of their time. If they are active on emails reach them via emails or if they are more responsive on phone call them.
  • Based on the above two define what data points you need to get started. For example, do you also need extra information like funding, hiring, management changes to qualify companies over and above the basic contact information?

This will help you in deciding 

  • Whether you actually need an outside B2B contact data provider depending on how niche or broad your requirements are.
  • How closely different contact data providers are able to align with your process in the long term.

Step 2 – Define key KPI’s to measure ROI  

Defining key KPI’s from the start will help you in measuring the ROI of your investment and understanding whether it is cost-effective in the long run to keep outsourcing contact list building to an external partner or not.

It also aligns all the stakeholders towards utilizing the data effectively and set up a consumption rate. 

To define the KPI’s work backward by first defining the number of leads you need to generate to reach your revenue goal. 

For e.g. Let’s say you are planning to run a cold email campaign and your objective is to get around 100 positive responses to fill up the pipeline of your sales team of 4.

Now set a starting value for 

  • Open rates, 
  • Response rates and 
  • Positive response rates you plan to achieve 

Based on above calculate the total number of contacts you need to procure.

calculation of contacts required for cold email campaign

Monitoring KPI’s will help you –  

  • Understand which contact data provider would be able to provide you with not only accurate contacts but contacts matching your customer profile to achieve the desired response rates. 
  • In assessing whether data provider is flexible enough should your requirements change depending on your key performance indicators.

Step 3 – Cost Comparison

Compare the cost of building prospect list in-house vs the cost of outsourcing.

Consider the following factors while doing your calculation, you can add more scenarios depending on how your team is currently building their contacts list.

cost calculator

You can access the Spreadsheet and run calculations to your specific use case.

Step 4 – Quantity of Data

Quantity of data available with any vendor would directly affect the speed, scale, and flexibility with which you can run your lead generation campaigns. 

Apart from the overall size of the database of companies and contacts consider following factors 

  • How fast are they able to scale their database i.e. number of new contacts they are able to add to their database on an average monthly basis.
  • Amount of flexibility you would have going forward in case you plan to expand your lead generation campaigns to new geographies. How much of your total addressable market can they cover?
  • Turn around time i.e. how fast are they able to provide data on the basis of your requirements.  
  • Flexibility in terms of excluding what you already have and only paying for new contacts?

A single data provider will not be able to cover your complete TAM w.r.t. geographies, in such a scenario, consider multiple vendors combining their individual geographic strength.

Step 5 – Quality of Data

Assess the quality of data as per your specific use cases and remember it goes beyond just the accuracy of email and phone numbers. 

A data vendor should be able to match your complete criteria in terms of – 

  • Type of companies you want to target 
    • Size
    • Revenue
    • Industry
  • Type of decision-makers
    • Titles
    • Seniority

For e.g., If you are getting correct emails and phone numbers of Marketing managers and your target are Marketing heads you are still hitting off the mark.

Additional key points you can consider while assessing the quality –

  • How data is processed, do they pull contacts out of static lists or do they run real-time processes for verifying contacts? Real-time processing almost always ensures 5-10% better accuracy. 

For e.g. At Easyleadz we build fresh contacts list on the basis of target requirements and run real-time verification of emails which enables us to commit 90% accuracy on our data.

  • The number of data points included in the data set. For e.g. do they provide additional information about companies like Funding, Hiring or Social profiles for contacts which can be used for running multi-touch campaigns.
  • Ask for the source of data and how often it is validated. Based on the sources and how frequently it is validated you will get an idea of how accurate data can be. 

As per Marketing Sherpa research, B2B data decays by 2.1% every month and turnover is higher for middle management compared to the top management

Depending on how fast any data vendor validates its database, will give you an indication of overall accuracy. 

  • Finally test whatever any data vendor is claiming by asking for a sample of contacts for your quality check, if they don’t provide one, it’s a big red flag.

Step 6 – Pricing and SLA’s

All said and done Pricing is going to play a huge role in your decision to go or not go with a data vendor. 

While how affordable any data vendor is will be driven by the budget at your disposal, still you can look at the structure of pricing contracts.

You can ask the following questions

Are they asking you for upfront commitment with long term contacts although the price per unit may be low or 

Do you have the flexibility of paying on the go and scaling up and down as per your requirements?

It makes more sense to pay a reasonable premium for higher accuracy instead of getting more contacts for less or the same price. 

Understand different SLA’s (Service level agreements) any data vendor operates with. For example  – 

  • How much accuracy are they willing to commit upfront.
  • How fast do they replace bad contacts beyond the committed accuracy limit?
  • Is there a refund available in case of non-fulfillment.

In conclusion, you should spend time in bringing on board a partner who can work alongside you, understanding your needs and willing to invest in your success rather than simply providing you a database of contacts.

Here is what to do next

  • Tell us how has been your experience of working with contact data providers.


B2b Contact Data

B2b List Building

B2b Sales

Lead Generation

How to Set up Cold Email outreach for B2B lead gen

cold-email-outreach

The genesis of this guide comes from our experience of talking to a lot of customers who buy custom email lists from us for their lead generation campaigns. On asking them “How are you going to set up your Cold Email outreach?” most of the times reply was –

“We will use MailChimp to send emails”

That got us thinking that it’s high time we laid out the process for sending cold emails based on our personal learning and experience.

At this point you might be wondering why are these guys hating on Mailchimp, well we have nothing against MailChimp. In fact, we love MailChimp and use it ourselves for sending out newsletters and setting up landing pages. 

However, a tool is not suited for every application although it might have a certain feature.

You can chew the food on the plate with your teeth, but you can’t possibly be chewing the plate itself, even though you might be capable of it!

Tenor.com

First, let us have a look at Why Mailchimp is not the best-suited tool for running cold email outreach and then we dive into the basics of cold emailing and learning how to set up an email outreach campaign to generate leads.


What Mailchimp is suited for?

MailChimp is simple and yet powerful marketing software for – 

  • Building beautiful landing pages.
  • Building your subscriber list via Opt-In pages.
  • Running Newsletter and Email marketing campaigns for your subscribers.
  • Managing and segmenting your audience.

Why MailChimp is not a good fit for cold email outreach?

Violation of Basic Terms

First of all, MailChimp forbids cold emailing. It clearly states in its TOS that you should have subscribers in your list who have opted in and allowed you to send them marketing emails. 

Violating the policy may lead to suspension of your account.

Deliverability

This is one of the most important reasons as to why it’s not a good fit. MailChimp triggers campaign emails from shared servers which means originating IP of your message may be flagged as spam by the recipient’s email server if it has received spam messages in past from the same IP, which likely can be the case.

Without sounding too technical what it means for you as an end-user is that your email deliverability is impacted as your emails are more likely to end up in the Spam or Promotions folder.

Additionally, this lowers your open rates and hence the response rates.

No follow-up scheduling

You can’t set up scheduled follow-ups based on replies, which improves open and response rates. You will have to create another campaign and the whole process becomes manual and unscalable. We will explain this in detail, later in the post.


Why Cold Email Outreach?

Cold email outreach is a powerful technique to get in front of the right prospects. People have launched startups, grown blogs and landed their dream clients by sending cold emails.

Now let’s dive into the scenario where you are looking to generate leads for your business.

You have a list of emails and your objective is to reach out to these prospects who yet don’t have any idea about your product or services. 

What do you think should be the prime objective if you are looking to generate interest and close a sale?

It should be to get responses from a few of the prospects if not all and jump onto a discovery call to understand their pain points and challenges.

How can you achieve that or what would it require?

You can achieve that by setting a cold email outreach process that works as a growth machine to drive leads.

Now let‘s explore each step one by one.


1. Targeting and Email list building

Targeting lays the foundation to generate high-quality leads through any channel let alone cold emails. Setting up any lead generation process without getting the targeting right is like building a castle on shifting sand. 

Right targeting will drive your outreach in the right direction. So how do you get targeting right?

Start off by researching into the business needs and challenges of the Industries and companies (within those industries) who stand to benefit the most out of your products and services.

Once you have narrowed down, now look at which decision-makers would be the right prospects.

This exercise will help in 4 key areas you will –

  1. Get to know who your potential customers are and save you tons of hours which otherwise would have gone in trying to reach out to everyone.
  2. Be able to create your Ideal Customer Profile which will help you in building a targeted contacts list.
  3. Know customers’ pain points, challenges that not only the companies face but also the individuals, which can be used for crafting personalized emails and boost replies.
  4. Get better at lead scoring and comprehending reasons behind why a particular customer is buying and why not.

Now that your targeting is in place next important thing is to get the email list ready. At this step, you can go in 2 directions –

  1. Either build the list yourself using Email finder tools or
  2. Buy a list as per your targeting requirements from data providers like Easyleadz.

Either direction is fine as long as you have weighed in on the following factors –

  1. How niche or broad is your targeting criteria. (Doing In-house vs Outsourcing)
  2. Availability of time and Budget.

Learn here about Building a quality B2B email list


2. Writing personalized email copies

This is the step where people falter the most but the only way to become good at not faltering at this step is by repetition and experimentation. That is how we have become better here at Easyleadz. 

As is the case with building any other skill you become better at cold emails as you write more and keep on experimenting with formats and optimize  

There are dozens of email templates out there, in fact, we also share templates with our readers but truth be told simply copy-pasting a template won’t get you much success.

Instead of simply copying, make any template your own.

Meaning, understand the structure of communication and add your own personalization based on the understanding of your audience. it’s definitely hard work. 

Most people skip the hard work and then complain we are not getting responses.

Tenor.com

In the beginning, write cold emails from scratch, draft a few different versions and test them. Having said that there are few Cold email best practices that you can always follow – 

  • Personalize subject lines and test different versions. Short and crisp or long form such as asking a question like Joe, Are you looking to scale lead generation?
  • Opening lines should be engaging and warm up the reader to read through the whole email. You can be direct or quirky or clever. Try all different variations and assess what works best in your case.
  • Make it about your prospect’s problem and how you have a solution and not about your product features or bouquet of services.
  • Always close with a call to action and preferably a single one. It is necessary to direct your reader towards making a decision at the end. Never leave it. You can ask about connecting over a call or seeking their permission to send more information or simply asking them to watch a video or webinar.
  • Keep your signature short and crisp with links to social profiles preferably LinkedIn. Don’t stuff it with too much text and company logo.
  • Don’t use too many links or images in your email body. It will negatively impact deliverability.
  • Don’t include attachments as at times google’s spam filters route the mail to spam even if its a scanned attachment.

In order to dive deeper into the technicalities of writing cold emails, you can refer to

Cold Email Tutorial by Cathy Patalas.


3. Setting up Email domain – Basic checks

Next thing you need is an email domain to send emails from. It is highly advised to not send emails from your main business domain such as easyleadz.com. Instead, use an alternate but similar sounding domain for e.g. easyleadz.in. 

The benefit here is that even if people mark you as spam on rare occasions it will not impact your main business domain.

Once you have your email domain set up, create a personal email account using your name. Don’t plan to send emails from ids like info@domain.com or sales@domain.com. It lends credibility to the overall personalization you are trying to achieve with your email body.  

You can create your email account either using service from your Domain hosting service provider or use Gmail for Business or Outlook. 

We would advise using Gmail since most of the cold email automation tools allow you to quickly connect your official Gmail account in a single step without having to go into technicalities of manually configuring IMAP and SMTP settings.

Irrespective of whether you have a new email account or an existing one if you are using it for the first time to send cold emails at scale, keep in mind these basic checks – 


4. Setting up Email Outreach Tool

Now comes the step where you can automate your outreach process and generate leads at scale. So what is an Email outreach or Cold Email automation tool?

Cold Email outreach tools help you send out personalized cold emails at scale while mimicking human-like sending behavior. You can set a sequence of emails (schedule followup emails in case no replies) for each recipient and the tool automatically send follow-ups based on reply detection on previous emails. 

You would be easily able to track open, reply, click rates and optimize the performance of your campaigns.

For e.g. you can easily check which email in the sequence is getting most replies and which one is not and accordingly optimize. 

You can set up your campaigns in 2 steps – 

  1. Connect your Email account and upload an email list
  2. Create Email sequence.

First 2 steps are easy, I am going to focus on the third.


Setting up Email sequence

You might be sending cold emails to 100’s of prospects but if you are not sending follow-ups your open rate is impacted negatively by at least 30-40% and reply rate by at least 10-15% 

This campaign had only one email

This campaign had one followup email

Note the difference in open rates and reply rates

In our experience of sending 1000’s if not millions of emails on an average, it takes at least 3-4 touches to get a response. 

Here are the basics of setting up followup emails – 

  1. Setup at least 3-4 follow-ups in your campaign, although recommended, is 5-6. 
  2. Keep the flow of communication in followup emails in context to the previous email. You can even take the prospect through an awareness journey wherein the first email your CTA can be as simple as reading an informative post and then in one of the next follow-ups you can ask for a call.
  3. Wait at least 2 days before sending a followup email. Give your prospects space and time to evaluate what you are offering to them.

Now coming to actual tools you can use, there are many of them with their own unique features and value proposition. 

However, there are certain standard features that most of the tools provide – 

  • Email verification and list cleaning
  • Reporting features like Open, Link and Reply tracking
  • Personalization tags
  • Follow-ups
  • A/B Testing
  • Contact Management
  • Integrations with Third Party apps.
  • Free trials.

We are going to look at 3 of the tools we have tried and loved them –


1. Woodpecker.co

Easy to use UI even if you are new to using email automation tools. Found it really easy to get started right away without much learning curve involved. 

Pricing starts at $40 per month and you can send emails to an unlimited number of prospects. They have 14 days of free trial available.

2. Reply.io – 

Reply has been around for almost 5 years and the team has added some exciting features like Direct Calling, Gmail Plugin, and Live Tasks to make the platform more powerful over the years and enterprise adoption worthy. One thing I loved about their email composer is the ability to choose templates right from the composer itself. 

Pricing starts at $55 per month with 14 days of a free trial. In higher plans, you get a has a host of team collaboration features

3. Lemlist

Lemlist is the new kid on the block and they have created quite a buzz with their Image and Video personalization features. Those of you curious to try out images and videos in cold emails Lemlist is your go-to platform.

Pricing starts at $29, in the base plan you can send emails to unlimited prospects with a cap on daily sending limit to 100 emails.


Here is what to do next

1. Tell us which part of cold email outreach you were not paying attention to earlier.

2. Download the PDF Version of this guide

B2b Growth

B2b Leads

B2b Sales

Cold Emails

Lead Generation

Startup Growth