The 3 Digital Ones You Are Not Using (But Should Be)
Posted in Sales, Toolkit on November 21st, 2013
One of my favorite things about working in the startup community is the exposure I get to awesome new tools. There are tons of smart people building genuinely useful technology, allowing us to continually get more efficient at what we do.
There are three prospecting tools in particular that our clients and fund companies have incorporated in the last year. When startups are getting off the ground, they have to rely on a lot of prospecting and old fashioned hustle to get in front of their audience (the “entrepreneurial sales challenge” is just different). These tools have made them more efficient and improved their results considerably.
These same tools can be leveraged by individual salespeople and teams with equal effectiveness – anyone who does outreach on a consistent basis will likely get huge efficiency gains.
Are you using these sales prospecting tools to prospect efficiently and effectively?
How to Get Anyone’s Email Address
Finding contact information is routinely a struggle for people trying to build prospect lists. Companies are hesitant to publish contact information for individual team members on their sites. Wouldn’t it be great if you could track down email addresses without having to hunt for them? Turns out you can, without leaving your inbox.
Rapportive is a Gmail plugin that shows you social media account information for your contacts. You enter the contact’s email address, and in the sidebar you’ll be able to see their LinkedIn account, Twitter account, etc. Useful.
But Rapportive has an even better, unstated use – reverse engineering it to find email addresses based on the existence of social accounts.
If you know someone’s name and the URL of the organization they work for, you can simply start typing different combinations of email addresses into the To: field, like so:
sean@digintent.com
sjohnson@digintent.com
sean.johnson@digintent.com
If the person’s social accounts populate in the sidebar, you know you have a match. Spooky.
How to Know if They’ve Read Your Email
Another great gmail plugin is Yesware, which tracks if and when users have read your messages.
This can be useful for prioritizing follow-up. While no one would argue an opened email is a strong buying signal, people who open your messages are more likely to engage with you than people who deleted or ignored your email.
It can also help you learn the email patterns of your prospects or current clients. You might discover that a particular person tends to check their email at night or first thing in the morning, allowing you to time your messages so they’re on the top of the stack. Another person might open emails but consistently wait a few days to reply. You’ll no longer be in the dark wondering what’s going on.
Yesware has a number of other useful tools. You can store templates of messages you reuse frequently, and can track the success rate of a given template. It syncs easily with Salesforce. And it’s super simple to use. They have a free plan, but don’t be surprised if you immediately upgrade – it’s a service that instantly proves its usefulness.
How to Follow Your Prospects Around the Internet
You’ve probably had this happen to you – you visit a website, perhaps starting the checkout process to buy a product but you bail midstream. Over the next week, you start seeing ads from that company on dozens of other sites you visit, perhaps including the item you were about to purchase. Creepy, right?
That’s called retargeting, and it’s become an extremely valuable tool in most digital marketing arsenals.
Turns out the same technology can be leveraged with email. Some remarketing platforms, including Perfect Audience, allow you to embed a remarketing pixel into emails, which tracks when prospects open a message (just like Yesware). Once an email is opened, you can show them display ads on other sites they visit.
This can be super powerful, and smart companies are experimenting with this in a variety of ways:
Holding a webinar or event? Offering a whitepaper or ebook? Remind people who opened and clicked through to the landing page but didn’t sign up.
Have you found social proof to a great lever to get in the door? Show logos of recent national press or industry awards.
Trying to overcome a particular objection? Create mini-case studies using quotes or example results from satisfied customers that specifically hit those pain points.
Remarketing requires the most work to set up, and you’ll need to have a designer create the display ads for you. But there can be huge upside. Optimizing the middle of your sales funnel can provide huge ROI – getting more prospects to take action is much cheaper and easier than finding more prospects.
So there you have it – three simple digital tools to dramatically improve your prospecting effectiveness.
