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January 5, 2017 — 0

Probably not and maybe: The simple way to qualify long tail leads

Scoring SMB leads is tough. Enterprise lead scoring methods that are typically very data intensive don’t translate that well to the long-tail. It is better to focus on disqualifying obviously bad leads than trying to pick the best ones.

I call this separating the “probably nots”, those that will likely not be qualified to buy from you, from the “maybes”, those that might be qualified to buy. Here are the high level steps in this process:

Develop a simple customer profile. Think about the things that your prospects with definitely be doing and definitely not doing. I like to focus on declarative statements that highlight how they operate their business. For example, “they will actively be investing in growth by buying ads on Google and Facebook” or “they be using a competitors product”. I like to focus on the profile on specific statements like this rather than semi arbitrary firmographic data, though there may be cases where things like number of employees really matter (e.g. if you business is based on selling seat licenses).
Find proxies for the key customer features. Once you have a basic customer profile figure out how you can identify the prospects that have those features at scale. I’m a big fan of “technographics”. These are signals that you can identify directly from a prospect’s website. You may also want to consider other modern firmographics here.
Continue to monitor the “probably nots”. You’ll want to filter out leads that fail to meet the minimum features of you customer profile. But, keep an eye on any changes over time. Just because a prospect doesn’t meet your “maybe” criteria today doesn’t mean that they won’t meet this criteria in the future.
Allow accounts to “play their way in“. This is admittedly a pretty ham handed segmentation technique that is optimized for scale rather than precision. Keep an eye on behavioral signals that may tell you that a prospect is ripe for engagement even if they fall into the “probably not” bucket.

As with any lead scoring or segmentation method, you’ll want to gut check your initial customer profile over time. Make sure that you incorporate any new profile information as your customer base evolves.

January 3, 2017 — 0

Scale lead scoring to the long tail with modern firmographics

Traditional firmographics, like employee count and company revenues, are staples of enterprise lead scoring programs. This makes sense as these are clear indicators of value. If a company has lots of revenue and lots of employees then they likely have budgets to purchase your product or service.

What about cases where you are attempting to prioritize large volumes of prospects or inbound leads, particularly in the long tail?

Traditional firmographic data doesn’t perform as well in these scenarios. There are several reasons why. This data is fairly limited for SMBs and can be highly inaccurate when it is available. It can also be quite expansive to source this type of information from a third party data provider.For long tail leads, I suggest using more modern indicators of value. So, what are these “modern firmographics”?

Below are some examples. In general, bigger is better for all of these signals. Keep in mind that values will vary greatly based on company vertical, business model and customer type.

Website traffic: using Alexa, Quantcast or similar sources you can get a sense of the volume of visitors that a prospect’s website is receiving.
Social popularity: popularity on social media, like followers on Twitter or likes on a Facebook page, is a great indicator of scale. You can get these stats directly from the social networks or use an API like Clearbit to get social following counts.
Inbound links: the signal that launched Google is also great for evaluating leads. Websites with lots of inbound links are more likely to have a following and be considered authorities in their industry. Majestic publishes a free CSV download of the top domains by linking subnets which is a reasonable proxy for inbound links. Cisco also publishes a similar data set.
Website shares: if people are sharing a potential prospect’s website on social media then you can get a sense of popularity. You can use a third party service like SharedCount to get counts of website shares across social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

December 25, 2016 — 0

Sourcing new leads by finding common ground on LinkedIn

Many of your first customers will be friends, colleagues or folks that are otherwise pre-disposed to buy from you. Because of this, you will inevitably run out of people you know who are qualified to buy what you are selling.

So, what do you do when the warm leads run dry?

The key to turning a cold lead warm is to identify a common ground, which you will use as an entry point into the target organization. This entry point is typically not the person who will be buying your product or service, rather the individual who will help you find the buyer and will most likely be giving you an implied endorsement along the way.

Finding a “common ground” entry point is a technique that I’ve used with great success in the past and is perhaps best illustrated with some examples.

In the following case, we were attempting to find the right person at a mid-sized organization. Typically, we sell to marketing people and I was having a tough time discerning who exactly the right person at this company was. I happened to notice on LinkedIn that the CFO of this company had been a member of the same fraternity as me, though at different campuses and different eras. I sent him a cold email introducing myself as a fraternity brother and explained what I was trying to do, and asked for help finding the right person in his company.

The CFO replied almost instantly with a nice note in which he identified the right contact at his organization (whom he’d copied on the reply) and asked that this person connect with me to discuss further. In that instance we went from having no knowledge of who the buyer was and no way to contact them, to knowing exactly who would be making the buying decision and a warm lead from the CFO!

I know what you’re thinking: This is just some frat boy insider baseball. Fair enough. To help dispel that conclusion, here are a few more instances that show just how tenuous “common ground” can be to make this work.

We were attempting to get a meeting with right person at a Fortune 50 technology company. I knew who the right person was (it was well documented because it was such a massive, well known company). But, I had no source of a warm introduction to that person. So, I started looking for a good entry point where I had some “common ground”. I did research on LinkedIn and found a VP who had joined the company a few years earlier by way of acquisition. He had a long list of start-up and founder experience on his resume. Then, I fired off a quick email introducing myself, explained the situation I was in, and asked him if he would be comfortable making an intro to the contact I was targeting. I briefly referenced his entrepreneurial background and that I presumed he had probably been in my shoes at some point while he was building his start-up.

I didn’t hear anything for a couple weeks and figured my email may have fallen flat or been disregarded altogether. But, to my pleasant surprise, a reply did come. He apologized for the delayed reply, said “he’d be happy to make the introduction” and asked for some additional context so he could write it up. I quickly gave him what he needed and the introduction came shortly thereafter.

Maybe you’re thinking to yourself that there is just something magical about this founder-to-founder connection that can’t work for a lowly sales or biz dev person who didn’t found the company they are working for? I can confidently tell you that is not the case based off of this last example.

In one of my first sales jobs I was trying to find a contact at a large start-up that I thought would be a perfect prospect. I had tried and failed a few times to reach the person who I thought was the buyer.

So, I took another tactic. I went back to the well and found the person at this target company that appeared to have the most well manicured LinkedIn profile. My thought was that I could use this as a proxy for engagement on the service, i.e. if they had spent so much time building up their profile they likely would be responsive to a contact through the service. The person I found wasn’t in the same department as the person I identified as the target buyer, nor were they an executive, but, I sent an InMail explaining that I would love to connect with whomever would be the right person to talk to about the product we were selling.

Within a day he had replied telling me he wasn’t sure whom I should be talking to but he’d do his best to find out. Within a week he had connected me to the person that ran the acquisition marketing group that I had tried, and failed, to connect with on my own. Keep in mind that my only connection to this person was that we were both happened to be users of LinkedIn!

There are three main reasons why I think this tactic has consistently worked for me in the past:

In most cases I’ve been targeting non-buyers. That is, the people I’ve contacted weren’t the folks that would ultimately be buying my product. I’ve found that these types of folks are more receptive because they don’t feel like they are at risk of “being sold to”.
People like to be helpful. Most people want to help out where they can and forwarding an email is as about as low friction as favors get.
Karma. I’m a connector and am always happy to make introductions when asked. As such, it has always been easy for me to ask for introductions from others.

Two out of these three opportunities (the first and third) ultimately converted into sales. But, the contact I made in the second example ended up making a second introduction to a colleague of his at another company, which ultimately did convert to a sale.

December 24, 2016 — 0

Sales for startups: building sales confidence

Kicking off a new sales effort for a startup or new product line can be tough. It can be particularly daunting if you don’t have much sales experience as you may struggle with confidence or even figuring out how to sell your product or service.

One common mistake is jumping right into trying to connect with the biggest, most strategic potential customers for your product. The reasoning makes sense. These big potential customer obviously need what you are selling and getting a deal with one of them is a huge vote of confidence in your business.

But, there are several downsides to this line of thinking. Bigger customers will typically have longer sales cycles and require higher levels of time investment. This means potentially investing lots of time in selling before you’ve fully refined your pitch. And, there is nothing more losing a sale to a big strategic customer out of the gate.

So, what should you do instead? Here is a simple process for quickly building sales confidence and refining your pitch without getting caught chasing big, slower moving customers.

Make a list of the top 50-100 prospects ranked by your perception of their value and strategic fit. The first prospect on your list should be your dream customer. Don’t worry about being to overly precise. Your objective should just be to make a clear separation between the guppies and the big fish.
Start calling from the bottom of your list starting with the company that you perceive as qualified but the least important opportunity. If you totally flub your pitch with this customer it is no big deal because you have plenty other higher value opportunities farther up your list.
By the time you reach the top of your list you will have pitched your product or service dozens of times and collected lots of feedback. You may even close a few deals along the way, which is both great for your confidence and company.

December 23, 2016 — 0

View Source: Find hidden signals in your prospect’s website with @Datanyze & @Builtwith

Have you considered the powerful lead scoring and segmentation signals hiding in plain “site”?

By evaluating a company’s website technology profile (that is, the software, widgets, frameworks and other elements used to build out, measure and promote the site) you can learn a lot about the relative priority and sales readiness of a prospect for your product or service.

Consider, for example, what you can infer by visiting the websites of your prospects and observing the type of analytics that each have implemented. In some cases there would be no analytics, in some cases you’d see a free analytics package such as Google Analytics and in some cases you’d see a premium analytics package like Adobe SiteCatalyst.

Now lets consider some of the inferences you can make about the companies in each bucket:

No analytics: In the absolute best case scenario, these folks operate a business for which visits to a website are not a useful asset. In a worst case, these businesses are simply not minding the store.
Google analytics: This would likely be the most diverse group. In some cases these will be companies doing the bare minimum and in other cases these will be extremely savvy businesses leveraging a cost effective tool to it’s fullest potential. But, in either case, we know that these companies care about measuring their business (or at least they know that they should be!). Additionally, these will generally be businesses that will be comfortable with self-service or low touch management delivery models.
Adobe SiteCatalyst: Since we know this analytics package costs roughly $5,000 USD per month, we can assume that these are businesses with budgets, are growth oriented and are actively investing in driving that growth. These folks will also likely be more likely to expect a higher touch sales and account management model.

In the above exercise we are just isolation a signal technology. But, imagine the power of this technique when compounded over several different technologies.

Here are some other technology types that may be able to help you analyze the appropriateness or sales readiness of a prospect based.

Ad tracking pixels: Google, Facebook, Twitter and other ad platforms offer tracking pixels that give advertisers a closed loop by which to measure the traffic sent to their site. The presence of these pixels tells you that this site is or was recently advertising on one of these networks. The presence of any one of these pixels gives you an indication that the company has ad budgets. The presence of multiple pixels may suggest relative scale and/or savviness of the advertising efforts of the company. In addition to ad platform pixels, keep an eye out for retargeting pixels from companies like Adroll or Retargeter and ad management platform pixels from companies like Marin Software or Kenshoo.
Email list building, marketing automation or CRM: Companies that have email lists, utilize marketing automation systems and CRM tools tend to have customers, which is a good sign! Additionally, this is a category of software where the solution being used really tends to tell you a lot about a business and it’s budgets. There are clear segmentations you can make comparing usage patterns. For example, a company using Marketo and Salesforce is making a much different monetary investment in marketing growth and customer management than a company that is using Mailchimp to manage a small email list.
eCommerce platforms: At the most base level, businesses that sell online have the capacity to generate revenue. But observing which specific technologies that a business uses to sell can also give you a finer grained set of insights into the overall scale of their business. Are they using a hosted selling platform like Shopify that s geared towards small to medium sized sellers or a more high-end solution like Demandware or Magento Enterprise? Further, retail businesses have very specific needs, so just knowing that the company operates an eCommerce presence can be insightful.

This is just a partial list. There are literally dozens of categories of software that could help you make better decisions about how to prioritize or segment a prospect. For more ideas, check out the market share reports from Datanyze and Builtwith (as I’ll detail below, these two companies offer premium subscriptions to detailed technology reports for millions of websites).

Here are some techniques and tools that can help you surface technology profile data.

Browser view source: Most modern web browsers have a standard method of viewing the code of a website in an active tab by right clicking in the browser and selecting “View Source” from the menu. This will render a text version of the web page code in a new browser tab that you can search for the technology markers you are interested in. Since this is the simplest and least scalable method of examining technology data, it is really only practical for cases where you are looking for very specific technologies AND you already know what you are looking for (e.g. specific code snippets for specific technologies).
Browser extensions: There are a number of free browser extensions that surface the underlying technologies on a website. These extensions are a significant improvement over the view source method in that they are completely automated and come pre-loaded with extension technology marker definitions. This method is still not very scalable as you can only view the technology profile of one website at a time. But, if you are looking for an easy way to review a small number of websites, browser extensions are the way to go. Wappalyzer, PageXray, and Datanyze all offer browser extensions for Google Chrome. Builtwith offers extensions for a number of web browsers.
Screaming Frog custom source code search: Screaming Frog is a desktop application that is primarily marketed as a SEO tool. But, one of the features of the app is the ability to upload a list of URLs and look for custom snippets in the source code of those pages. This can be as simple as a word or phrase or as complex as a long javascript snippet. Scream Frog is a great tool if you are interested in a small number of technologies (you can input up to 10 custom snippets at a time) for tens of thousands of websites at a time. Note that while Screaming Frog does have a free version, custom source code search is only available with a paid license. This is very reasonably priced at about $160 USD per year. And, as in the case of view source, you’ll still need to know what specific code snippets you are looking for.
Builtwith or Datanyze: These two companies have built large databases of website technology profiles. The benefits of using these services versus the more DIY methods above are simplicity and scale. Both Builtwith and Datanyze have catalogued thousands of technologies on millions of websites. I have used both services and both are great products run by high quality teams. Each company offers subscriptions ranging from hundreds to thousands of USD per month. I believe this to be a very reasonable investment if you are running a medium to large scale lead scoring or segmentation program based on the quality of insights you can expect to derive from this data.

December 22, 2016 — 0

Considering generational cohort in B2B marketing & sales programs

Age is a critical demographic in B2C marketing but is it useful in the B2B context? Data clearly show that the various workplace generations buy differently. When you develop strategies for B2B lead generation and marketing programs, you should consider these differences.

Differences in How Age Groups Buy

There are three main age groups in the workplace. The oldest is the Baby Boomers, born from 1954 to 1964. The next group is Gen X, with members born from 1965 to 1979. Finally, you have the Millennials, with birth dates from 1980 to 1999. They are increasingly in positions of power and are a common focus of marketing efforts.

Below is a summary of insights from research by IBM and the marketing agency Sacunas that is helpful in understanding how different generations buy. Of course, individuals are all different but the generalities are helpful as a baseline.

Baby Boomers are more comfortable making decisions by themselves with little or no input, and they often go with a “gut feeling.” Conversely, Gen Xers and Millennials solicit input, strive for team unity and review analytics, with Gen Xers having the higher affinity for numbers; videos and case studies are popular among Millennials.

Millennials also need convenience. Preferring to have as much information as possible at their fingertips, they are less likely to be patient with sellers who cannot meet these needs and who are unable to communicate on multiple channels, including social media. The younger the Millennial, the greater the importance of social media and video-based content.

Millennials love to engage with vendors’ representatives; if they plan to build a fruitful, long-term relationship with a company, they want to ensure the vendor is personable, accessible and easy to work with. Also, a vendor involved in social causes is a plus in many Millennials’ books. Millennials, much more so than the other two age groups, also consider the input of their friends and family before making a final B2B purchasing decision.

On the other hand, Baby Boomers prioritize speed. If a vendor can deliver quickly, the quality of the relationship and even perhaps of the product or service matters less. As for Gen Xers, they want services and products that are satisfactory, above all other considerations.

How to Infer Age at Scale

So, it is possible that knowing age cohort could be a useful lead enhancement and segmentation value but how do you determine prospect generation at scale?

FullContact‘s person API can make an educated guesses as to age based on a name. This can be parsed from a prospect email address or captured directly in a lead form.

It turns out that name is a good indicator of age. For example, you can take a name that was popular mainly in the 1950s to 1960s; as you will discover, very few babies born after 1965 will have this name. Here is a web based calculator that illustrates how names can determine with reasonable accuracy the age of the person. Popular statistician Nate Silver covered this phenomena on his blog in 2014.

As a side note, Silver’s article made an anecdotal believer out of me as it happened to use my name as an example in the chart below. At the time it was published in 2014 I was, in fact, 37 years old.

December 21, 2016 — 0

How do different companies buy? Introducing the prospect segmentation matrix

I’ve spent my career selling to companies of all sizes and as a buyer at very small and very large companies. This has helped me develop perspective on how the selling process works within companies of all types.

Understanding the common ways that businesses of certain size or stage operate is helpful in thinking about how you may approach multiple aspects of the customer lifecycle process. To that end, I’ve developed the prospect segmentation matrix below which splits the US business population into six distinct segments:

Pro: individuals buying for a business purpose.
Solo: the “one person shop”.
Sustenance: focused on revenue maintenance rather than growth.
Growth: actively investing in business growth.
Industry Scale: the largest and most successful businesses relative to industry peers.
Global Scale: the largest, most successful businesses in the world.

For each segment I’ve tried to capture:

How large this population is in the US.
The range of employees and revenues.
How they fund purchases.
How they buy.
Post purchase expectations and risks.

There are a few ways I think this matrix could be useful for entrepreneurs, marketers and sellers. Most importantly, I think it shows that there are critical factors to consider about how your customers buy when building a new product, customer acquisition program or direct sales initiative. Without further ado, here is the full prospect segmentation matrix:

Click the image or here to see a super sized version.

In the spirit of full transparency, there isn’t a whole lot of science here. The values are all based on my first-hand, or very close second-hand, experience. So, I’d suggest that this is an informed view but not the definitive view of the factors that set these different segments apart.

How companies buy and sell is an area of great intellectual interest to me. I’ll continue to explore this topic in further posts. In the meantime, I hope that this prospect segmentation matrix contains some helpful insights.

December 20, 2016 — 0

Sales for startups: the perfect startup CRM

When kicking of a new sales effort it can be tempting to dive right in to selecting and configuring a customer relationship management system. If you are an experience sales executive and know exactly what you want to accomplish with your CRM, then this is a great idea to get started early. But, if you don’t have a ton of experience with tracking the sales process then it is a good idea to take a more flexible approach in the early days.

A simple Google spreadsheet is a great short term CRM for many reasons.

There is basically zero setup involved. Launch a new spreadsheet, add a few headers and start typing. Even better, if you guess wrong about the types of things that you will need to track then it is as simple as cut-and-paste or adding some additional rows and columns. This also means that you can punt on some of the structural decisions that go in to setting up a CRM out of the gate. This is a big win because it is easy to guess wrong when you are first setting up your CRM system, particularly if you are new to sales process development.
It allows you to focus on customer development and selling versus administrative tasks. Researching, trialling and configuring a new CRM system can be time consuming. You can spend the time that you save actually learning about your potential customers need or, even better, closing sales.
It makes it easy to share and collaborate. Even if you are a one person sales team you likely have interested stakeholders- a cofounder, investor, boss or mentor. Sharing updates and getting feedback on progress is as simple as sending a link to your spreadsheet.
When you are ready to level up it is likely that getting your spreadsheet data into your new CRM will be totally painless. Every CRM system that I have experience with has a simple CSV import feature.

So, when is the right time to onboard a full blown CRM? As with most things, it depends. One big factor is how long you expect your sales cycle to run end-to-end. If you have a very short consideration timeline then you may be able to get enough of a feel for your long term needs in a few weeks or months. If you have a longer sales cycle then you may want to take a little more time because your process will likely be a bit more complex. A good, but admittedly arbitrary, rule of thumb is to track 25 to 50 prospects through your sales cycle before jumping into a true CRM solution.

December 19, 2016 — 0

Who are you? Enhanced Twitter Follower notifications with @Zapier and @Fullcontact

Getting a new Follower is great, but wouldn’t it be better if you could automatically get more information about them from across the web? You can!

Below I’ll describe the process I use to generate enhanced Twitter follower notifications. It users Zapier, a killer web service automation tool to connect Twitter and Fullcontact so that every new follower that I receive on Twitter triggers a email with more details on that account. This includes things like company name, title, a phote, LinkedIn account information and more.

It case you are not familiar with Fullcontact, the company offers an API for contact enrichment. Given an input, like an email address, full name or Twitter handle, Fullcontact can potentially provide dozens of additional bits of information about the owner.

Ingredients

A Fullcontact developer account: your first 500 API matches are totally free to start. You’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan when you exhaust those. The lowest cost paid plan is Starter which costs $99 per month and gives you 5,000 matches. This should be more than enough for most twitter accounts.
Zapier Basic account: $20 per month. Zapier offers a free plan, but it won’t give you enough tasks to make this work well.
Twitter account: Free

The setup

Signup for your Zapier Basic, Fullcontact and Twitter accounts if you don’t already have them.
Login to Zapier and click “Make a Zap!” at the top of the page.
You’ll be prompted to select a “trigger” app. Select Twitter and then select “New Follower” as your trigger. It is at the very bottom of the list. You’ll be prompted to connect your Twitter account to your Zapier account.
You’ll be asked what Twitter username you’d like to monitor for new followers. Enter your Twitter @handle into the field. Once that is complete, you’ll be able to test that the integration is working as expected.
Next you’ll add a second trigger app. Choose Fullcontact and then select “Find a person” as your action.
You’ll be prompted to provide your Fullcontact access token in a pop up window. You can find you access token by clicking here (you’ll need to be logged in to your Fullcontact account).
Next, you’ll be asked how you want to search Fullcontact’s API for a person. Since we want to get more info about your new Twitter followers, we’ll use the “Twitter” option. The setup looks like this:
Now you’ll add your action step. In addition to integrating with hundreds of third party apps, Zapier has several useful “built-in” apps. One of these is called “Email”. We’ll use this to have Zapier automatically email you new follower details from Fullcontact, so select Email from the select app screen.
Next you’ll create the actual email template which populates fields from the Fullcontact API response and configure the details of the email. Here are the settings that I used for this example:If you follow the configuration above your receive an email that includes an image of your new follower, their name, company, title, LinkedIn bio, LinkedIn URL and a list of “digital footprint topics”. These are keywords and phrases that reflect the types of things that this person is associated with based on their social presence. It is missing from the screenshot above, but make sure you select “Yes” in the “Force linebreaks?” drop down at the bottom of the page. This will improve the readability of your notifications by putting each data point on a new line.
Finally, Zapier will walk you through a test of the email send so that you can see what it looks like in your inbox. Once you’re happy with the output you can name and launch your zap.

Once you’ve launched your zap it’ll just run in the background. There is no ongoing maintenance to worry about. But, you may want to try out different fields or email structures. Fullcontact has dozens of fields available in their API response that you can use to populate your enhanced Follower notification emails.

A few notes

Fullcontact data is good but not perfect. You’ll likely see some inaccurate data or empty fields from time-to-time. Regardless of some misses and gaps, I find these additional insights very useful.
Zapier integrates with hundreds of applications, so you can replace the email step with something else if you like. For example, populate the new Follower data into a Google spreadsheet, an Evernote note or send it to your CRM system.

December 18, 2016 — 0

Sell like a Hoosier: The “four pass rule” of social selling

In the movie Hoosiers Gene Hackman plays Norman Dale, the coach of an Indiana high school basketball team. He enforces a “four pass rule” where his players are explicitly required to, you guessed it, pass four times before they take a shot.

Coach Dale shows just how serious he is about his rule in the scene embedded below.

Why enforce the four pass rule? Basketball is all about high percentage shots. That is, those that the shooter is most likely to make because they are closer to the basket or uncontested by a defender. By passing multiple times it gives the team time to find the right shot rather than just taking the first available one.

This logic translates well to engaging with prospects on Twitter. Sure you can jump right in immediately and aggressively start selling. But, that is the equivalent of the low percentage shot. Taking the time to provide value and context to others before expecting them to make an investment in you will greatly increase the likelihood of success in your social selling efforts.

Here are a few “passes” to consider:

Start with lightweight engagements like likes, retweets and follows. This will help your potential customer learn that you exist. It also sets a good tone for the relationship because your are giving them engagement upfront.
Make sure that your social profiles are well merchandised. Include a helpful summary in your bio section. It’s also a good idea to include a link to a landing page that covers more about your or your product/service depending on the type of outcomes you are trying to drive. Ideally, this would be a mobile optimized page given the massive amount of social networking activity that happens on mobile devices.
Monitor for opportunities to engage directly with the potential customer over time. If it is an important prospect you may want to consider setting up Tweet notifications for their account. You can setup these notifications by visiting their Twitter page and clicking on the bell icon towards the top of their profile.

Remember, thinking of social selling on Twitter as an opportunity for a quick score may lead to you getting benched.