How to Leverage Customer Reviews for Lead Generation
Customer reviews are considered to be one of the most powerful assets for B2B marketing. While the internet has brought everything to the fingertips, customers are leveraging the same to evaluate products and services based on the feedback of other customers. According to a recent study by G2, 92% of B2B customers would consider purchasing a product after reading a few trusted customer reviews.
How to Promote Customer Reviews to Generate More Leads
In this customer-driven industry, businesses need to provide them with information, such as customer reviews, case studies, and testimonials to influence their purchasing decisions. Merely marketing the products or services for the features they offer is no longer adequate.
So in this article, we will learn how to leverage customer reviews for lead generation.
#1. Share Social Proof on Social Media
Customer reviews can be beneficial only if they are visible across various platforms. With an extensive user base of over 4.62 billion people, social media is the best medium to reach out to prospects.
Sharing reviews of happy customers on social media serve as social proof for the prospects who are willing to try your products or services. You can learn more about how to generate leads via social media in this article.
Here are a few tips to help you generate more exposure to the reviews on social media:
- Know your customers – Identify the customers who have recent positive experiences with your brand and share their reviews
- Design appealing visuals – Create attractive images for the reviews and share the same as a single post or carousel on your social media pages
- Leverage hashtags – Use hashtags such as #reviewwednesday, #testimonialtuesday, or create a custom hashtag for your brand before sharing the reviews
- Identify the best posting times – Choose the times when your followers are the most active for posting the reviews on social media
- Add the best call to action – Include a relevant CTA along with the review to direct the followers to a lead generation landing page or your website
Check out this customer review shared by Buffer on its Instagram page.
#2. Add Reviews on the Company Website
The company website is crucial for every business. It helps businesses market themselves online and builds credibility. It is another source for generating leads as it provides consumers with all the business information.
Showcasing customer reviews on the website helps businesses deliver social proof and influence prospects towards successful conversions. Website pages, especially homepage and landing pages, are the primary hotspots that facilitate conversions. Including a short textual or video review on these pages will certainly help in converting prospects into customers.
Check out how Workable, recruitment software is showcasing customer reviews on its homepage.
Here are a few things to remember when posting customer reviews on your website.
- Quotes – Include short quotations from the reviews on the website homepage
- Customer information – Post customers’ details, such as name, company name, designation, location, and a picture, if possible along with the review
- Content types – Do not hesitate to experiment with different content types and design styles for the review placement
- Customer website – Share the link to the customers’ websites(with their permission, of course.)
- Dedicated page for reviews – Create a dedicated page for reviews and testimonials on your website
- Review placement on landing pages – Share reviews on landing pages by identifying the connection between the review and the message your landing page is trying to convey
#3. Use Video Reviews in Advertisements
Video reviews are preferred by 42% of the customers because they showcase the real users of the products and demonstrate how the product helped in simplifying their lives. The prospects will be able to connect with the customers and relate to your products better.
Video reviews boost brand credibility and instill a sense of trust among the leads. By adding a human touch to the brand, video reviews add a whole new dimension to the marketing strategy. They serve as the best sales pitches and succeed in attracting the attention of the leads without any hurdles.
Here is a video review of Google AdWords by its client, Happy Hound. Happy Hound is a day-care facility for dogs. In this video, the lady establishes her problem about not finding the right customers and then, narrates how she started using Google AdWords and the customer base started growing. She ends the video on a positive note saying that she is confident Google AdWords would continue to help her grow her business.
Let us look at a few best practices for creating an engaging video review of your products.
- Invest in the right equipment – Get the right equipment for shooting the reviews. This does not necessarily mean you need a studio with high-tech gadgets. Having a DSLR with a ring light can also do the job.
- Trust the customer – Let the customers talk about their experiences. Using a pre-written script might make the video review look rehearsed and artificial.
- Prepare the questions – If your customers are recording the video by themselves, share a brief or a questionnaire about the points you wish them to focus on.
- Focus on video quality – Keep the video short, concise, and engaging. The ideal video length should be anything under two minutes.
#4. Leverage Case Studies to Share Customer Experiences
Case studies are another excellent means of lead generation because it enables the customers to share their experience with your products in detail. In addition to the customer’s experience, case studies provide other details, such as the customer’s problem, the solution you offered, customer onboarding and support, and much more.
CoSchedule, a marketing management and automation platform, has amazing case studies that will compel the readers to click on the link and read it. Have a look at this screenshot.
This checklist will help you get started with compiling excellent case studies for your business:
- Customers – Connect with your customers and request them for a case study. Offer them some freebies, such as access to premium features, discount coupons, and more for their effort.
- Content questionnaire – Prepare a questionnaire containing relevant questions about how your products or services have helped the customers. If your customer base is spread across various industries, ensure that your questions are tailored accordingly.
- Case study content – Write engaging content giving in-depth information about the customer’s requirements, company goals, and how your product or service helped them achieve those goals. Include statistical or numerical data wherever possible.
- Case study design – Ensure that the case study is easy to read. Add relevant headers, images, graphs, bulleted lists, and more to make it appealing. Experiment with different designs and layouts.
- Call to action – Do not forget to include a relevant call to action on the case study page in multiple locations.
#5. Host Webinars to Capture Customer Feedback in Real-Time
Last but not the least, webinars play a significant role in boosting lead generation efforts. In fact, 73% of marketers feel that webinars offer a good medium to generate high-quality B2B leads.
Businesses should invest in webinars because it helps you target specific audiences; generally, those who are already interested in investing in a product like yours. It enables you to engage with your prospects in real-time. By presenting excellent industry-related information to the attendees, you put yourself out as an expert and build a sense of trust in them.
Here is a quick five-step guide to help you generate more webinar leads:
- Step 1 – Prepare yourself for the webinar by creating an ideal lead profile, selecting an interesting topic, and planning the webinar strategy.
- Step 2 – Generate excellent webinar content that will educate the attendees and provide them with solutions to their pain points.
- Step 3 – Invest in promoting your webinar on various channels including social media, paid advertising, and more.
- Step 4 – Request your existing customers to attend the webinar and share their experiences with using your product. This will create a lasting impression on your prospects.
- Step 5 – Do not forget to follow up with the leads after the webinar.
Managing Leads with Lead Generation and Management Tool
Now that you have understood various ways in which you can leverage customer reviews for lead generation, let us learn how to manage these leads and other B2B contacts.
An efficient lead management system like LeadsChilly can help you manage the leads and nurture them as customers without any hurdles. From capturing leads to scoring them, from tracking their activities to communicating with them, lead tracking software helps you foster strong relationships with your prospects. By personalizing every aspect of the lead outreach process, you can convert warm leads into your customers and scale your business.
Conclusion
Customer reviews are excellent mediums to capture the prospects’ attention and convince them to make a purchasing decision. We are sure you will follow the tips mentioned in the article to leverage customer reviews to generate the best leads and grow your business.
5 Lead Magnets Every Business Should Invest In
5 Lead Magnets Every Business Should Invest In
The competition for attracting the right customers is getting fierce day after day. Businesses find it difficult to reach out to potential customers and engage them with the brand. The traditional process of lead generation is slowly turning out to be ineffective.
Hence, eliminating those annoying phone calls and monotonous cold emails and jazzing up the lead generation process with excellent sales lead generation tools, takeaways, and rewards can help businesses make a good impression on prospects.
Lead magnets, as these takeaways are commonly called, encourage prospects to subscribe or sign up for a product or service. By providing valuable content to prospective customers in the form of a downloadable resource, such as an ebook, PDF file, or checklists, businesses can capture their email addresses or other contact information.
You can manage this information in an intuitive lead generation tool, such as LeadsChilly, and engage your prospects to build strong relationships.
In this article, we will learn more about lead magnets and various lead magnet ideas to capture the best leads and convert them into customers.
Why Lead Magnets Are Important for Your Business
Lead magnets are the best mediums to generate B2B leads online. Here are a few reasons why businesses should invest in creating lead magnets.
- It helps in drawing the attention of the customers to your products or services.
- It establishes your company as an industry expert delivering value to the audience and strengthens your brand image.
- It personalizes your marketing campaigns by helping you serve customized content to the audience. You can use various marketing tools for lead generation to serve personalized messages to prospects.
- It helps develop a sense of trust in the minds of prospects by offering them a chance to learn about your company and its offerings.
- It provides an efficient medium to grow your email database and boost email marketing efforts. You can also leverage email finder tools or email leads generation tools to simplify your efforts.
5 Types of Lead Magnets Every Business Should Include in Their Marketing Strategy
1.Ebooks
Ebooks are one of the best ways to capture leads and increase brand awareness. In fact, 51% of B2B businesses have included ebooks in their marketing campaigns.
Businesses can create ebooks containing informative content, instructional content, how-to guides, detailed explanations, tips, and tactics. If you have an active blog where you publish industry-specific articles, you can combine these articles and convert them into an ebook.
Being informative, these ebooks deep dive into specific topics and helps the readers understand them easily.
2.Case Studies
Case studies are one of the most compelling proofs of the benefits your products or services offers. They help readers understand how the products can simplify their processes or tasks via detailed insights into how those products helped other companies.
By giving real-life examples of how customers achieved their goals, you are influencing the prospects into trying out your products or services. Here are some tips to write an engaging case study.
- Adopt a storytelling approach when writing your case study
- Keep it detailed and maintain a word count of at least 1000 words
- Focus on showcasing the results and benefits
- Include relevant data, images, and customer quotes to make it more appealing
- Do not forget to conclude the case study with a relevant CTA
3.White papers
White papers usually contained detailed thought-leadership content that shares unique data and information. This type of content helps prospective customers understand any issue or solve a problem without any hassles.
Many B2B businesses are leveraging white papers for lead generation as it helps in imparting the right information to the prospects. Thus, helping them make informed purchasing decisions. According to the Content Preferences Survey Report, 71% of B2B buyers are referring to white papers for researching products to make purchasing decisions.
You can create a white paper for sharing industry statistics, presenting a simple solution to complex processes, sharing in-depth explanations of certain process workflows, and more.
- Follow these tips to create an amazing white paper.
- Choose an impactful topic. Remember you are educating the audience who are already familiar with the basics. Your topic should provide detailed insights or analysis of industry-specific terms and techniques.
- Conduct thorough research to write insightful content that delivers value to the readers.
- Connect with industry experts to make your content more engaging and credible.
- Fact-check every sentence you write to ensure it’s true and reliable.
Present the content in an easy-to-read format with the help of minimal design elements.
4.Checklists
Checklists are yet another type of lead magnet that can capture excellent leads for your business. A checklist is a simple list of tasks or things that help individuals achieve their goals.
For example, social media marketing interns would love a checklist telling them the tasks they are required to carry out before publishing a post on social media.
Presented in bulleted lists, checklists serve as a productivity tool that can help your customers manage all the micro-tasks with ease. Here are a few tips to help you create a great checklist.
- Set an objective for the checklist. Ensure that it helps the customers achieve their goals.
- Structure out the content in proper order. Include sub-sections if required.
- Write the content in an easy-to-understand language. Avoid jargon wherever possible.
5.Webinars
Webinars are considered to be the best medium for lead generation as it empowers businesses to interact with prospects in real-time. Hosting a webinar presents your business as an authority and makes you stand out from the competitors.
Whether you are hosting a workshop, giving a presentation, or providing training, webinars help you capture the attention of those prospects who are already interested in your products or services. Hence, you can gauge whether or not these prospects would fit your ideal customer profile.
To leverage webinars for successful lead generation,
- Decide on webinar content. You can host educational webinars to teach some useful skills to the prospects. Focus on delivering value to the customers.
- Include a subtle sales pitch towards the end of the webinar. Offer gifts, such as discount coupons, ebooks, or one-on-one consultation calls.
- Create a webinar landing page providing the required information. Do not forget to include a registration form to collect contact information.
- Leverage social media to promote the webinars. Create short teaser videos highlighting the topic, speakers, and more.
- Once the webinar is over, thank the attendees for their participation
- Follow up with the new leads on a timely basis and build long-term relationships with them.
- Segment these leads into various categories based on their responses and share the same with the sales team for enhanced lead nurturing.
Nurture the Prospects with Sales Lead Tools
Once you have successfully managed to capture the prospects, it is time to nurture them. Lead nurturing is an essential component of the lead generation process. Leads management tool like LeadsChilly offers intuitive tools to segment your leads into various lists and devise a custom nurturing strategy based on their interests.
For example, you can devise personalized marketing campaigns to send emails to prospects using the email automation tool and track the progress in the intuitive CRM. Further, you can implement a chatbot to connect with the prospects in real-time and help them with their queries.
The sales lead tools stores everything, right from the first email message and chats to the customers’ feedback, on their respective profiles and the same can be accessed in just a few clicks.
Manage your leads with an exclusive tool designed especially to deliver custom content to the leads and make the lead generation and management process more simpler and effective.
How To Manage B2B Contacts – Filters For Qualifying B2B Lead Generation
How To Manage B2B Contacts - Filters For Qualifying B2B Lead Generation
Generating high-quality leads is indeed essential for the success of any business. However, lead generation is not enough. Businesses need to nurture these leads and convert them into customers by identifying the relevant ones and building a sense of trust.
According to Invesp, only 35% of companies have a dedicated lead nurturing strategy to boost their lead generation efforts.
So, what is the first step towards a successful lead nurturing process? It is managing B2B contacts. To qualify the leads, you need to have an excellent contact management strategy. This will help you identify the relevant leads while keeping the non-relevant ones at bay. It will also help you focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Let us now understand various criteria to qualify B2B contacts as strong leads.
1. Customer Behavior
You can tell whether a lead is interested in purchasing from you based on their behavior. Although the demographics of the leads play a major role in determining whether or not they are the right fit, it is their behavior that contributes to planning the lead nurturing strategy.
Customer behavior provides a comprehensive view of how potential customers engage with your company before making a purchase. Another important reason to consider customer behavior for qualifying leads is that this metric changes rapidly over a short time, unlike the other parameters that usually stay as they are.
With deep insights into behavior information, you can understand what the leads are looking for and customize your strategy in a way that meets their requirements. For example, leads who want to purchase a graphic designing tool will surely check out the tool’s pricing page. You can offer discounts or design a custom plan for them by observing what subscription plan they are looking at.
Monitoring customer behavior helps you build a winning approach for interacting with the leads and significantly boosts your win rate.
Check out this screenshot below. Our lead generation tool, LeadsChilly captures a detailed activity log from the leads and presents them in their lead profiles.
2. Company Size
The next important criterion that determines lead qualification is the company size. It is easy to tell how closely a lead fits your ideal customer profile (ICP) or target persona based on the size of the company.
According to a study by ReferralRock, 17% of businesses consider company size as an important factor for finding high-value B2B leads.
For instance, a B2B organization serving small and medium businesses would not wish to have an enterprise business as a lead. Hence, understanding the company size is essential for lead qualification
3. Valid Information
Verifying the information about the leads is a must to understand if they fit in the ICP. No matter what medium you use for capturing leads, checking the authenticity and accuracy of information is mandatory for lead qualification.
Here are a few details every lead you capture must have:
- Full name
- Valid email
- address
- Contact number
- Postal address
- Job title
- Company name
- URLs of social media profilesespecially LinkedIn
If the listed information is incorrect, the lead profile should be updated with correct information, if possible.
For example, every phone number must have a certain number of digits as per the standards. If the lead’s phone number has different digits, then that information is of no use. In such cases, it is ideal to connect with the lead via a different communication channel, such as email or social media, and request the correct phone number.
4. Behavior on Website
The number of times a lead visits your website is a crucial indicator for determining how they connect with your brand online. The more time a lead spends on your site, the more likely it is that they will be interested in collaborating with you. In addition to website views, sessions are an essential indicator for qualifying leads.
Here are some ways to observe the lead’s behavior on the website:
- Track the page views
- Monitor the length and frequency of their visits
- Check if they have subscribed to your blog, offers, or email lists
Monito the lead behavior for a period of 30, 60, and 90 days to gain deeper insights into their behavior. This data can be leveraged by AI-powered tools in predicting their actions and crafting a fool-proof marketing strategy.
To build long-term client loyalty, you must ensure that our customers are happy with your service.
5. Lead Engagement
You need to pay great attention to how the lead responds to your content and marketing efforts. You might see a chance for conversion if a lead has been interacting with you for an extended period by opening emails from you and downloading your lead magnet content.
6. Revenue/Value Potential for Lifetime
Lifetime value is one of the most crucial indicators to use (LTV) to find high-value prospects. A company’s lifetime value is based on how much money a client spends with them throughout their relationship with the company.
It’s not enough that a lead is valuable right now. Investing your time and effort extensively in them usually makes sense if they are likely to add value to your company over time.
7. Budget
Another key measure to monitor while filtering leads is the budget. When it comes to a purchase, the majority of companies have a certain spending limit in mind. Spending time on a lead who does not have the required budget for making a purchase is a complete waste of effort.
For example, if you are offering HR software at a monthly subscription cost of $150 and the lead has a budget of $50, it would not be an ideal customer for you. However, if the lead is ready to increase the budget to $100, you can offer them some discount on quarterly or annual plans. You can also convince them about the benefits your software offers and motivate them to make a purchase.
8. Completion of Form
Lead capture forms are a great means for understanding the lead’s interests. Design the forms to ask for more information in addition to asking for the lead’s name, phone number, and email address. Besides, you need to put in some effort and upfront disclosure on your form which will, in turn, help you determine the lead’s purpose and participation.
If a lead does not fill the form, in other words unresponsive, they are unlikely to purchase from you.
Summing Up
Lead qualification helps you shortlist the ideal customers from a huge database of leads. LeadsChilly offers an all-in-one tool to capture leads, qualify them for the sales process, as well as nurture them. It boosts your inbound and outbound sales efforts while providing the right details of the prospects.
Remember lead generation is a crucial process and it requires the right tools. Sign up for your LeadsChilly account today and kickstart your lead generation efforts.
How To Generate B2B Leads Using Social Media
How To Generate B2B Leads Using Social Media
Many assume that social media is great for B2C businesses. But smart marketers understand how social media plays a crucial role in B2B marketing as well. A professional B2B marketer will successfully find a delicate balance between engaging audiences with their B2B products without sounding too enterprise-like.
One of the most effective social media platforms for B2B lead generation is LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
If you are a B2B business or marketer, this article presents you with tactics for sales lead generation and marketing tools for lead generation.
Process of generating B2B contacts using social media
B2B Sales lead generation using social media involves the following activities that need to be undertaken:
- Building a brand awareness
- Designing and executing paid lead generation campaigns
- Share testimonials
- Build email list funnel
Let’s explore various tactics one can apply across each of these activities.
Build a strong B2B brand presence
Social media is a great marketing tool for lead generation and establishing a brand presence. For this, you need to decide what your brand is known for and how it will interact with its followers.
Here are some tips for establishing a brand identity on social media for sales lead generation:
- Optimize your profile: Learn the best practices of profile optimization on various social media platforms. Some common hacks include ensuring keywords in the profile bio, customizing the URL (for LinkedIn), adding relevant contact information, links in the bio, etc.
- Utilize ‘Call-To-Action’ buttons: Almost all social business profiles provide CTA options. Use this to direct the profile visitors to your conversion landing page.
- Develop a brand kit: Have a brand kit ready with color palettes, tone, font sizes, audience persona, etc. Use this brand kit for making social media creatives.
- Set up Quick replies: Social media platforms like Instagram allow quick replies. It’s known that leads tend to convert 9X when follow-up is done within 5 mins.
Building a brand identity helps you streamline your appearance and tone that, if maintained consistently, will improve brand recall.
Run lead generation paid campaigns on social media
Social media platforms allow B2B paid marketing via their ad offering. You can pinpoint ads to your target audience within the social media’s ecosystem and convert them for sales.
A typical B2B lead generation campaign on social media includes the following aspects:
- Giveaways: An organic way to generate B2B leads is to run exciting giveaways of your product or anything relevant to the followers. You can make them conduct actions like following the social page, signing up for your product, inviting others, referrals etc.
- Run brand awareness ad campaigns: Got a social media post that got many likes? Boost its engagement with paid ads that help it reach more audiences. This helps gain followers
- Influencer Marketing: Collaborate with influencers or micro-influencers on your social platform of choice. Design a B2B lead generation campaign where all influencers run the same offer for maximum exposure and recall.
- Retargeting ads: This feature helps you showcase personalized ads to potential leads yet to convert. It helps improve your conversion rate.
You can use LeadsChilly to help you find relevant influencers and potential social media audiences to help with running paid marketing campaigns.
Here’s an example of how you can extract emails as B2B contacts from LinkedIn. You can feed these contacts to design targeted email marketing campaigns for conversions. You can even automate sending LinkedIn connection requests and quick replies.
Share customer reviews and testimonials
Today’s consumers are actively voicing their opinions of liking or disliking brands and their products. If you receive positive feedback or posts, do highlight them on your website. This helps generate trust and strengthen your brand recognition among social media channels.
Here are some ways to use social media posts created by your followers or customers to your brand’s benefit:
- Embed testimonials on the website: Someone recommended your product on Twitter? Grab the embed link of that tweet and share it on your website’s landing page.
- Create and share content: Share the feedback, testimonials and reviews shared by your customers as posts on all your social media pages.
- Create notifications: Use LeadsChilly’s social proof feature to customize social notifications. This helps improve engagement and conversions on your website.
Grow your email list using the social media funnel
One of the best ways to safeguard your followership on social media is to convert them into newsletter subscribers. This helps you de-risk platform dependence so that you do not lose your hard work in the event of your account getting removed or hacked.
Here’s how you can set up a lead generation funnel for building your email list:
- Use ‘Live’ features: You can host Twitter Spaces, Instagram Live, LinkedIn Live or Facebook events for real-time engagement. The benefit of doing this is that you can prompt your viewers to sign up for email lists during these sessions.
- Promote ‘Gated’ Content: Write detailed guides, eBooks or checklists that your target audience would like to get their hands on. Share posts promoting to get them on ‘link in bio’ for organic conversions. You can also run paid ads designed for sales lead generation for sharing this gated content.
- Leverage ‘Groups’: Almost every social media has a ‘community’ or ‘groups’ feature. You can join such groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc where you can prompt them to join our mailing list. Make sure you provide value in your posts.
- Share content from newsletters as social media posts: Let your followers know the value your newsletter brings instantaneously before they give their email address. You can share the content from your newsletters as it is in the form of social media posts. Then, prompt the viewers/followers to sign up for newsletters to receive updates in captions.
Once you gather the B2B leads in the form of email subscribers, you can feed them into LeadsChilly’s CRM to further nurture them with email marketing campaigns. Our tools help you segment and send targeted emails to boost conversion rates.
Get started with B2B sales lead generation using social media
The possibilities are endless for social media. The more you leverage their inbuilt features for building your brand, the better your chances are for organic B2B contacts generation. Social media is equipped with powerful B2B lead generation tools in the form of an ads platform that finds and targets your potential customers among its sea of users.
Explore how LeadsChilly can help you leverage social media for your marketing needs. Signup for a Free Trial.
How to Do Sales Prospecting? Tools and Best Practices
How to Do Sales Prospecting? Tools and Best Practices
The sales industry is evolving. Technologies like automation and artificial intelligence have made sales processes simpler and more efficient. Further, social selling has also opened new avenues for sales professionals to achieve sales goals.
But, despite these advancements, companies are still finding the process of sales prospecting and nurturing to be difficult. This study by HubSpot proves that 40% of sales representatives consider prospecting to be their biggest challenge.
Have you wondered why businesses are finding it harder to find and keep prospects? Why do businesses complain about losing prospects before they become a customer?
One of the major reasons could be an improper sales prospecting plan.
In this article, we will dive deep into sales prospecting, understand the best sales prospecting practices and learn about various tools that can streamline your sales processes.
What is Sales Prospecting?
Sales prospecting is the process of identifying the prospects to find out whether they fit your ideal customer profile. The goal is to nurture these prospects to convert them into paying customers.
Although acquiring and converting new leads is a part of every sales prospecting strategy, sales professionals must not forget to re-engage old leads or customers. This can be done with the help of a new or revised sales strategy.
Sales Prospecting Best Practices
1. Identify and Understand Your Prospects
Not every lead you generate or prospect you come across would be an ideal customer for the business. That is why identifying and understanding the prospects is essential for the success of sales prospecting.
According to Sales Insight Lab, 50% of the prospects are not an ideal fit for the business. So, instead of chasing the wrong prospects and wasting the time of the sales team, create a buyer persona and connect with only those leads that match your ideal customer profile.
Conduct thorough research on the prospects using some intuitive online sales tools. Pay attention to their website, social media pages, and blog to check if there is an alignment between their business challenges and your product or service.
2. Initiate Engaging Conversations with Your Prospects
Effective conversation creates a sense of trust and builds better client-business relationships. Write convincing sales scripts for cold calls and engaging messages for emails. Personalize the messaging according to the prospects’ industry, job role, location, and other demographic information and behavioral factors.
Focus on creating a bond with your prospects with the help of engaging phone calls and personalized messaging. Address their pain points or challenges and provide them with a solution to resolve the same.
3. Keep the Conversation Going
4. Leverage Technology to Optimize the Processes
Automate the sales prospecting process wherever possible. Use intuitive tools (like the one mentioned in the section below) to free the sales team from manual tasks and encourage them to focus on other important tasks such as scheduling demos, resolving customer queries, and more.
5. Take Advantage of Word-Of-Mouth Marketing
Devise a referral program and ask your customers as well as prospects for referrals. This form of marketing ensures you reach out to a more precise audience and thus, increase the conversion rates.
Reward your customers with some tangible benefits as a token of appreciation of their effort. You can send out coupon codes for subscription renewals or offer a free trial of premium features to the referrers.
The above-mentioned plan with the right sales lead tools will skyrocket the prospecting campaigns and convert more customers.
Best 5 Sales Prospecting Tools You Should Invest In
Let us have a look at the top sales prospecting tools to help you streamline prospecting activities. Note that this list includes paid as well as free sales prospecting tools.
1. LeadsChilly
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an excellent social selling tool that helps sales professionals discover prospects and connect with them organically. Besides discovering leads, sales professionals can also manage these leads effectively in custom lists and track them in a tailored pipeline.
The automated lead generation feature suggests the best leads based on the search history, sales preferences, and profile views. Further, you can gain powerful insights into the prospects and stay informed about their updates.
Integrating LinkedIn Sales Navigator with CRM software like HubSpot can help you track all prospects from a single platform.
Pricing – $99.99 onwards
3. Quora
Quora is one of the best question-and-answer websites that can help you source qualified prospects without any hurdles. You can leverage this platform for sales prospecting by connecting with the prospects and reaching out to them via Quora’s messaging feature.
Further, you can also create marketing opportunities by answering questions related to your product and industry.
Pricing – Free
4. MailTester
As the name suggests, MailTester is an email verification and email checker tool that keeps the prospects’ lists free from invalid emails. This accurate email list cleaning tool immediately catches irrelevant emails and ensures your email databases stay updated with the right email addresses at all times.
Besides, it identifies and deletes duplicate contacts. It also searches the email lists for spam traps. Thus, maintaining the sender’s reputation.
Pricing – $19 onwards.
5. HubSpot Sales
HubSpot Sales is one of the widely used CRM that helps you track and manage prospects as well as customers. It also offers you to send personalized email messages by setting up email templates and custom email sequences. Further, it gives you detailed insights into the performance of the email campaigns via click-through rates, email bounces, open rates, and unsubscribe rates.
Pricing – Free, Paid plans start at $35 onwards
Final Thoughts
Sales prospecting can be time-consuming and challenging but it is an essential part of every sales process. With the help of the right approach and online sales tools, the sales team can achieve success at prospecting.
10 Step To Write Best Sales Email For Sales Introduction
10 Step To Write Best Sales Email For Sales Introduction
The average conversion rate for cold emails is 15.11% with 10.29% click-through rate!
But to make the most of your email marketing efforts, writing the best sales emails that doesn’t sound intrusive and pushy is the most crucial, and first step.
In this article, we will teach you how to write a great sales introduction email that people would want to open, read and respond to in 10 simple steps.
Step-1: What is the one thing that you want to sell?
Knowing what products in your catalog need to target a particular customer persona is important so that your sales email is relevant to the potential customers your sales lead generation tool has captured.
Use Jobs to be done framework and answer – what job does your product or service really help the potential customer accomplish? Or, what is the positive end-state of your customer when they use your product or service?
You need to gain clarity on this picture as a part of your overall sales lead program, so that you can draft this same message across the email body and other email marketing collaterals.
Step-2: Decide an offer for your sales lead program
Pushing too much on how your product is the best in the world and adding a simple ‘purchase me’ button is not going to work. You will have to entice your potential sales lead to speak with your sales team or try your product. To ensure you write the best sales email for closure, you can use an exclusive ‘offer’ that you can use towards the end of the email body. Some examples of such offers can include:
– Free 15-45 mins consultation
– Free demo walkthrough
– Credits for your product usage
– Exclusive or limited time discount offer
You can also get creative as per your product or service or use themes as per festivals, occasions, etc.
Step-3: Write a good email subject line
Your email subject line is the most important aspect of the whole sales introduction email writing process. Before your customer decides to click the email to open it, their email service provider (gmail. Yahoo, hey, etc) will decide if your sales email should reach their inbox or not.
Here are some best practices to write a good email subject line:
– Do not use any word that is related to sales or is spammy – like offe’, discount, sale, complimentary, exciting, reminder, etc.
– Conduct A/B test with different sales introduction email subject lines and gauge the open rates. Use the subject line with maximum open rate for the rest of your email marketing
– You can use various email headline analyzer tools available who help draft a best sales email subject line
Step-4: Write a captivating opening line
Sales introduction emails should not start with formal introductions that you learn in school. Instead, you can emphasize the problem your product or services aims to solve for the target customer as found in Step-1. Ensure your statement is empathetic and strikes a conversation to make the email sound as if a human is reaching out for help. Some starting phrases that could be used include:
– “I saw your tweet on the difficulty you are facing….”
– “We checked your website, and we have a couple of suggestions…”
– “Thanks for attending the ‘xyz’ conference. I observed you asked the question to the panelists regarding….”
Step-5: Explain how your product/service solves their problem in your sales introduction email body
Now that you have introduced the problem and struck a camaraderie with the lead prospect in the opening line, it’s time to solve their problem in the email body. For writing the best sales email body, you must state why your product or service is a perfect solution to solve the issue they face and how it is able to help them achieve a state of success.
Here are some best practices on writing a sales introduction email body:
– Clearly articulate in 1-3 medium length lines about what you product does
– Add numbers – like % increase in efficiency, % decrease in costs, how many hours saved, etc to emphasize on value provided by you
– Keep the body short and crisp – longer emails get skipped
– Focus on 3 main benefits your product has that helps them tackle the problem they are facing
Step-6: Share the offer from Step-2
Clearly articulate the offer you designed in Step-2 and place it prominently after the sales introduction email body. The offer should be mentioned in 1-2 lines only and needs to form a continuation of the body content.
Step-7: Add your email call to action
Below this offer statement in your sales email, add an actionable call-to-action. A call-to-action is a button or a highlight that contains the statement that leads the person to sign-up for your website or join/avail your product offering. Some examples could be:
– Grab 10% off today
– Book a demo
– Get free credits
Step-8: Offer to solve doubts or concerns
Striking a conversation by making your lead reply is a great way to ensure you improve your email deliverability rate to their inbox. Hence, end the sales introduction email with how your team is available to solve any doubts or concerns they might have regarding the product information or the offer shared. Some example statements you could use:
– Feel free to reply with any concerns…
– Our team is available to assist you…
– Let me know if this is a priority for you at the moment…
Step-9: Add an email signature
Best sales email will always have an email signature that has sufficient information about the sender. Ensure your email signature is not too fancy and does the job without grabbing too much attention away from the rest of the sales email.
Here are some best practices for email signatures:
– Add the professional profile links of the sender
– Add an unsubscribe button in case if the lead wishes to opt out
– Include contact details like phone number and email
Step-10: Avoid these sales email mistakes
Everyone thinks they have written the best sales email unless you spot these frequently occurring mistakes that you must avoid:
– Avoid adding more than 1 call-to-actions
– Do not overdo with the writing – stick to 100-200 worded sales introduction email
– Do not use photos or slogans in your email signature
– Use a P.S line to add any relevant case study links or webinar material linked to the email body – but do not overdo it
– Ensure all links attached are working and not broken
Post drafting your sales email, you might want to start with your sales lead generation and email prospecting efforts to kickstart your sales lead program. At Leadschilly, we help you target the right customer and run email marketing campaigns via our all-round sales leads tool. Learn how to design a effective email campaigns using our online sales tool- book a demo (//add link)
10 Free Ways on How to Find Someone’s Phone Number and Email Address
10 free ways on how to find someone's phone number and email address
The fastest way to close sales or to get a job is to build a warm relationship with the highest decision maker. An easy way is to connect with CEOs and managers on professional networking platforms. But not everyone will accept your social media DMs. This is where knowing how to find someone’s phone number or how to find email addresses will help. It gives you the necessary access to the person, without being too intrusive.
It’s more civilized and professional to approach your potential customer or job via cold emails or messages. You can manually start a conversation by learning cold email best practices. Or, one can design drip email campaigns and schedule follow-ups to build more trust.
But how to find out someone’s phone number and email address? In this article, we will look at 10 free tools and hacks that will help you find anyone’s email address and phone numbers.
1. Use Leadschilly Email Hunter tool
LeadsChilly can help you find anyone’s email address and phone number across the internet using its email extractor tool. It’s designed for B2B lead generation, prospecting and cold emailing. But you can easily extend this powerful tool for personal use like a job search.
Leadschilly also offers you more features for creating customer profiles and running email marketing campaigns. You can also download the captured data as excel to help you scale your cold emailing efforts.
Contact our team today!
2. How to get someone’s phone number using B2B websites or communities
There are various B2B marketplaces, communities or review based sites like Capterra, G2, Clutch, etc where many B2B companies create their profile to showcase their products and services.
Generally, these profiles are listed by the concerned team members across marketing or business development, where they do end up sharing their contact information. Hence, you can check the profiles of the lister of the company to get in touch. Else, you can also save time by using Leadschilly’s email extractor tool that scrapes through these B2B websites and social media to extract contact information.
3. How to find out someone’s phone number via the company’s website
One of the obvious ways to find someone’s phone number is to check out the company’s website that you are trying to target. You can specifically check the ‘contact sales’ in case of lead generation motive or ‘careers’ page in case of job search to find relevant email addresses or contact information.
On the ‘About Us’ page, you may also find the ‘team’ section where you’ll find names of executives. Simply enter these names into Leadschilly’s email finder tool to get their email addresses and phone numbers.
4. How to find someone's email address via personal websites and blogs
One indeed feels protective about sharing contact information across social channels. But many influencers, bloggers and professionals do engage in having their own personal website or blog, where they end up mentioning their contact information.
To know how to get someone’s email address or phone numbers, these personal websites tend to be more reliable than company ones.
5. How to guess email address using trial and error
This method works well when you’re trying to find the official email address of someone working in a company, and you know their name. Most official emails tend to be simple with typical combinations as follows:
– First name only: abc@leadschilly.com
– First name + last name: abc.def@leadschilly.com or abcdef@leadschilly.com
– First name + first letter of last name: abc.d@leadschilly.com or abcd@leadschilly.com
– Only initials of first + last name: ad@leadschilly.com
You could also use freely available email permutation tools that would help you find more such combinations to help you find someone’s email address. At Leadschilly, our email hunter tool helps you remove this guesswork and find the accurate contact information.
6. Subscribe to the target’s newsletter
Another free way on how to find someone’s email address or phone number is to sneak into their newsletter. Most newsletters do not tend to be no-reply, hence high chances you might discover their most active email address as a result.
You can simply comment on their latest issue by replying to the newsletter notification email and strike a cold conversation.
7. How to get someone’s phone number using LinkedIn
This trick works only when the person has chosen to make their phone number and email address public. Although LinkedIn’s free version may come with its limitation, in some cases if you’d like to find someone’s phone number and email address, taking up a LinkedIn premium profile or LinkedIn Sales Navigator will allow you to send ‘InMails’ and search better. But the InMails feature is limited to sending emails and doesn’t include phone numbers.
Before deciding to spend on LinkedIn premium, you might want to check our lead generation tools at Leadschilly for finding contact information via domain ownership, social media, websites, etc. Integrate Leadschilly LI prospecting Tool
8. How to find someone's email address using Twitter advanced options
Twitter is a great platform where conversations can lead to funding, collaborations, acquisitions and jobs. Twitter has a very powerful advanced search feature that you can use to search a user’s tweets and replies based on keywords.
Simply add keyword as email and add the person’s username, and Twitter will do it’s magic:
Step-1: Go to advanced search option
Step-2: add ‘email’ as keyword
Step-3: Add username of the target
Result:
Or you can also use this command on search option:
Else, you can also google search by adding twitter as a variable to enhance your search as follows:
twitter.com/username + “keyword”
9. Use company’s support chat
This is a manual method, but generally companies are very humble when you use their support chatbot and ask to get connected to a certain employee, provided you have valid reasons. Obtaining email of leadership or higher management could be a bit difficult, so do your prior research of someone in middle management or junior managers to enter their email ecosystem first.
10. Approach via press, media or brand kit section
Some brands tend to have a dedicated section for press and media professionals to approach and download brand kits. With this, you can get direct access to someone influential in the marketing department with a better response rate.
Does this seem like a lot of work?
At Leadschilly, we are making it easy to find phone numbers and email leads for your business development, job search, outreach, etc.
Not just for search, but we have created an all-in-one lead generation tool to take care of your lead prospecting, data enrichment and email marketing requirements.
Contact us for a demo on how you can use Leadschilly to find someone’s email address and phone number.
What is the Always Be Closing (ABC) sales framework?
What is the Always Be Closing (ABC) sales framework?
Always Be Closing - ABC definition
The sales job is hard – it requires consistency, persistence, and the will to keep learning on how to improve sales. For this, frameworks like ‘Always be Closing’ (ABC) act as a motivational phrase to develop a sales mindset where a salesperson focuses on engaging in a continuous cycle of gauging prospects, pitching, and closing them using whatever sales strategy is necessary.
Using the ABC framework, one is expected to develop a strong lead qualification process at every step of the sales framework that converges to closure. Thus, closing sales takes precedence, irrespective of the sales tactics used.
How to use the ‘Always Be Closing framework’ for your business?
As a business, you can get the most out of your sales team by nurturing a sales culture that embraces the ABC framework. Here are some steps to implement ‘Always Be Closing’ in your organization:
Profile your ideal customer
Tweak your sales framework by looking through your closures and failures to understand the demographics and interests of your customers. Prepare different user personas and define their problem statement, existing solutions used to solve the problem, and where they spend their time. Prepare a tailored sales pitch for each persona and reach out to explain how your product is the perfect solution to their problem statement.
Fix any loose ends
It’s always easy to convert a customer who is in a state of emergency for the service you offer. But sometimes, customers take a lot of time to decide as they might be looking at alternatives. As a result, during your sales call, they will devise reasons to stall the purchase.
Don’t give them a chance to do so – develop a fear of missing out (FOMO) as a part of your sales strategy with an offer and paint a picture of their state if they do not take it. Offering limited period pricing, special trial periods can create FOMO. Expedite the purchase by including competitor comparisons and be prepared to answer any FAQ.
Cut to the chase and move on
As a salesperson, knowing when and where to showcase your perseverance should be a part of your sales strategy. If you’re dealing with a non-ideal customer, prepare a separate sales framework. This includes a separate sales pitch and flows to understand at what juncture you should stop following up with them. You’d rather spend the time discovering new leads that fit your ideal customer profile as per your business development strategy.
The origins of the ABC framework
The ‘always be closing’ phrase was used for the first time in the film ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ which was scripted by David Mamet in 1992. This film was an adaptation of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.
The movie is about four real estate salesmen, where a situation of ruthless competition heats up when they learn that two low-performing teammates will be fired by the weekend. During the scene of Alec Baldwin’s ‘coffee is for closers’ speech, he mentions the phrase ‘Always Be Closing’. He flips to the blackboard to write ‘always be closing’ while repeating this phrase several times to motivate the real estate agents.
An alternative to the ‘Always Be Closing’ framework: the idea of Always Be Helping or Always be building a Relationship
In the movie, adopting the ABC framework did motivate the employees, but it also backfired since it led to unhealthy competition and the adoption of unethical means to close sales. The ABC framework focuses on closing sales by any means – even if the customers may not truly need your product.
While doing this may increase your business revenues in the short term, this impacts your brand reputation and decreases trust among your existing customers in the long term. It also makes your sales professionals egoistic and vulnerable to controversies.
Considering we live in a well-connected world where word of mouth spreads like wildfire and Gen-Zs tend to be more ethical, it’s essential to position your business development strategy and sales framework that aligns with new-age values.
One can think of adopting the Always be Helping or Always be building a relationship framework – a new motto for the sales professionals of modern times.
Under this, you prioritize helping the customer solve their problem and build a trustworthy relationship over closing the sale. It’s implemented by modifying your sales strategy as follows:
Understand that you cannot help everyone!
Under the ABC framework, you are expected to adapt your sales pitch to suit the customer’s problem statement. But your product may prove to be a disastrous solution to the customer, leading to huge support tickets and chaos. Hence, give an ear and listen to the problem stated by your prospect and determine if your product is the right fit. If it’s not the case, you will help save their time and yours.
You can use tactics like asking for references in their network who might need the product offered by you or offer to keep in touch for future requirements. Keep in mind that if you try to help everyone, you end up helping no one.
Educate your customers
It’s important to educate your customers about your industry, what you offer, and how your product works. A standard way to do this is by preparing use case website pages, help pages, competitor comparison pages, writing SEO optimized content like Guides, eBooks, templates, etc. This helps you warm up the prospect to your offering so that they can grasp your sales pitch.
Build a relationship
A successful sales professional understands the importance of human emotions and the need to build relations. They ensure they build a rapport with the prospect where both the parties come in agreement in terms of the expectations and deliverables. Thus, the sales strategy adopted here is to be transparent, build trust to have a long-term engagement whether they purchase from you or not.
You can choose the ABC framework or the modern-day strategies mentioned as per your organization’s values and priorities.
ABC Analysis – Definition And Concept
ABC Analysis - Definition And Concept
ABC Analysis means categorizing your customers as A-B-C, in that order of priority, based on defined characteristics. Thus, based on their overall revenue contribution, you will get insights on the kind of customer personas you should divert your resources.
This concept is based on the famous 80/20 rule or the Pareto Principle, which states that –
“Roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes”
This concept can be extended to customer segmentation to help fine-tune your business development strategy and sales framework. Thus, we can reframe the Pareto Principle as –
“20% of your customer base makes up to 80% of your total sales”
Thus, you can apply the ABC analysis to segment your customers as per their contribution to the revenues. Here’s an ABC analysis example:
Category A:
Group 10% of customers who make up 70% of the sales. This category contributes the most value to your profit numbers and must be focused on for your business development and lead generation.
Category B:
Group the next 20% of customers who make up 20% of the sales. This category represents the potential to nurture these leads for upselling and cross-selling to improve the Average Revenue Per User from them.
Category C:
Group the next 70% of the customers who make up to 10% of the sales. This category can be automated for your sales strategy since they consist of typically smaller transactions. You can also equip your support team with automated tools so that they focus more on Category A and B.
You can use other metrics for customer segmentation apart from revenues to gain more insights like geography, demographics, churn, the number of transactions, product categories, or any other north star metric that your sales strategy values.
How does ABC analysis work?
Conducting ABC analysis on your customer dataset is an easy excel game. Here, we have listed steps that you can follow in case you’d like to segment based on revenues:
STEP-1: Prepare a table of your customers and the revenues they brought in.
STEP-2: Calculate the total turnover by summing up all the revenues brought by these customers
STEP-3: Determine how much is the 70%, 20%, and 10% of your total turnover
STEP-4: Determine a sum of customers from the top whose total turnover is equal to 70% of the total turnover received. Label it as Category-A.
STEP-5: Similarly, calculate the sum of the next set of customers whose total turnover is equal to 20% of the total turnover. Label it as Category-B.
STEP-6: The rest of the customers left would make up for the last 10%. Label it as Category-C.
How to use ABC analysis in customer segmentation?
While each customer is valuable, with ABC analysis, you will have better clarity about the customers whom you should be focusing on in terms of your business development strategy. This will help you further strategize resource allocation in terms of support, business development, sales, and marketing.
Here’s an ABC analysis example in customer segmentation based on sales revenue, and how to interpret them to improve your sales strategy:
Category A:
Category-A customers contribute the most value to your profit numbers. Hire a UX researcher to draft a user persona in terms of demographics, company financials, problem statement, customers whom they serve, value propositions, etc. You can align your business development strategy and lead generation efforts accordingly.
Category B:
Category-B customers represent a potential where you can nurture these leads for upselling and cross-selling. Identify key areas where you can serve them with your other products or sell affiliates. This will help you improve the Average Revenue Per User from them.
Category C:
Category-C customers represent an opportunity to cut costs using automation since they consist of typically smaller transactions. Classify these purchases and place bots to conduct the sales pitch rather than employing dedicated sales professionals. You can also equip your support team with automated tools so that they can focus more on Category A and B.
How to use ABC analysis in sales?
After successfully segmenting your customers, you direct your resources for implementing your sales strategy towards Category-A and B. Here’s how you can do that:
Focus your lead generation efforts on targeting Category-A customer personas. Draft a personalized sales pitch and focus on converting for in-person meetings and demos than mere emails.
Draft sales pitch to cross-sell or upsell with other products available in your catalog. Check the conversions and improvement in sales numbers – and group these products. Perform lead generation tactics on the customer personas that you could successfully upsell. Iterate your sales strategy, pitch, and products to bring these customers to Category-A.
Get started with ABC Analysis today
LeadsChilly, can help you implement ABC analysis and automate your lead generation efforts. If you’re a B2B sales professional, get equipped with campaign management, data segregation, and derive insights for your lead generation efforts. Sign up for the 7days trial today.
