LeadSift doesn’t like to just talk about the next generation of data in sales and marketing.
We use our own proprietary Buyer Intent Data so that we can define the best practices and help our clients innovate their processes, too.
It’s our duty to report on what is working and what is not, when we find it.
In our sales prospecting efforts, we’ve unearthed a few emails that demonstrate the real power of using our data to hit the right prospect at the right time with the right message.
Here are six real-life examples for you to enjoy…
Example 1: New hire in the marketing team
| Prospect: | Chris ****, VP Marketing and Sales Development |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked after 1st email. Deal closed within 30 days |
My email outreach:
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Hi Chris, Imagine getting the contact info of any prospect that engages with competitors like Market Track or 360pi, or when they share industry content. Just looking at this week’s data – I see there are 27 target accounts for you guys to go after. In fact Clever Age or MARKABLE would be a couple great accounts for you to go after in the next few days. We are already helping some of the fastest growing companies like Looker and Vidyard to identify and reach the right accounts and would love to have you guys onboard. Would you be interested in learning more? Here is a link to my calendar – please let me know if you have 20 minutes and I will send an invite. Thanks Alex Field | Growth Manager LeadSift 902-880-4146
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Chris’ reply: Alex, give me a call on *** *** **** |
Very few prospects will ever tell you what worked in your sales outreach messaging or why, but we’re sure that having the data on this company and their competition and being able to reference it in the email was the main reason Chris took a meeting.
This was data he did not have and information his team needed. Maybe it was a curiosity factor that made him take the meeting.
Example 2: Engagement with our competitor
| Prospect: | Robert *****, Director of Marketing |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked after 3rd follow-up email. Deal closed within 60 days |
Tukan’s email outreach:
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Hi Robert, Just because someone has the specific job title at your target account does not mean they need your solution. With LeadSift you can now figure out when ***** is top of mind based on Intent Triggers and engage them proactively. No more cold reach outs – only talk to people who want to listen to you. See how we helped Vidyard re-engage cold leads and identify new ones to increase their pipeline. Would love to learn more about your current outbound sales process and tell you how LeadSift can help you identify and reach your target accounts everyday! Thanks, Tukan |
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Robert’s reply: Hi Tukan, Thanks for reaching out. Do you have any time to talk today? Thanks |
If a prospect is interested in your competitor, why would you not want to show them why you’re better?
The problem is, most sales people find out a competitor is involved way too late in the deal. It’s an objection.
In this case, we used it as a trigger. A trigger that told us to reach out and win a deal.
Example 3: Prospect attended industry event
| Prospect: | Shohil *****, Digital Marketing Manager |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked after 1st email. Deal closed within 60 days |
Tukan’s email outreach:
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Hi Shohil, Its almost a month since ****** attended Dreamforce. Did you generate enough new leads and/or opportunities from the show? Imagine getting the contact info of any prospect that attends an industry event or better yet, engages with competitors like Apigee Corp or SnapLogic. With LeadSift you can now figure out when a prospect is attending an industry event and engage them proactively. No need to spend big bucks on a booth – reach out and talk to people who want to listen to you. I would love to tell you more about LeadSift and how we can help you turbo charge your prospecting process. Will you be interested? Let me know and I will put something on the calendar Tukan CEO |
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Shohil’s reply: Hey Tukan, Sounds intriguing. Would love to learn how you guys do it: “With LeadSift you can now figure out when a prospect is attending an industry event and engage them proactively.” Thanks |
Industry events are a great trigger for all sales people.
If you go to a Salesforce event, you might be interested in buying or using Salesforce. So naturally, there are variants of this situation for all industries.
We can identify when your prospects meeting your buyer persona engage with industry events. That’s before, during and after the event.
When the seller digs deeper into this insight, they can see that the person was there or if they are engaging way ahead of the event. LeadSift’s Behavioral Intent Data can help you identify that something more complex is happening. This data informs our messaging.
Example 4: LeadSift data suggested a lead to us
| Prospect: | Chip ******, VP of Marketing |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked after 1st email. Deal closed within 60 days |
My email outreach:
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Hi Chip, Since I reached out to you a couple weeks ago, we have identified 81 new prospects for *******, based on how they have engaged with your competitor and industry content in the past week. I’d love to show you over a quick demo and get your feedback. Here is a link to my schedule over the next few days – let me know if you have 20-mins P.S. There is absolutely No obligation for you if you don’t find it useful. Just getting your feedback would be valuable in helping us build our product. |
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Chip’s reply: Hi Alex, We had been using you indirectly via ****** ***** (outsourced sales outreach firm we were using). We’re no longer working with ****** *****, but like your stuff. Can we set time up to talk? Any time this week…afternoons (Eastern time) are better than mornings, schedule-wise. Thanks! Andy |
Truthfully, there’s nothing that special about this outreach.
The reason I reached out was because we have identified a customer that we closed with a similar role and similar type of company (size, industry, keywords about what they do in their bio) which is why our data suggested this lead to us.
I reached out knowing what the problems are and goals these folks face.
This is why we got the deal.
I didn’t know anything about this prospect before being shown that this prospect would be a good prospect to reach out to. That’s the power of Behavioral Intent Data!
Example 5: Prospect engaged with industry content
Trigger: Engaged with an industry topic
Email Nurture + Marketo (Fun fact: LeadSift fully integrates with Marketo)
| Prospect: | Adam ******, Director of Marketing Operations |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked on 1st email. Deal closed within 45 days |
My email outreach:
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Hi Adam, Imagine getting the contact info of any prospect that engages with competitors like Contently or NewsCred, or when they share industry news about Content Marketing. We are already working with a select group of B2B SaaS companies like Sysomos and Vidyard to help them identify the right prospects at the right time and would love to have you guys onboard. Would you be interested in learning more? Let me know and I will put something on the calendar. |
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Adam’s reply: Hi there, Yes I am. We have our company conference next week but I’d love to learn more the week after. Best, Adam |
Like many sales professionals, we use Outreach.io. It makes not a great deal of difference if you use Salesloft, or any other similar tool for this.
In this instance, we leveraged LeadSift’s Behavioral Intent Data to first identify the right prospects and then we entered them into our email cadence, customizing the messaging to mention the competitors we found their ICP engaging with.
With this email I sent to Adam, we programmed the algorithm to search for prospects who engaged with Marketo.
The reason why I did not send a hand-written, uber customized email is that there are tons of people who engage with Marketo every week.
It’s a best practice to straddle the line between customization and volume here. We ran an email nurture from Outreach.io to a large number of leads engaging with Marketo, mentioning the data we found in our own system. It was our job to customize the email to reflect this.
Example 6: Prospect engaged with competitor
| Prospect: | Andy *******, Marketing Director |
| Outcome: | Meeting booked after 1st email. Deal closed within 30 days |
My email outreach:
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Hi Andy, Imagine getting the contact info of any prospect that engages with competitors like VoltDB or NuoDB, or when they share industry content. We are already helping some of the fastest growing companies like Looker and Vidyard to identify and reach the right accounts and would love to have you guys onboard. Let me know if you’re able to share 20-minutes to learn more and I will send an invite. |
This prospect engaged with some content from one of our competitors, so we wanted to try and educate them on the challenges they are facing and see what their goals were.
We reached out to three people from their marketing team, and the Director or Marketing responded.
Andy was one of the contacts the Behavioral Intent Data suggested we reach out to, based upon our target buyer persona listed in the LeadSift algorithm.
What have we learned?
The key takeaway from this sales prospecting activity is that context is key to success.
Anyone can send a random cold email and follow up until the end of time, but without great reason for contact, why are you emailing? It makes it far easier for a prospect to disregard you as a pesky sales person.
The answer is to have highly specific context for your outreach: great timing and a great understanding of what is going on in an account and what they are trying to do.
If you want to see replies to your prospecting efforts like we have seen above, book a meeting with me and I’ll give you 100 free leads. They’ll be exactly like the ones we prospect from…
