The hardest part of cold email is that – well, it’s cold. The person receiving your message doesn’t necessarily know you or that your message relates to them. There’s a good chance they’ve never heard of your business, and it gives them an easy out to ignore your message.
This is why building a list of targeted prospects is so important. Finding leads that you know have an interest in your product, service, or even your area of expertise is a great way to build that initial connection.
Sales Prospecting: A View from the Experts
We sat down with Liston Witherill, Chief of Sales Insights at Serve Don’t Sell, to get his expert insight on qualification.
According to Liston, Serve Don’t Sell is first and foremost a mindset about how to approach sales: “I tell my clients that if we can help someone, let’s focus on doing that, and if we do it in a methodical way we can also sell something – but we shouldn’t really be selling something to people we can’t actually help.”
What’s the Goal of Qualifying Prospects? [1:14]
Liston explains: “The goal of qualifying a prospect is to make sure we’re spending time with people we can actually help, and that people we can actually help are spending time with us.
“If I’m qualifying people properly, a prerequisite is that I understand who my perfect-fit client is – I call them PFCs. If I understand who my PFC is I can more quickly qualify a prospect, but if I don’t know who my PFC is I’ll start asking things around budget, which is sort of the lazy man’s way of qualifying a prospect.”
He underlines that if he can then match the person he’s UAE Phone Number talking to to his PFC, then he automatically knows they’ll likely have the budget anyway – so that doesn’t need to be covered.
“If my PFC is a $10 million company, then I don’t need to ask them if they can afford a $5-10k per month budget,” he says.
How Do You Determine What Looks Like a Qualification and What Doesn’t? [12:28]
“In order to determine if they’re qualified or not, we need to know what ‘qualified’ is. And then the question is, how far away from that definition are they?” Liston says.
He explains that the time to decide whether this lead is qualified is not on the phone call – it’s prior to that.
“I’m a big fan of saying ‘let’s put some brainpower and energy and effort into figuring out what are deal-breaker qualification steps, and what are nice-to-haves or preferences?’”
He says: “If I asked ‘what are you doing for lead gen or marketing right now?’ And they said ‘oh, we don’t have any leads’, I would say ‘well I have courses and products you can buy for that, but you’re not right for my coaching services. You don’t have the right problem for me.
“Being clear about the problems you can solve is the easiest way to do this.”
To make sure your sales emails make the cut, you need to get away from sending thousands and thousands of generic emails to targets identified by purchasing huge lists of contact details. In short, you need to get dynamic.
Affinity Groups: What Are They (& Why Should You Care)? [1:26]
If you’re going to build dynamic prospect lists, you first need to understand the importance of affinity groups. In other words, cohorts of people connected by a common interest or purpose. Because basic audience targeting – defining your ICP and persona, and finding people who match up to those criteria – just doesn’t cut it anymore.
But why?
Mark explains it this way: of your total addressable market, only 3% are actively looking to buy. Another 7% are open to buying. “That leaves 90% who aren’t interested in buying. If you’re just doing persona-based messaging or targeting…only 10% of them may actively be buying. The rest aren’t.”
That’s why you need to get smart and go after prospects based on more than just their location, job role, and company size. You need to understand the indicators that show someone is ready to buy from you right now. And you need to find affinity groups of people displaying those indicators.
How to Identify and Reach Your Affinity Groups [3:10]
Mark has put together 14 playbooks for targeting your affinity groups. But before we talk about those, you need to understand the four key steps to reaching those all-important prospects who are demonstrating buying signals:
Understand the source where you can find people who belong to an affinity group
Research them and enrich that data with contact information
Create messaging that you can send to them
Launch your campaign
What to Look for in a Lead Generation Service
The top three things to look for in a lead gen service are CRM integration, search criteria, and additional automation support.
CRM integration can help you and your team use your new service with ease. It allows your lead gen service to merge with your existing database so that you avoid duplicating efforts, contacts, and data entry.
The search criteria that your lead gen service offers can be all the difference between mediocre leads and qualified leads. Outside of account and location, look for platforms that support your specific needs. For example, if you offer recruiting services, you might be interested in a lead gen platform that can find accounts that are hiring.
Finally, look for additional features that can support your prospecting. For example, some lead gen services can enrich your data with additional information that can add useful context to your database.
Our Top Eight Targeted Lead Generation Picks (and One Bonus)
1. LinkedIn Site Search
Pricing: free
This isn’t so much a tool, as it is a process for those who don’t have LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Sales Navigator is a really effective platform for building a list of targeted prospects. Because it’s such a powerful tool, there’s already a lot out there on how to use it. Check out Alex Berman’s quick video on how his team uses it, and why it’s so valuable.
However, for those of you who don’t have Sales Navigator (which can get pricey at $80/month), you may have found that finding prospects using LinkedIn search can be a pain.
Their search functionality is cumbersome, and you end up hitting their commercial limits quickly.
Thankfully, you can use Google search operators to find prospects, which allows you to find profiles more reliably, without touching your commercial limit.
To make this process extra fast, you can use a few simple formulas in Google Sheets, so you can paste in what you’re looking for (name, company, role, etc.), and have your Google searches generated for you.
To help you scale your LinkedIn outreach, Mailshake has recently added LinkedIn automation features that simplifies the process so you can connect with more prospects.
Check out the video below to see how it works, and click here to download your copy of the spreadsheet. it’s a view-only version of the doc, so you’ll need to click ‘file’ and ‘make a copy’ to get your own version.