Building a prospecting program is hard work, and it can easily chew up many wasted hours if you put inefficient processes in place.
The same holds for managing relationships. You need the right phone and email cadence to keep prospects engaged without overloading them.
By choosing the right tools for the job, you’ll maximize productivity, minimize wasted time, and never lose track of a prospect’s position in your funnel.Here are some popular tools to get you started.
Tools for Building Your Prospect List
Before you look at the tools, you need to decide whether you plan to build a list, or buy one.
Purchasing a list is unreliable, and should only be a last resort. Use the right tools, and you can scrape prospect contact information, with minimal effort, from the websites and social networks your prospects use most. Backed by data science, these tools will serve you far better than a purchased list.
Before choosing a tool you need to:
Define your target audience (job title, company size, and other critiria)
Choose a data source
Upload data in your CRM of preference
- Broadlook Capture – Broadlook allows you to capture contact information from social networks, search results, documents, and any website. Captured information is then appended using Broadlook’s proprietary databases and crawlers, so you get the most accurate results possible.
- Salesloft Prospector – Salesloft’s Prospector extension for Chrome can scrape prospect contact information from social networks like LinkedIn, and Google searches.
- Data.com – From Salesforce.com, Data.com is a database containing contact and D&B information with millions of listings.
- Sidekick for Business – Another large database, Sidekick’s offering includes information on over 16 million businesses. Filter results by industry, location, size, and revenue to hone in on the exact prospects you seek.
Tools for Managing Email Cadence
Timing is everything in email marketing. Send too many messages, and you’re just asking to end up in the spam folder. Too few, and you’re marketing never gets a chance to make a real impact. You want to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
Improve productivity by testing and continually improving your email marketing, and moving relationships through the sales cycle with a minimal investment of time from your team.
Building a Cadence
- Build email templates for each segment of your prospect list
- Schedule emails to send at the right time
- Send follow up email if they don’t reply
Suggested tools:
- Outreach.io – Outreach is focused on one thing, and it does its job exceptionally well. The big-ticket items are that Outreach allows you to set touchpoints for prospects that are automatically executed, detect replies, and follow up if no reply is received. It also features analytics and A/B testing, so you can find out which messages convert, and why.
- Sidekick for Business – In addition to its database of contact information, Sidekick allows you to schedule emails, track open and click-through rates, and receive notifications when a prospect visits your website. It also features a tool to help your team create templates and send email to prospects.
- Salesloft Cadence – With Cadence, you set your sales process up front. Cadence provides email templates, and sends reminders to make sure you adhere to your pre-set process. When a prospect replies, they are automatically removed from the cadence.
- Salesforce.com Enterprise Workflows – If you use Salesforce and want to limit the number of tools you use, the Enterprise plan lets you create automated workflows. While lacking the advanced features of some other tools, workflows can be used to set up an email cadence.
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