Advanced Lead Generation: What is It?

Chapter 1: Finding and enriching leads, on a scale

The first step to any outreach campaign is to create the audience of leads you’re going to engage with. On LaGrowthMachine, you can either do social selling using our Linkedin audience creation or use your own data that LaGrowthMachine will enrich for you.

Defining your persona

To create your outreach audience, your first need to understand the buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of who you’re selling to/engaging, described by qualitative characteristics firmographic (job position, seniority, company size, years of experience), needs-based or value-based segmentation…

• If you’re a SaaS company providing expensive back-end integration, one of your persona may be CTOs of startups that 1) have raised more than $5 million and have 2) with a team of 10 developers minimum
• If you’re an SEO agency specialized in e-commerce, your persona might be CMOs, marketing managers, or CMOs of a company with monthly minimum traffic of 50k visitors/month, that has raised more than $1.5 million
• And so on…

Defining your persona is the first step to social selling with LaGrowthMachine and requires you to analyze who is buying from you and their motivation. For more information on effective market segmentation, visit SalesHacker’s Outbound Sales Science guide.

Social prospecting with LaGrowthMachine

Since LaGrowthMachine, just like any sales prospecting tool, was built to help sales development representatives be more efficient with their time by automating trivial tasks, one of our personas includes their boss, the Head of Sales of high-growth companies.

To prospect for Head of Sales, go to Leads and launch a Linkedin Search. In our case, we’re going to search for Heads of Sales in Paris with the following parameters:

• Title: Head of Sales
• Location: Paris Area

‍https://www.youtube.com/embed/VSyeO-B3iXY

Using your own data

If you have your own data, you can upload it to LaGrowthMachine and enrich it. To do so, go to Leads and click on “Import lead” and then click on “Import CSV”.

If you are using your own data, don’t forget to use the “Visit & Enrich” actions at the beginning of your sequence. LaGrowthMachine will automatically enrich your leads, looking for emails, Twitter accounts, and Linkedin details.

Chapter 2: Engaging with your leads

Social selling via emails has become so mainstream that your leads probably get solicited every day. Blasting emails and generic Linkedin requests will have a very low chance of converting. In order to stand out, it is necessary to have a conversational approach by first warming up your lead and then getting in touch based on the lead’s behavior.

Step 1: Warming Up Leads

Warming up a lead isn’t easy. Probably they’ve never heard of you nor your company. We break down this barrier by interacting with him and creating proximity.

In this sequence, LaGrowthMachine will automatically:

• Visit their profile: this will tend to create a visit back during which the lead may search for more information from your profile and company
• Wait for a day
• Like his latest tweet and follow him, then visit his Linkedin profile again. You could also search for a tweet containing keywords of interest. In our case, we could use growth. We recommend doing this with your company’s Twitter account to further demonstrate what you do

People can’t help being curious about who showed interest in them. These subtle actions almost always result in your lead researching you or your company. Moreover, it’ll give the impression of real human behavior and genuine research.

Step 2: A brief intro

You’ve created proximity and trust with basic human interactions. It’s now time to contact them. Linkedin has a 300 character-limit on connection requests. Your copy has to be straight to the point.

We recommend focusing on the perceived value of our tool and close with a demo proposition as CTA.

Having first warmed up the lead and demonstrating the value of your product should start to result in positive replies. It’s most likely however that you’ll have to continue chasing your lead to provide more value to convince them to do a call with you.

Step 3: Switching to email

Prospecting on Linkedin alone isn’t the best medium to expect a reply. Your lead might now be in a receptive mindset while scrolling but also they might be overwhelmed on LinkedIn by similar requests.

It’s time to show how relentless you are by pursuing him via personalized email. Hopefully, it’s very easy to follow up via email with LaGrowthMachine, since you’ve used the enrich function to automatically find their email.

On emails, you have no theoretical limit on length, but avoid boring out potential leads with long emails. Nobody likes to read long sales pitches: precision is of the essence.

In our sequence, we’ve built our first email as follows:

• First, we mention our previous attempt at connecting via Linkedin. In our case, it’s a perfect way of introducing the power of automation via LaGrowthMachinewith a brief reminder of what we do

• Proving you’re the best at what you do with social proof: segment your prospect by customer type/persona and use custom attributes to explain how customers matching their segment use your company to their benefit. For more research on how to segment and build custom attributes, do check out Dogpatch’s on writing personalized emails at scale.
  
  Here’s what we use:
• {{customAttribute1}} matches with 3 clients from the same segment.
• {{customAttribute2}} matches with the value -mostly statistics of improved conversion rate or increased volume- they get from LaGrowthMachine.
• Closing with a demo proposal as CTA. You might notice we do not provide directly a Calendly link, as we believe this shows a lack of appreciation and demonstrates a mass-emailing approach. Though we send a Calendly link if they reply to easily schedule the call.

For an in-depth article on how to write great cold emails, check out Startupgrind’s 6 creative ways to use cold emails.

Pro Tip: Using Status to A/B emails

You may notice that for each email, we are counting each time each email is 1) open, 2) clicked, and 3) replied using “Status”. These are basic metrics to compare one email copy to another. Constantly adding these to your emails will allow you to A/B compare email copies and see which performs best, i.e.:

• Which has the best open rate: this can be affected by the email title –SalesForce reports that 33% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone-, the identity of the sender, and a warmup strategy you performed before sending the email.
• Which has the best click rate: this can be affected by the quality of the content you provide to your lead and if it matches its interests. Good segmentation is key.
• Which has the best reply rate: an overall factor of all of the above, the quality of the copy, and the CTA you chose

Step 4: So you spent time on our website?

By now, if your lead hasn’t replied, it might be a sign that he isn’t interested in your product. Let’s assume they just didn’t have time to review or reply and send another email. This time taking into account what they’ve done.

Remember, links and attachments we send through emails can be tracked. If the lead visits a link, it must be that you got his curiosity, but not yet his attention.

Let’s use that knowledge to our advantage to yet again reassure the lead with behavioral personalization. Looking carefully at the template, you’ll see that we divide our actions based on two behaviors:

• “Did not reply” AND “Has clicked”
• “Did not reply” AND “Has not clicked”

The former allows us to write an email mentioning the page they visited.

Don’t forget to always provide value that demonstrates the power of what you’re selling. In our case, we are sharing our Advanced Lead Generation guide using LaGrowthMachine and providing our high positive reply rate. Given this is addressed to Heads of Sales, it will definitely raise interest.

For the latter (i.e. hasn’t clicked), we use the same guide with a different opener, knowing we’re on harassing mode and owning it.

Step 5: Last chance

If your lead hasn’t didn’t reply by then, there is a high probability that he isn’t interested. Let’s give it a last try by going all-in with that last email. In our case, we send our other guides to recruiting and fundraising. Other use cases may raise interests

Chapter 3: Results

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