A Little Legwork Upfront And Marketing Automation Awaits!

What I am going to share with you today is really powerful. I’m saying this because I’ve used these exact techniques first hand in my own business.

Prior to moving into marketing technology I used to work in sales in the financial industry. While I was there I was put through the ringer of grinding for prospects manually. My experience in that world drove me out of wall street and led me into the marketing automation space where I realized there was a better way to prospect.

As a marketer and entrepreneur I’ve actually been able to build some of these tools myself and now I can finish all my sales related activities in a half hour as opposed to spending half my entire day focused on them. Now I have time to speak with clients and focus on where my businesses are growing.  
While automation is our end goal it’s important to build your system step by step before you can reap the rewards. Here’s my approach to how you can research prospects and begin putting automation into practice.


 

Gleaning A Massive Boost From Testimonials And Social Media

This research methodology works even if you don’t have any current clients and you’re starting at revenue zero. You can simply move to step 2 and begin studying your closest market competitors and who they are working with.

If you do have clients then make a list of your last 10 – 20 successful deals to start with. This process is manual, but it ultimately scales into a tidy automated process down the line.

Either look on your own site or your competitors for all and any testimonials. Now go and research those clients on social media networks like Twitter or LinkedIn. Also take a glance at who’s tweeting at them and identifying themselves as users of their products or services.

Create an excel sheet for each contact you identify. Include, names, job titles, email addresses, company name, company size, industry, location, keywords, and testimonials as your columns. On each profile note down as much of this information as available.

After you complete this first run through you will be able to sort and filter the information and look for “clusters” of data. Maybe you realize that many contacts have the same job title, company size, or have similar keywords like “SaaS” or “cloud.” This will be specific to your company and field.

As you identify these clusters they become prospective customer segments that you then can search for on LinkedIn using an advanced search. When you run these specified searches you will get literally thousands of new contacts who fit the criteria you’ve already identified.

Now here’s the cool part, you can actually save these searches and set LinkedIn to send you daily, weekly, or monthly updates to all the new contacts who fit your customer segments. For example if someone gets promoted into a new job or changes companies and now they fit your criteria you’ll know about it right away! These are “trigger events” and they are prospecting gold!

Now you have not only a hot lead but you also have an “in” to connect with them. You can congratulate them on their new job and see if you’ll be a good fit to work together.

This is just one way that you can slowly transition your processes into automated procedures that can make your business run smoothly while you focus on the big picture issues that require your full attention.
 

Action Steps

  1. Study your past customers and/or competitor testimonials.
  2. Create an excel sheet that lists out their relevant prospecting information.
  3. Identify trends and clusters in this data then turn them into customer segments.
  4. Run the customer segments as LinkedIn searches.
  5. Save the searches and automate LinkedIn to send you regular updates to you by email.
  6. Go and contact your prospects!

 

Result You Will Achieve

Receive lists of new prospects who fit your criteria automatically from LinkedIn (plus a bonus research method to identify customer segments).

Mentor: Ryan O’Donnell

Co-Founder at SellHack & Replyify, 96 hours a month saved automating prospect list building, sending cold emails, and following up.

This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.