Ryan O’Donnell

Ryan runs a $1 Million dollar business using two tools to generate B2B sales via email. He is Co-Founder of SellHack and Replyify, with 96 hours a month saved automating prospect list building, sending cold emails, and following up.

Replyify allows users to automate Cold Emails & Follow-ups. It places the sales process on autopilot with effortless drip marketing.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Ryan’s success

Result if you follow the steps in Ryan’s session

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Transcript

If you don’t have clients, rather than you just guessing who your ideal customer is, we’re gonna go to step 2.
In step 2, I’m assuming you’re in a market where you have competitors or companies offering a similar solution.

Go and make a list of those competitors. Go to their websites and I want you to find their testimonial section. I want you to find who’s giving them testimonials.

I want you to go to their Twitter page and find who’s tweeting at them saying, “I love your product, I love your service, this is great, that’s great…” That’s if you don’t have customers.

If you do have customers, I want you to look at your last 10-20 deals that you’ve done (if you have that many). I want you to make a list of all the people who’ve actually bought your product.

We’re gonna do some manual research. In the manual research, start where the fish are.

Most of the folks that you’re going after are going to be on LinkedIn. I want you to go to LinkedIn and take either the list of your current clients or your competitor’s clients.

Spend 2-5 minutes per profile. Find each person on LinkedIn and in a separate window on your computer,

Open up an Excel document. In that excel document you’re gonna have name, email address, company, company size, Industry, location, keywords and testimonials. You’re gonna have those headers and columns.

Person by person, you’re gonna go through and look at their profile. Make a note. What’s their title? What’s their job title? What’s their company size? What’s their industry? Copy and paste their description and put that in the keywords section. Look at the people who’ve given them testimonials. You want to see what people are saying about them.

Go through this exercise for those 10-20 people and when you’re done, look in that spread sheet and start to sort and filter all the data.

You’re looking for clusters, do I have – of these 20 people, are five of them vice presidents? (That’s interesting) Of these five vice presidents, are they are they all from a certain industry or company size?

Let’s keep going. The way they describe themselves in the description, are there different words that they use like sass, for software as a service, or cloud?

We’re looking for commonalities here. And what we do at that point is based on these VP cluster that we just created, all of a sudden that just became your segment 1.

Look for your second cluster. Maybe you have 2 founders or 2 CEOs or 2 presidents. That’s your segment.

What we’re doing off of that is we’re going back to LinkedIn, running an advanced search for vice-presidents in the marketing and advertising industry, company size, 1-200 for example and you run that list and that list is going to give you based on that search you’re gonna get thousands of people who matched that search criteria.

We’re gonna start right there. On LinkedIn a nice thing you can do there is they’ve been changing the design a lot. So depending on what design you have.

There’s a gear icon at the top right of the page or if you don’t see a gear icon look for something that says “Save Search”. Okay? I want you to save that search. Your next step once you save the search, you can actually select, the option for daily, weekly, or monthly. And LinkedIn’s can actually send you an Email, every day, every week, or every month for all the new people who have entered into that search.

The people who would not have come up yesterday, they’re gonna email you those people. For folks on this call who have been selling for a while, you know that’s prospecting gold.

For folks who haven’t been selling, that’s called a “Trigger event”. Something happened, right? They got a new job, they got a promotion. What happens when a new job or promotion happens? If that person wants to stand out, they want to make a difference, they want to hit their first couple weeks or first month or two and really start to move the needle.

That’s when they are exceptionally more receptive to your message that could help them achieve that goal. That’s a really important step that I see a lot of people skipping. The data is there and it’s right in front of you.

We’re not even in into the automation component yet. This is research that you have to do at the beginning to make every step you automate in the future as effective as possible.