Sales Prospecting: Using Clearbit, LeadIQ, and Bonjoro

The world is your oyster, it is up to you to find the pearls,” — Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness

Sales Prospecting Pursuit of Happyness Poster

If you’re in sales, you’ve probably figured that finding the right prospects is like finding these proverbial pearls. 

Sales Prospecting is one of the most integral aspects of a sales process. It is important to note that the terms ‘prospect’ and ‘prospecting’ mean completely different things in the sales world. A sales lead that is close to being qualified for an appointment with a closer is a prospect. Prospecting is the process of searching for potential customers, moving them through the sales funnel, and eventually converting them into revenue-generating customers.

A sales lead that is close to being qualified for an appointment with a closer is a prospect. Click To Tweet Prospecting is the process of searching for potential customers, moving them through the sales funnel, and eventually converting them into revenue-generating customers. Click To Tweet

Sales prospecting can take up more than half of a sales rep’s work hours. In today’s fast-paced world, time management can only get you back so many minutes. It’s sales prospecting tools that help you find prospects faster, remove manual tasks for sales reps, and save you the real meat of the day. 

A few weeks ago, we hosted Patrick Barnes, co-founder, and CEO of Advocately for a webinar on going from 0-100 trial signups. In the webinar, Patrick spoke about how tools such as Clearbit and LeadIQ can be used to take the sales prospecting game up by a few notches.

Build the perfect customer list

Building the perfect customer list is vital if you want your business to grow. Bear in mind that these customers should be a realistic fit for your current solution and not an aspirational one. They should meet your criteria in terms of specific pain points, industry vertical, company size, their existing technology ecosystem—parameters that allow you to create a list having at least 500 companies, if not more.

This isn’t about buying lead lists that give you the contact details of 3000 companies and taking the top 500 out of them. It is about taking that list of 3000 companies, analyzing them, and then drilling down to the 500 that meet your specific business needs.  

For example, Advocately—an intuitive software platform that helps B2B SaaS businesses build brand advocates on websites such as G2 Crowd, Capterra, etc. looked at B2B SaaS companies that were already leveraging these review sites. They were able to narrow down their list by looking specifically for companies which were investing in paid campaigns and thereby go after the right audience for their product.  

TL;DR Start by building a list of 500 companies that are a realistic fit for your current product/service. Click To Tweet

Related Videos:

Nichole Elizabeth on identifying your ideal customers

Amaan Nathoo on identifying your most and least ideal customer profiles

Finding the right contacts with Clearbit and LeadIQ

Once you have the list of 500 companies that you’re intending to go after, you need to find the right contacts in each of these companies. While there are many ways to do this, here are some tools and techniques that are a cut above the rest.

Clearbit Prospector

Sales Prospecting Clearbit Prospector

 

While Clearbit offers a suite of business intelligence APIs to help companies find more information on their customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud, the one we would be examining here is Prospector. Prospector is a paid tool which allows you to upload a list of company domains and specify job titles that you think are relevant, the API then returns verified email IDs that you can then reach out to.  

LeadIQ

Sales Prospecting LeadIQ

LeadIQ offers a nifty lead capture Chrome extension that enables its users to find prospects, discover emails and contact information of potential customers online.

Sales Prospecting LeadIQ Chrome

Once you have your list of ideal customers ready and you find their profiles on LinkedIn or AngelList, the LeadIQ Chrome extension can be used to capture lead data individually via browsing their LinkedIn or AngelList profiles, or to build an amazing prospecting list via batch capturing Linkedin search results, one page a time.

This lead data is stored under specific campaigns in LeadIQ. These campaigns can be accessed via their web app and downloaded as CSV files.

We recommend that you give these two sales prospecting tools a spin today, and feel free to share any others that we missed. We’d love to know what else forms a part of your sales playbook!

lead management cta

Bonus: Delighting your Prospects

Andy Hanselman of ‘Thinking in 3D’ fame has a fairly simple checklist on what constitutes a delightful experience:  

  • It produces a ‘wow’ reaction!
  • It appears spontaneous or unexpected!
  • It’s the personal touch!
  • It makes the customer feel valued!
  • It’s genuine… and…
  • It creates a ‘talking point’!

You’ve spent a considerable amount of time building your ideal customer list and then finding the right contacts at these companies. But let’s face it, your prospects probably receive hundreds of such sales-y emails every day. How do you then make yourself heard, stand out from the crowd?

Don’t just say hello, say Bonjoro!

Sales Prospecting Bonjoro

Bonjoro is a personal 1-1 video messaging app to welcome, thank, and connect with your customers. Bonjoro has both web and mobile apps that enable you to create simple, short personalized selfie videos which you can then share via email. You can customize these emails with your own logo, create a specific call to action, and add a personalized text message. 

Instead of a conventional introductory email, try shaking things up a little by sending personalized 30-second elevator pitches via Bonjoro. While this may be a little time consuming if you have a lot of prospects to go after, it is bound to work like magic because it’s personal.

Don’t make your prospects feel like they’re just an email ID on a list, go that extra mile and delight them. Click To Tweet

What tools form a part of your sales and marketing stack? Let us know in the comments section below.


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