Hi,

Getting enough leads is hard, right? It’s the primary focus of all the sales leaders we spoke with over the last months. Getting a seat at the table of promising prospects has always been hard, but what we see today is a whole new level.

And it’s not hard to explain why it is so hard to obtain enough leads. There are two major factors in play:

1. It’s the economy. What comes up must go down. With increasing prices worldwide, it’s coming down for sure.
2. The competition for attention is cruel. The amount of ads, emails, and calls is staggering if you have the “right” job title.

You and I have been in sales long enough to know that you can’t change these things. Learning from it and adapting your way of working is the only way to keep growing.

If you want to sit at the right table, I have some interesting insights on leveraging tech to do the heavy lifting for you.

The number one issue we see with our clients is that their market approach is insufficient. It comes down to two major ingredients:

• The target group
• The “touches”

I’ll explain both and show you what tools can help you get to the bottom of this.

In most B2B sales teams the target groups are not specific enough. A list of hundreds of people to approach is simply the death of every lead gen campaign.

To stand out in the busy crowd, you must know who you’re targeting. That means you must divide your target groups into smaller, homogeneous ones.

For one of our clients, we made 48 lists! We filtered the companies using industry and revenue growth as the major parameters. Next, we targeted three job functions and crafted a list per job title, industry, and growth rate.

Where do you get this information to craft those lists? The easiest way is to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to get the latest information on people and companies. Those lists now sit in Sales Nav, but that’s useless to you. Even though LinkedIn does not allow you to move this data anywhere else, it doesn’t mean you can’t. Google it and add the name of your CRM. You’ll see ;-)

Once you have the lists in your CRM, you want to enrich this information. Here, you have a huge amount of options. Sales Intelligence is one of the biggest tool stacks out there. I’d like to point out two:

• Clay: This little fellow is now half a unicorn and way more than data enrichment alone. It’s a full orchestration suite that combines several data sources and can send out personalized emails.
• Lusha: One of the cheapest and richest tools out there. It’s not perfect, but this one might blow your mind if you are on a budget.

Now, you have your lists and all the data you need. It’s time for action.

Here’s where it gets complicated. Your potential buyer is not waiting for your email or call. She’s busy. If you are an email god, you might be able to send an email and book yourself a meeting.

If you want to book that meeting today, you must go multi-touch. It’s a well-orchestrated flow made by marketing and sales together. It combines several channels and is super-targeted. Hence, there is a staggering number of lists you need to have. You want to go from low-invasive methods like SEO, SEA, social media ads, and blogs to more invasive methods like DMs, emails, and calls.

Better marketing and sales tools like HubSpot, Active Campaign, and SalesForce combined with specific channel tools (like Expandi for LinkedIn and LeadInfo for your website) can automate and measure the whole flow. With these tools, you design a new path for every activity you see, like a profile visit after a LinkedIn post or a website visit.

The trick is to stick to your target lists and treat them all individually and hyper-relevantly. That means you have a lot of streams to manage. That’s why we always advise picking out one list with the most potential and building the flow only for that specific list. Learn from it, fine-tune it, and then move to the next.

The fantastic thing about this approach is that you are developing always-on campaigns where, eventually, there is a constant flow of leads. Marketing entirely focuses on iterating these flows, whereas sales follow up on these leads and provide more data.

It’s not. It’s engineering. I firmly believe sales success can be designed. We’ve seen it happen many times. The most common mistake I see sales team make is one list + one channel. It’s no longer working. You need to break it down into small pieces and go top-level bit by bit.

One thing I know for sure is that you can’t do that manually.

These are the posts I published on LinkedIn that are worth checking out:

When we founded Stryfes, we knew we were up for a challenge—a consultancy firm in a developing and unknown area. In the beginning, we found it hard to get new clients. It stood out that many sales leaders were weary of all those consultants who promised them staggering growth but never delivered.

Even though we were extremely confident in what we could do, we had to take their reluctance seriously. We started selling Discovery Workshops to show our capabilities.

What was meant to end today is one of the most amazing things to do for me. In just 4 hours or 2 times four hours in more complex organizations, we usually find 15 to 30 issues in a sales process, from small to big.

All of the sales leaders, who were initially skeptical, said the same thing after we presented them with the report: You found all this in just 4 hours? That’s a complete roadmap…

Those discovery workshops allow me to peek into several sales teams every month. As we look for what’s wrong in the process, we also see the awesome stuff happening, from super consultants in a sales role who know their customers and their struggles to smart usage of processes and tools that inspire us to go further.

With all this in mind, I want to give something back to everyone supporting us by reading this newsletter.

I’m giving away one workshop for free in July 2024. If you want it, reply to this email with your main question for us. I’ll hand-pick the winner. Bring it on!

And don’t forget: