I am responsible for lead generation at snapADDY GmbH. My daily work revolves around determining together with my team the sources for acquiring suitable leads and preparing them for our sales department. In addition, we design the lead generation and lead processing workflow in such a way that there are no unnecessary unforeseen issues. When we use the term "lead," we distinguish between companies that are potential customers and contact persons. For us, one always includes the other, and of course, several contacts in the same company can be good leads.
Below, I will share with you our experience during these six years in outbound sales. It would be a great pleasure for us to know that you can use some of our experiences for your sales.
We use four sources for our lead search: LinkedIn Sales Navigator, trade show exhibitor directories, trade show visits, and Pipedrive - our CRM system. Regardless of your industry or your company, these four sources should be useful for you to apply according to your needs.
It is possible to use LinkedIn without the Sales Navigator to search for contacts. Here you can quickly find a suitable contact using simple filters (region, career level, industry, keywords, and company name). In case you use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify companies you can use filters such as the number of current employees (per department) or staff volume to narrow down the number of companies in the results. Save your search criteria in case the list of results is promising. LinkedIn will notify you when leads match your search criteria and you will avoid having to go through the entire list again.
My tip for using LinkedIn: Use the lead and account lists differently than LinkedIn suggests i.e. to exclude all leads seen from future searches. To do this, simply save them in a list such as "Uninteresting leads" or "Existing account in CRM system." Your notification list may quickly become saturated, but a more targeted search will be much more successful.
Trade shows and exhibitor directories
Do you participate or attend trade shows? Then you know the possibilities to get in touch with interesting people, potential customers, partners or suppliers. At snapADDY, lead generation through trade fairs starts long before the trade fair itself. We are interested in all companies that visit a trade fair because our products can be used in any industry. That's why exhibitor directories are worth their weight in gold to us.
We have created an internal script to optimize the processing of these directories. It uses our software to enrich the data in the exhibitor lists. For example, we add the company size, industry, LinkedIn company profile, address, email, and phone number of all exhibitors. In addition, we merge the data with our CRM system. In this way, in the lead generation process, we can exclude exhibitors with whom we are already in contact or those who are not interesting to us due to their size or region.
For the actual trade fair visit, we use our snapADDY VisitReport tool. In the app, we have created a questionnaire to facilitate the preparation for the trade fair and to check it with interested parties. The app is connected to our CRM system. In this way, all of our organization's data is available to the trade fair sales department. Our colleagues can easily access the app using their smartphones and use it at the trade fair, even offline. After the trade show, we can transfer the questionnaires and contacts to the CRM system with a few clicks. If you are interested, you can contact me or my colleagues in our sales department to get to know the application in a demo session.
Pipedrive – CRM System
We generate warm leads through our CRM system. Pipedrive offers the option to identify website visitors based on their IP address. This allows us to see which companies are interested in our products and find a suitable contact person via LinkedIn.
In addition, Pipedrive stores all the companies we have already had contact with. In the past, we couldn't qualify the vast majority because we did receive no response at all or even an unjustified "No, thank you" in response to our inquiry. As long as we have no major reasons for the loss, in our case, the lack of a suitable CRM or the absence of trade fair visits, we reactivate these deals at regular intervals. For this, my colleagues create manual reactivations as an activity or certain automation reactivates the deal, depending on the reason why the original one went cold. In addition, we regularly check all companies that do not have a pending deal but meet our lead criteria. To do this, we provide colleagues with shared filters so that everyone can search for reactivations independently. We also use a "Sales" user in the CRM which has no owner. All deals from this user are available to all salespeople.
The key to an effective lead capture process is an orderly and up-to-date CRM system. With snapADDY DataQuality, we have developed a product that allows us to do just that. Feel free to contact me if you would like to clean and enrich your data in a specific DataCleansing project or if you would like to always keep the data quality in your CRM system at the best possible level with snapADDY DataQuality.
