There are two primary ways to get potential customers into your sales funnel: inbound and outbound...
How Lead Rater Works
Our new app—Lead Rater—is now in beta. In this post, we’re going to give you the rundown on how it works and what you can expect when you work with us to establish an outbound sales motion. Before we jump in, it’s important to note that we discuss why we are launching this app in this blog post.
What does an ongoing partnership look like?
What else can you do other than send me leads?
Watch a Walkthrough
If you don’t feel like reading about it, watch this walkthrough by Intro CRM Founder Harris Kenny, explaining every step of the way. Not only does he show you the Lead Rater app, he also explains the context behind what we’re trying to accomplish in each stage of the process. In this case, he uses our own company as an example.
How do you get started?
Before we start our work in the app, we ask new customers to fill out an intake form using one of our favorite applications, Arrows. Once they have filled out their intake form, we use that information to create a customized ICP or Ideal Customer Profile so we know how to best spend our time when it comes to finding new leads.
Why waste time finding people who don’t need what you’re selling? We will work together to get crystal clear on your ICP as it’s our foundation for building a successful sales process.
After we build an ICP, we start finding leads! We deliver our leads to you via Lead Rater. Lead Rater is a web app with download options for your mobile phone and desktop. The app was built with no-code and started in spreadsheets. That’s right, the old reliable spreadsheet. We delivered lead lists using spreadsheets for six months—refining the process and the inputs—before building Lead Rater.
We’re using high-quality databases to ensure the leads information and the contact info we’re delivering are accurate, current, and relevant.
Once your first batch is delivered, we ask you to rate the leads (companies) and contacts on a scale of 1-5. If you rate a lead lower than 3, the app asks you to input some feedback, allowing us to pick better leads for you in the future.
What does an ongoing partnership look like?
Our team of researchers takes your feedback and immediately begins implementing changes, which we document in your new Sales Playbook.
Using the information you provide us, we refine your next batch of leads. The following week your next batch of leads is delivered. Lately, we’re able to provide a lead list with 4- and 5-star ratings by the second (occasionally the third) list we provide.
It’s our goal to deliver you lead lists containing 4- and 5-star ratings as soon as possible.
What else can you do other than send me leads?
After we niche down on the types of leads you’re looking for, we shift our focus to helping you give your sales cycle a facelift. Or create it if you don’t have anything in place today.
We’re first looking for consistently high-ranking lead lists and a deep understanding of your ICP. Once those objectives are complete, we move on to outreach. We develop outreach templates and messaging you can use to improve the success of your sales cycle.
For our customers using Close, we go ahead and add all these directly into your account to make your life a breeze! We import your leads and templates with the custom fields and email sequences. If you aren’t using Close, we send it over so you can use your platform of choice.
We continue to send you high-quality leads each week, and after we build you new messaging and templates, we start to dig into reporting and focus on the performance. The first thing we aim to improve is your open rate. Our goal is to get your open rate over 50%.
As we get your open rate on the rise, we continue to focus our efforts on the effectiveness of your sales cycle. The next step is fine-tuning the action people are taking based on your email. What kind of responses are we getting? How can we increase your response rate of people excited to learn more about you?
When we hit a roadblock in prospecting or optimizing your sales cycle, we step back and review your ICP. It’s beneficial to regularly ask questions like, do we try a different industry? What about another contact level? Do our technographic filters need to change?
Beyond these things, there is a fundamental question about your offer. What are you offering to prospective customers? Have you found a way to de-risk it, so it is easy for them to learn more?
As you can tell, this is an iterative process.
Where can I start?
We’d love to show you how Lead Rater—combined with our outbound sales processes—can help grow your business. We can send you a pre-recorded video, or jump on a call and talk specifics. We’re here to help!