Who is the right person to talk to when you want to advance a prospect through the pipeline? When is the right time to talk to that person, and how should you do it? Today’s guest has some ideas.
Joining the podcast today is Tukan Das, CEO of a company called LeadSift. Tukan is here to talk about whether or not you really can predict who is ready to buy, what a good work flow is, and how you work those leads so that you can increase the yield and lower the time it takes to get from the initial conversation to close.
Episode Highlights:
- The statistics mentioned on LeadSift’s website
- Why Tuakan started the LeadSift tool
- Gauging intent data
- Hyper personalizing sales conversations
- Building an ideal signal profile
- The steps toward scaling
- How soon to jump into the middle term
- What comes after the middle term
- An exciting customer story
- How the audience can connect with Tukan
Resources:
Email: tdas@leadsift.com
Free Tool to Automate Research for prospecting
Transcript
Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Tukan Das. He’s the CEO of a company called LeadSift. He’s talking to me today out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. It’s quite an honor to be reaching out to the Canadians up there. What we’re talking about today is something that’s really focusing on how, who, and when do we talk to the right person to advance them into the pipeline.
You know that I’m all about predictability, and Tukan is as well. My first question to him is, can you really truly predict who is ready to buy, so that we’re not wasting time, that we’re maximizing our return on effort. As you all know, we put records into a funnel, into a list—whatever you want to call it—and we work really hard to figure out who of these hundreds of people are the ones that are ready to buy.
Tukan is going to talk to us today about whether or not you really can predict and what a good work flow is if you had that magic wand of predictability, how do you work those leads so that you can increase the yield, lower the time it takes to get from that initial conversation all the way to close.
Tukan, welcome to the podcast.
Tukan: Thanks a lot for having me. It’s an honor to be in the show. I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts around this super interesting and relevant topic.
Marylou: I’m on your website right now and I have to read this to our audience because they all get it. He has a promise on here, it says, “No more spray and pray.” That really hit home with me because I’m still hearing that people are doing that. What he says here is that, “We can buy those static lists from the list vendors. We can spend day and night on LinkedIn, trying to figure out who those people are. We can scrape the entire internet with all of our tools, but the cold hard truth,” according to Tukan, “is that only 3% of qualified leads are currently in the buying journey.”
How the heck do you know that, Tukan?
Tukan: That actual stat is not from us. We actually found that in one of the research that I believe Gartner did of serious decisions, they did that. It says, “Three percent of your total addressable market at any given point is in the market for the solution like yours, but 40% or something around that number is starting to be in the buying journey, more top of the funnel, and the remainder of them are happy, they are not looking.” That’s what the stats says.
Marylou: We have in our world, and I preach—it’s even in my book—that we call the hundred audience formula. That 3% number is the same number, even for us. We don’t rely on anything other than our data, now it’s millions of records because we started looking at this probably late 80s, early 90s. It’s been a while since we’ve been around.
Really, what it says is 3% are ready to buy now—we get a little bit more specificity—7% are somewhere on that ladder of level of awareness. They’re problem-aware may be, but they’re not necessarily vendor-savvy yet, or situation when these problems come up aware, that’s 10%. Ten percent is in the ballpark, in that bull’s eye. Then we have 30% who know they don’t want anything, they’re happy, they don’t even want to talk to you. The remaining 60, though, are somewhere along that level of awareness ladder of, “I didn’t even know I have a problem,” to “Yup. It’s on the docket. It’s an initiative. It’s not a high priority.”
We’re aligned and I’m happy to hear that the big boys who do these types of research are aligned with what we have, and we have even more specificity because we get down to levels of awareness. Given that, what got you going on this tool that you’ve put together?
Tukan: I’ll give a brief context about LeadSift and how it got you going in this. We started LeadSift around 2012. Our mission when we started LeadSift was around mining publicly available unstructured data to predict buying behavior. That was the goal. When we first started in 2012, it was more around consumer-facing brands. We are trying to predict when someone was going to buy a new car, or a new phone, or looking to buy a new house or a new credit card, looking to book a travel and things like that. That’s what we were focusing on, by crawling the public web. Trying to understand from the language, what they are saying, and then inferring or predicting when they would be looking to buy a product like that.
About 3½ years ago, we pivoted into the B2B sales intelligence […]. The mission is still the same, but instead of predicting who’s looking to buy a new phone or a car, we focused on when a company, or a person within that company would be looking to buy a new software or services for their company. That’s what our journey has been. Thankfully, our mission statement has remained the same. It’s just the application has changed.
Now, to answer your question or the thing that you stated, can you really predict when someone is in the market for your solution, at least in a B2B setting? I have some good news and bad news. The reality is, every marketer, every sales person wants to know that. Everyone wants to know who’s going to buy your product right now. If everyone knew, the problem would have been solved. It’s crazy. But unfortunately, that’s not the case. There is no one waving a flag and say, “Hey, I’m looking to buy a database software, or IT security software, or a sales intelligence software.” No one does that in a B2B setting.
Until and unless obviously they’re coming through a website, picking up the phone, calling you, emailing you, and saying, “Hey, I’m interested in buying.” Until that happens, it is always a prediction. That’s where this whole term or concept of buyer intent or intent data comes into play, which is really a probability of guessing where a company is in the buying journey of buying that solution.
Whenever you use the term probability, there is always a chance that it’s not going to be right, it’s not going to be if you say it’s 90% accurate, it might not be there, that they are not 90% in the buying journey. It might be 60% or something like that. That’s the reality. That’s the bad news.
The good news is, there are ways that you can get pretty good at making these predictions of when someone is looking to buy your solution, your software, or your services, so that you do not waste time spraying and praying and basically focus on the right accounts where more likely to be taking a meeting, who are more problem-aware, who are more willing to listen to what you have to offer because if they don’t buy now, maybe 3-6 months later, they might be interested in buying. That’s the good news.
Marylou: I have a question about the intent data. Here’s where I get stumbled up a little bit. When I work with clients and we’re looking at keywords or intent words, do you find that the client you work with actually know which words trigger the ability for us to gauge the level of intent or is your analytics or your engine supplying and helping the client figure out which words to use, look for, search for, for a given product or service?
What ingredients do the client help you with? Or is this purely you saying, “Hey, just give us all your content or comment data and we’ll come up with the magic list of the words, the phrases, the intentions to use in our process”?
Tukan: That’s a great question. I don’t think there is a fix set of keywords, or phrases, or terms that can indicate intent, at least when you’re looking at it from a keyword perspective. What we tell customers is, “Give us a list of your competitors.” That’s the first thing because we look at competitors and partners to infer intent. Other is, “There is a list of keywords that you are currently creating content about. Give us the topics.”
If you see people engaging with those topics that you are already creating content on, then we can try to find other people who are engaging in those topics. One thing that I’d like to add, is this whole idea of intent. There’s a bit of misconception out there.
Marylou: One hundred percent. A lot of confusion of yes.
Tukan: A lot. So I like to demystify it a little bit […] marketing perspective. According to me, there is no one single source of intent or there is no one single lens that you look at buying intent from, at least from a B2B setting. What I mean by that is, if someone is searching on Google for a specific term, that’s a pretty good sign of intent, but if you look for that specific term, let’s say it’s best marketing automation software, that’s how someone would search if they’re looking for a marketing automation software.
If you look for that exact term—those four key words—on the internet, no one writes like that on a blog. If you’re looking on the web for that kind of signal, you’re not going to find much intent there. Let’s look at marketing automation as a topic on its own, and see who are engaging that kind of content to figure out intent, that’s one side of it.
Other thing is, intent is not just keyword search or content consumption. It is a whole bunch of different things. Just diving into what are three things that someone can do from a sales perspective or marketing perspective right now, to define intent with the goal of predicting if someone is in the market, the first thing you need to do is what does indicate buying behavior? The buying behaviors are very different based on which industry you are in, what product you are selling.
To give an example, let’s say if you are selling anything to do in the sales intelligence space, a good buying behavior or indicator of buying behavior that someone might need a sales intelligence software is if you see a company aggressively hiring a whole bunch of SDRs or BDRs. That might be a good signal of intent.
It has got nothing to do with any keyword search, any topic research or just the fact that someone is going there, sales development or business development team, gives you an indication that they might be a sales acceleration tool, a sales intelligence software, and things that are auxiliary to that role. That could be a signal of intent. You need to understand what would be a buying behaviour for your software.
Let’s take a few other examples. For example, if you sell office furniture, which is not your SaaS software. For you, a buying behaviour would be, when you find out a company’s opening up a new office, or relocating. If you find that out, that would be a signal of intent.
Let’s take it even further. Let’s say you sell an IT security software. For you, your signal of intent would be if you go to a website and you notice that they don’t have a secured sign-in on their website. That could be a signal of intent.
A signal of intent or a buying behaviour is one and the same. It could be there is no activity. A classic example that I give to our customers is, let’s say you’re a content marketing agency. A signal of intent could be, that you look at a company that are functioning, that are growing, but they are not creating enough content; their competitor is creating a lot of content.
That difference that your competitor’s creating content and attracting traffic and you are not creating content, or blogs, or any content, is a signal of intent for a content marketing agency to talk to them saying, “Hey! You’re competing with these guys. They are absolutely killing it with their content strategy, we can help you create content.” That’s a signal of intent if you think about it.
Anyone, when they’re thinking of intent, it shouldn’t be that someone is researching about a keyword or a topic. It’s much, much broader than that. The first thing that I would suggest is, is to understand what would indicate buying behavior and then work back from there. If that makes sense.
Marylou: Yes. I’m a visual person, in my mind, graphically, I’ve drawn a bull’s eye in the middle, so I have a circle in the middle and then I have all these spokes coming out from that circle because the gravitational pull of multiple types of indicators all contribute to the—I love that term—signals of intent. I like it better than buying behavior, but that’s just my preference.
That allows you to think outside the box. Because I came in, you heard me say, “Hey Tukan, it’s all about keywords,” and you’re saying, “Well, partially, but there’s more to it than that. There is behavior, there’s activity, there’s action, or inactivity, or inaction. There’s a lot of different levers that are used to generate the intent index that then goes into a software system.” I’m totally loving this.
The biggest problem we have now, as you know, is this whole spray and pray, it’s still around. Mass email is still around, but there’s legislation coming up in the US, it’s already in Europe, the GDPR, that says, “Hey, you can’t be reaching out to hundreds of people. It’s got to be personalized,” and what you’re giving us is the ability to hyper personalize a conversation by understanding where the buyer is in his head at any given time.
I can just see that list fatigue probably goes down with your clients because we’re not over taking the list by touching so often that, it’s just thrown in the wastebasket type of thing. We’re just touching for the sake of touching. It’s what I call vanity touching. We’re just touching for the sake of touching with no conversion rate in mind. I love this.
Let’s do the one-two-three right now, so that audience really understands and give it to me in order. Step one, step two, step three, and then we’ll go on to what we can do middle term.
Tukan: In the immediate short term, what I would say is, first thing is, you draw that circle out and figure out what are the indicators these signals of intent for your industry. Figure that out, list all of these things out. It could be very well engagement with topics, but it is always, has to be much, much more than that. Let’s start all of those things. That’s the first thing.
Once you defined that, like what are all the different things, then comes an interesting task of I know if someone is moving an office, if they’re doing this, or they’re not doing this, that could be a good signal. How do I track it? Then comes the tracking part. In the short term, what I would suggest is, trying out simple, easy, and most importantly free tools that could help you get some of these information.
The first thing that I would do is use Google Alerts, and a lot of your audience probably are using it. Google Alerts’ pretty good, it has limitations. Twitter Search is a very good tool. Twitter has a probably good pulse on what’s going on. LinkedIn Sales Navigator, not a free tool, but I know a lot of sales people in their organizations are using it. LinkedIn Sales Navigator would be a good tool to help you track your accounts or active opportunities for some interesting signals.
Finally, this is a shameless plug, we just launched a free tool. It’s not even on our website, it’s that early, we’re just testing with some beta customers. It’s called Buzz. It’s buzz.leadsift.com. Basically what it does is, you can track in 10 of your top accounts that you’re trying to prospect, or it’s an active opportunity. We can track them to get some of these information, see if they are opening a new office, did they raise funding, are they aggressively hiring for certain roles, they launched a new product, and things like that that are automatically delivered to you so that you can then start taking those information and then focusing on the reaching out part of it. That would be the second thing that I would use a bunch of these different free tools.
The third thing that I would also do is, this is another set of tools that you can use, you can go to a website and then use them as Chrome Extensions. Few of them would be BuiltWith, which basically gives you information of what are the current tech stats they are using, because if you know what they are using, or what they are not using, that gives you an edge into saying, “Oh, I see you’re using this,” or “I see you’re not using any of these hence you should be using this.”
Other tools would be Alexa Ranking. One classic example I was going to give is, let’s say you are selling a software that has something to do with an ecommerce space, whether it’s a shopping cart or website personalization tool, or something like that. One simple thing you can do is, you go to an account, plug that in Alexa. Get the idea an idea of what the number of visitors they get on a monthly basis.
Let’s say you are seeing they are getting over half a million visitors or a million visitors a month, you obviously know that ecommerce side is highly traffic, they need solutions. And then using BuiltWith, let’s say you see they are using an outdated shopping cart, or they are not using a product personalization tool. Boom! That’s your perfect in to pitch your product personalization tool saying, “Hey, I know that you’re getting a ton of traffic and you’re not using anything. Did you know that one customer in the similar space got a 20% increased conversion by using our personalization would suggest better products to them.”
Again, all of these you can do for free.
Marylou: That’s so helpful.
Tukan: Thank you. SimilarWeb is another tool. SEMrush or AdSpy are a couple of tools that give you more intelligence on what your competitors are doing, or what certain websites are doing in terms of content or keywords they’re bidding on, what tools they are using and stuff. For me, those would be the three immediate things that I would start doing.
First, figuring out what are the different buying signals that your customers would have. From then on, start tracking those signals using free tools on the active opportunities you have. You have your Google Alerts, LinkedIn Sales Nav, Twitter Search, LeadSift Buzz. Then you add another level of intelligence using tools like BuiltWith, Alexa, SimilarWeb, SEMrush to get all of these intelligence and from there on, you then go ahead, do your targeted outreach to these companies.
That would be the first immediate thing that I would suggest someone in a sales role when they’re prospecting, that’s that’s what they should be doing.
Marylou: Yeah, and then for those of you who are process-oriented, which most of you are, otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to me, what we would then take is those terms, those signals, and decide should we store these things in a field of data in our database so that we can take the sequences that we build and actually use the sentiment and those indexes of intent, those signals of intent in a templated email.
If you think about this, you spend the time figuring out what those signals are, you’re looking not only keywords but operational, tasks, firmographic. It’s almost like building an ideal account profile, but we’re building an ideal signal profile essentially, an ISP just to add yet another acronym to our world.
Tukan: There you go.
Marylou: We’re taking that ideal signal intent list and we’re now incorporating into our CRM fields of influence database because what we want to do is then track, once we go through these conversations, and we actually start getting conversion rates, which signals did bubble up to the top? Which signals did lead to a sense of urgency? So that we and reduce the lag in the pipeline, increase the yield of the conversion.
This is like the beginning of a beautiful, rhythmic touch sequence that allows us to not only start with a pretty good head start given what Tukan has done but allows us to track the results of those conversations with those indicators and those signals to see is our signal list optimal? Or do we need to optimize it after we run it through a statistically relevant sample of records?
I just love this flow. It just sounds so nice. Here I am. I’ve done what you said, I’ve gone through some records, I’m seeing some successes. How long do I stay here in this particular mode and then where do I branch out from there? Let’s talk about middle term now. Now that I’ve taken that exercise, I’ve run it through, I’ve proven the concept to myself and I want to scale this thing. What’s the next step towards scaling?
Tukan: Then comes the whole idea of let’s now incorporate some of the first party intelligence that I already have. What I mean by that is, assuming you are using some marketing automation software and choose your favourite one to track activity of buyers on your website and on your content.
What I mean is, you’re reaching out to people using these different triggers, at the same time, you should start measuring how many of these people are opening emails, how many of them are coming to my website, engaging with my call-to-action, what are all the activities they are doing, and then start scoring these activities on what they are doing on my website, on my content, on your first party content, that’s what they call it.
That would be the immediate next step. Now you’re getting a little bit more sophisticated saying, okay, I’ve identified a certain subset of people within my ICP that are throwing signals. I’m taking some proactive action towards them. Let’s now track what happens once I do a proactive action, whether it’s an email campaign, LinkedIn campaign, phone calls, or ad campaign.
Some of these people will be coming back to my website. Let’s start tracking them. Let’s score these leads using whatever tools—most marketing automation tools have some kind of scoring—and then start prioritizing even more and learning from them what’s happening, which triggers are working better, how many of these ones are turning into MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and things like that. That would be one not immediate in a middle term I would say.
Other thing that I would do is, another good source of buying behavior intent signal would be what people are doing on a review website. G2 Crowd is a very popular one. I think they call themselves G2 now. You can buy a subscription of that and they would, not really would they help you showcase your product and get your customers to write reviews for social proof, they also sell company level data of people that are coming to yours or your competitors website within G2 Crowd. Just on their website. If someone is searching for another IT security software, they will tell you, “This company was searching for an IT security software.” Some of those might be vendors, they’re just doing competitive intelligence, but some of them are real buyers at a company level.
That would be the second step. You’re now advancing using some automations, some scoring to really build up these signal profiles on accounts that you should be really honing in. That would be my middle term action items.
Marylou: How soon do people jump into middle term? In my world, we’re looking at statistical relevance plus or minus, we’d like to get to a 5% margin of error. But in this world, is that a realistic number or do we jump sooner based on the data that we collected in that phase one immediate right now? You have that feel for that?
Tukan: Ninety days, that’s what we have seen, is a good enough period for you to build out your progress, start tracking, and then sending out email campaigns with templated cadences. Ninety days should be a good enough time period for you to start seeing results to say, “You know what? This kind of intelligence is providing value.” And then talking to your marketing operations or sales operations to tie in the first party data from marketing automation tools or sales automation tools and rolling it up into a scoring module within your marketing automation system. Ninety days would be a good enough time period for you to get some basic results and then move on to the second phase, the middle term phase.
Marylou: Okay, and then I want to emphasize to the audience that this 90 days should be in a production 90 days. Don’t do it over the summer when half of Europe is on vacation, I’m so jealous. A bunch of European clients are like, “See you in six weeks!” Like, “You’re kidding me!”
Tukan: I hear you.
Marylou: Maybe in your world, not in the US. Make sure it’s at a fully production quarter that you’re picking to do this test. Then you’ll have first of all, confidence that you’re going into the next quarter with information that’s viable and to get to that middle term.
You run through the middle term. Now, some of you will probably stop at the middle term and just be happy in that zone for a while. For those of you who are always at the bleeding edge of technology and at work in the process, what’s the optimized, once you’ve gone through that middle, what’s next after that?
Tukan: This is when you really need buying from your marketing team, the demand gen team, would be to leverage a third party intense solution. You are using these free tools to at least gather a solution to get you a list. A third party intent solution, based on all of these different triggers would automatically flow in a list of account and key context within their accounts into your CRM every morning suggesting. “Hey, these are the top 20 accounts that you as the SDR of the salesperson needs to be going after because in the last 24 hours, they did this, this, this.” That could be one thing when you’re going a little bit advanced.
Something very interesting starts happening. As these third party intent data solutions start picking up signals, a certain percentage of signals will be making accounts and contacts that’s delivered to you every morning. You log in, you go after them, which is great. But the small percentage of those signals would actually be on your existing accounts and active opportunities that have come to your website, filled out a form, you spoke to them six months ago, but nothing happened.
Now all of a sudden, you just saw a signal of them talking to a competitor of yours or hiring for a specific role or attending an industry where you are going to go. That’s a signal that you can then tie in with your first party data that’s already in your CRM, overlaying third party, notifying your account executive saying, “Hey, there’s an activity happened. Do something. This deal has gone cold, but now all of a sudden, it just jump up. Let’s put them in a different workflow so that we can re-engage them.”
Those could be some advanced things that you can use to really beef up this whole buying intent signal process.
Marylou: That’s the engine. That’s the scaling engine, is that last area because how great would it be to come in your office. We used to say this on Predictable Revenue back in 2011 was, how great is it when you come into your office and see all these replies from your emails.
Tukan: It’s like Christmas.
Marylou: Now, it’s how great would it be to come in and have your entire workflow ready to go because it’s ordering it in order of priority. Highest impact, least amount of effort which is the nirvana for us, is what we’re trying to do is maximize return on effort. The other thing you’re hearing from Tukan, it’s not out in the future, it’s here now. It is here now, everyone. What it’s going to focus us on is creating the very best sales message. We’re going to be needing to be on top of our game as to why people should change, why now and why us. We really need to focus on flipping that script to, “Hey, are you the right person?” to more of a bit like Tukan said, “I have this information. Winter is coming, I know that you are going to need this. Here’s the reason why other people like you have gone through this process with us and here’s some data to get you really excited about what the next steps are and what you need to do next.”
We really need to focus now—I love this—on creating compelling sales conversations and spraying them out over a canvas of time so that we can leverage this intent data to be always in the front mind of the prospect. Wow, cool.
I’ve noticed on your website, you got some really beefy clients and I see some 100% increases. What’s the most exciting story you can share with the audience before we part ways today, as someone who’s come into your fold, where they were, how long it took them to get there, and what they’re enjoying now in terms of conversion rates?
Tukan: I’ll give an example of a customer that came to us from a sales perspective, without doing a lot of marketing but purely from a sales cadence perspective.
Marylou: Okay, mostly outbound, direct reaching out.
Tukan: Exactly.
Marylou: Okay.
Tukan: They are one of the top Facebook ad agencies nationally in the US and Canada. One of the things they were doing, they leverage LeadSift was to get intent data signals pushed directly to their system and what they were doing was, they were taking the data and breaking it up into three different nurture streams. One was when a prospect was taking to a competitor on a complementary company of theirs. They put them on a separate sequence.
The second them, they were putting them, if they were researching about a specific topic that they were hiring for certain roles or engaging certain keywords, they’d put them in another sequence with a very different message, with a similar call-to-actions of meetings book.
And the third one was in their world, they were tracking industry events and trade shows, whether it’s niche events or large trade shows, they were tracking them and see which companies were attending those trade shows that give them an indication of their budget, they are more likely to learn new things, and they were putting them in a separate sequence.
This one, the call-to-action was around downloading a piece of content, more educational than let’s book a meeting. Those are the three sequences. It is personalized. It is completely automated, leads coming, going to one of these three sequences based on the trigger that they found, and the results that they’re seeing are phenomenal.
I do not know what the reply rate is, but their reading book rate is about 6%, which is incredibly high from a cold email because it’s so contextual, relevant, and timely. For the third email sequence where they were pushing people to download or see a piece of content, which is a lower barrier, top of the funnel, they’re getting 11% response rate. Positive response rate come back.
Marylou: Guys, that 9%-11% is the sweet spot that we spend months trying to get to for a click through. The fact that they’re coming out the gate with an 11% is phenomenal. All of you sitting out there, know your click through rate and it’s not 9%. It’s down in the 2% and 3%. Be honest. That’s wonderful, I love it.
Tukan: The best part is, all of this result was done in a 45-day window, the first 45 days. But one thing I will preface, though, is this customer was extremely savvy with the email copy they had to nurture these leads into these different sequences. That […] key. You would know a lot better than I do is a lot of the times, you can give them the best data, but if their email copy of their messaging is not up to par, it doesn’t matter. Everything will fall apart.
Marylou: That’s what I just preached. I just preach that. If we don’t know our sales conversation, why change, why now, why us? Which is persuasive copywriting at it’s finest, if we don’t spend the time nurturing that, optimizing that, and split testing that. This is from the old masters back in the direct mail days. Read those books! Those books are the bible in teaching us how to write effective copy.
I’m so glad that you said that, Tukan, because it just emphasizes the importance that we cannot have shoddy copy out there. Amp up the people who know how to do it. There’s a lot of freelance copywriters out there. Copyhackers is one of the places I go to all the time to find the latest tricks of the trade and how to write good copy for landing pages, for websites, for emails. You name it they have it. That’s constantly an education that we need to get emboldened, embedded into our sales world for sure.
Tukan: Absolutely.
Marylou: Cool. How do we get a hold of you? I could go on forever, but I want to be respectful for our audience. What’s the best way for us to reach you? How to get started? What should we do?
Tukan: A few things. To reach out to me personally, you can email at tdas@leadsift.com. I’ll be more than happy to reply to your emails. Connect with me on LinkedIn. The other two things to try out is this free product we’ve launched. It’s literally free, there’s no strings attached. It’s called LeadSift Buzz, so buzz.leadsift.com. Check it out. It’s early. There might be some kinks, but I love to hear your feedback and work from thereon.
If you want to talk to one of our sales team to figure it out, you can automatically get intent signals to identify new accounts and also get signals on your existing accounts. Just go to leadsift.com and book a demo. One of our sales folks will be more than happy to walk you through and see if it’s a fit.
Marylou: Probably just to give folks an idea, the market is B2B, you kept saying, so I don’t want to dissuade people who are not B2B to not look at this. At least get an understanding of how you can apply it, but the B2B is mostly the sweet spot for this type of product. There are so many applications that this can be used for.
You mentioned, Tukan, just really briefly trade shows. A lot of times, what we’re trying to do is get our inbound people to help develop actual appointments while we’re in the booth. This is a perfect way to utilize from an inbound perspective the ability to know who’s going to a trade show because they’re going to talk about it online about, “Hey, I got to this hotel and we’re going to this trade show.”
Here you are developing this list of potential people who will come to your booth, get them set-up with appointments, get that face-to-face belly-to-belly thing going, and that’s going to improve your trade show conversion rate, which a lot of you are spending a ton of money on trade shows with nothing to show for.
Tukan: One of the big use cases that you see is this where marketing and sales align very well. On average, what you see is a lot of companies go to about six trade shows. At least six trade show events, one in every two months. One of the things they do is a month or six weeks prior to the event, they start tracking that event or trade show with lead data. Leads would start suggesting the companies and people that will be attending it.
What they do is then they would start sending nurture campaigns, reaching out to these people personally and companies saying, “Hey, we are going to be there. We would love to talk to you or meet up for coffee or something,” and they get amazing results.
One way to maximize ROI on your trade show—not cheap by the way—would be to start tracking them and figuring out which companies are going. Some of them even might actually be your existing customers that are going. That’s a perfect opportunity for you to meet them there. So, there’s a few interesting applications.
Again, as I said, intent is not just keyword. It is way bigger than that. If you start figuring that out, once you map it out, it clears a lot of confusion.
Marylou: The next thing I’m going to ask you to put together for your website is this whole planning idea. Really, we’re limiting ourselves. Until you said the words ‘trade show,’ that wasn’t on my little circle and my spokes, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that’s a whole other channel that we can leverage.” Awesome. Very good.
Thank you so much for your time, Tukan. It was great having you on the show. For everybody, I’ll put as many links as I heard and my team will get as many links on Tukan’s page so that you guys have all these free tools, the next level up, and all of that. So, don’t worry about that. You can always reach out to him directly and I’m sure we’ll just keep a watch on this because it’s a fabulous next step.
If you have list issues, it’s a great option. If you have a ubiquitous number of records but want to start doing more responsible marketing, whether it’s outbound, inbound, or even your referral network, that’s another spoke that can go on this as your partners and what they’re doing with their clients.
It could just go on ad nauseum, but it can definitely help us hone in on the conversation, talk to the relevant people with that sense of urgency. We’re going to get better in our sales conversation because we’re talking to people who are ready to buy. They can tell us why they chose us and that all comes back to marketing and improving our sales conversations going forward.
Tukan, thanks again, very much appreciate your time.
Tukan: Thanks a lot, Marylou, it was great.