Pro Tip: Append Direct Dial Phone Numbers to your Marketing Database for Better Conversion

For as long as I can remember, Marketing professionals have been in the business of growing the contacts in their Marketing Automation Platform and converting those contacts into actionable leads. But that job is getting A LOT harder. I wrote a blog post highlighting 6 reasons why getting the attention of the decision maker is so challenging, but the math is easy to understand. There are more people with more access to mass communication tools contacting the same people. A cold email is almost never returned and that is the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is that a cold email can get you black-listed by a private company or reported to a public official for violating privacy laws – yikes.

Now GDPR is not shutting down Sales and Marketing – but it is making your existing database that much more of a priority. Smart marketers are getting to know their prospects better by appending information to their records that allows for micro-campaigns; show me you know me campaigns if you will. They are also redefining what a lead actually is so that an inside sales team can reach out earlier in the sales process to set an appointment.

Marketers are using different lead scoring techniques such as what pages a prospect may go to on a website and buyer intent from companies like Bombora to recognize when a prospect is in the market. This data is fed to a BDR or Seller to make a phone call to set up an appointment. This is the traditional Call to Action of a form completion or email reply – but it is what smart companies are doing to get above the noise. They are also appending a direct dial phone number to this data as they pass it to sales.

Sellers are 147% more likely to set an appointment if they call their prospect directly. That is why it is almost a wasted lead to send it over without direct dial data. Too often, the seller will get lost in the phone tree or redirected from a gatekeeper to even leave a voice mail – much less connect with the prospect. The average lead costs a B2B company over $1,000 and far less than 50% of those convert. Smart marketers are increasing their odds with direct dials phone numbers.

September 3, 2018 / No Comments /

Steal These Cold Calling / Email Icebreaker Scripts

Creating Demand is difficult – it takes just as much will as it does skill to be successful at it. The problem is that our buyers are busy and our competition has access to the same mass communication tools that we do. As a result – our solicitation is drowned out with everyone else. At RampedUp, we understand the hurdles that sellers have to jump over so we use an Icebreaker program that is multi-touch, multi-media, and personalized to every buyer. They are short, can be used for phone, social, email, but templated so as not to paralyze demand gen efforts with excessive research.

Icebreaker #1 – Use Cases – 90 Percent of Buyers want a use-case to help them make a favorable decision

Since @<Company Name> and our most recent customer @<Customer 1> are both in the in the @<Industry> industry, I thought I would reach out and share why they came on board. We worked with their @<Title 1>, @<Title 2>, and @<Title 3> to really understand their business, it is what differentiates us. I will have the @<Customer 1> use-case prepared for a call if you are free early next week.

The CEB graph you see to the right show just how important it is to reference the entire buying committee – because there are going to be more people involved in the decision anyway.

Icebreaker #2 – Triggering Event – referencing a news headline shows you have done your homework.

I saw that @<Company Name> was in the news recently: @<Trigger Event Headline>

We work with growing companies like @<Customer 1> in the @<Industry> industry. With the recent news, it looks like a good time to share how we are helping titles such as @<Title 1>, @<Title 2>, and @<Title 3> reach their goals. Are you free for a quick conversation early next week?

12 Trigger Events that Spark Buying Decisions

Icebreaker #3 – Competition – all companies are defined by their competitors.

I was researching @<Competitor 1> in the @<Industry> industry and came across @<Company Name>. I saw that @<Company Name> was in the news recently: @<Trigger Event Headline> so I wanted to introduce myself and my company.

If you are you looking for a competitive advantage against @<Competitor 1>, we can help. We help companies like @<Customer 1> reach their goals and would like to do the same with you. Are you free early next week?

Icebreaker #4 – Installed Technologies – Time honored competitive or complimentary strategy

I have done some research on @<Competitor 1> and the decision making process the @<Title 1> did evaluating @<Installed Technology 1> and wanted to share some insights. Are you open to quick conversation on how we helping companies like @<Competitor 1> in the @<Industry> industry improve upon their experience with @<Installed Technology 1>? Are you free to speak early next week?

Use Installed Technology to define your Account Based Selling Strategy

Feel free to steal these templates for your own demand generation efforts. We built a platform that will auto-populate these fields to make this process super simple.

August 19, 2018 / No Comments /

Data.com Clean vs RampedUp Salesforce Clean

Salesforce recently announced the retirement of Data.com Clean, leaving their users scrambling for alternatives. RampedUp is helping data.com customers with the following functionality:

Account and Contact Table Cleaning The Burea u of Labor Statistics reports the average person changes jobs ten to fifteen times (with an average of 12 job changes) during his or her career. That has a very tangible impact on the health of your CRM but also a great opportunity to follow your old customers to their new jobs for quick wins.

Real-Time Lead Appending. The premise is simple, use the leads table to qualify contacts, companies, and opportunities before they care converted into permanent records. Once this policy is in place, add real-time lead appending to clean leads as they come into your system. If you have one point of entry into Salesforce.com and the point is reinforced with a cleansing tool, your data will enter current, complete, and accurate.

Account Cleaning – User Enabled. An account cleansing tool will empower the user to clean up the accounts and contacts that are important to them and thus important to the entire company. Old contacts will be labelled as such and their replacements will be imported ensuring the entire buying committee is represented.

RampedUp is offering a credit exchange program for all Data.com users – fill out the form Here to see if you qualify.

August 17, 2018 / No Comments /

Why the Best Salespeople Cold Call Like Crazy

Gordon Tredgold Founder and CEO of Leadership Principles wrote a wonderful article entitled, “Why the Best Salespeople Cold Call Like Crazy” in Inc. – It can be found here. My favorite quote is the following, “I read that 90% of C-Levels don’t answer the phone. It’s a survey, it’s wrong. They don’t want to admit that they do. They do! Many CXOs were once sellers and will accept a valiant, pro effort to reach them.”

“The opportunity is vast for the courageous. Be bold! Be a bull breaking fine china! Pick up the phone. Make sure you have the data you need to directly dial.” This last part is particularly true. A recent study from Funnel Clarity found that a seller is 147% more likely to have conversation with a VP by calling that person directly.

Gordon goes on to state, “Call prospects that scare you. Call the people that make the decision first. Don’t over think it but ensure you have the right narrative by leading with why the conversation matters. Don’t research all day. I couldn’t agree with the last part more – the old paralysis by analyses syndrome. I wrote this blog about limiting your research to 3 minutes before you call a prospect.

The math is eye opening. By committing to a calling campaign and adding direct dials to you will net results quickly. A study from TOPO found the average connect rate for a seller is 18:1 – or 18 dials to connect with 1 decision maker in the course of an hour. The average Time to Dial is 80 seconds for a switchboard vs. 45 seconds to call them directly. So the math here is quite simple – having direct dial phone numbers save the average seller 15 minutes per hour.

Imagine giving your sellers 25% of their calling hours back to them. Also, imagine the phone fatigue a seller experiences when they have to navigate a phone tree to “hopefully” find their prospect. If you haven;t picked up the phone in a while you should try it – it isn’t fun.

August 16, 2018 / No Comments /

Outreach vs Salesloft – Pitfalls to avoid

Two of the hottest sales acceleration platforms on the market right now are Salesloft and Outreach.io. An SDR platform is a great idea but be mindful it is also very powerful. I can share first-hand experience from using these tools:

False Opens – We experienced a great discrepancy in email opens using both tools. Our SDR manager would remark that his teams’ open rates were 10 times greater than traditional marketing. It turned out that advanced security software would send an open notice even though it was not in fact read by the recipient. As a result, we lost all confidence in open rates. I recommend using your marketing automation platform for bulk sending and use your SDR tool for direct solicitation.
Co-opting your email server. If you use Microsoft or Gmail for your email server be very careful connecting it to either of these platforms. Microsoft will notice you are using their server as a BULK sender and notify the recipient you are a SPAMMER. I recommend using a sperate IP address very highly.
No man’s land. After years of using services like Outreach and Salesloft, we started to experience a decline in receptivity. We started to notice that our campaigns not only didn’t get the reception we expected, we didn’t even get Out of Office replies. We weren’t even making it into the Inbox after abusing the system for so long. I recommend keeping email very tailored so as not to alert the security software. Also, use other medians like the phone, personal letters, and social just as heavily as email.

Here are some third party reviews of these systems:

Trust Radius: https://www.trustradius.com/compare-products/outreach-vs-salesloft

The reviewers from Trust Radius give the nod to Outreach.io with 8.8 out of 10 score compared to an 8.1 out of 10 score for Salesloft. That is from a combined 347 reviews.

G2 Crowd: https://www.g2crowd.com/compare/outreach-vs-salesloft

The reviewers from G2 Crowd both gave Outreach.io and Salesloft a 4.3 out of 5. That is from a combined 1104 reviews. Salesloft did win head-to-head for ease of use, ease of set up, ease of admin, quality of support, and ease of doing business.

August 6, 2018 / No Comments /

GroupBDO partners with RampedUp for Account Based Selling

Austin, Texas — July 17, 2018 — Today, Group BDO and RampedUp announced their partnership to provide targeted sales and marketing solutions to the Business Process Outsourcing Market. “We have already seen a positive impact by using the Account Based Selling programs RampedUp offers,” shared Bill Lennon, CEO of GroupBDO. “ GroupBDO supports the international expansion of BPO companies. RampedUp gives us the tools and insights to penetrate these competitive markets.”

“Account-Based Selling is White Hot Right now with sellers seeing a 171% increase in their Average Contract Value using Account-Based Strategies,” Scott Miller, CEO of RampedUp. “Our platform does exactly what Bill needs and that is to identify the total addressable market for businesses looking to expand inside North America.”

The two companies will serve the growing Business Process Outsourcing market for the foreseeable future with a combined process, people, and technology approach.

About Group BDO

Group BDO offers a collaborative Enterprise Sales & Consulting Solutions to BPO (FAO & CCO) / Software / and Technology companies to develop revenue-generating sales channels and lead-generating marketing in the United States. Our knowledge of American markets, combined with strong industry relationships, location, and relevant industry experience helps our clients achieve their international growth objectives.

About RampedUp

RampedUp is an account-based selling solution where we examine our customers’ customers to identify their Ideal Customer Profile. With this intelligence we provide look alike companies for demand generation and score accounts to prioritize selling activities. The value proposition is unique / just in time / detailed data that helps sellers set better appointments and close more deals.

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July 17, 2018 / No Comments / 2

Cleaning Salesforce.com without Data.com – an Alternative

On May 3rd, 2018 Salesforce.com discontinued selling Data.com Connect – you can read more about

the product retirement here. Data.com was a wonderful tool that helped keep Salesforce.com clean but it obviously outlived its usefulness. But why does Salesforce.com become dirty in the first place?

Transiency: B2B Contact data expires 24-36% rate per year – Hubspot. Its hard to keep up with everyone who is moving on.
Relying on Email Validation: 50% of Email Addresses won’t bounce because they are Accepts All Servers
Form Fills: Up to 70% of Online Forms are purposely incorrect – subscribers want the information but don’t want solicitation
List Buys: Contact compilation takes up to 15 months to produce
- Tax Records / Credit Bureaus / Trade Associations / Outsourced teams need months to compete one record

Try these three simple ideas to keep your CRM accurate and updated

1 – Clean the data as it comes into Salesforce.com. The premise is simple, use the leads table to qualify contacts, companies, and opportunities before they care converted into permanent records. Do not allow users to add any company or contact data into Salesforce.com unless it starts as a lead and make it functionally impossible through permission settings.

Once this policy is in place, add real-time lead appending to clean leads as they come into your system. In an early blog I wrote the importance of contacting leads as soon as they come into your organization and lead appending will ensure this will happen. If you have one point of entry into Salesforce.com and the point is reinforced with a cleansing tool, your data will enter current, complete, and accurate.

2 – Empower the users. Although up to 15% of the inaccuracy in your CRM originates from misspelled or misrepresented data from the users, empowering the users to clean up their own mess benefits the database overall. After all, who has a more vested interest in the cleanliness of Salesforce.com than the sellers themselves?

The key to Account-Based Selling is a clean Salesforce.com. By deploying a utility that corrects the company and contact data inside and account record, sellers can become part of the solution instead of the problem. An account cleansing tool will empower the user to clean up the accounts and contacts that are important to them and thus important to the entire company. Old contacts will be labelled as such and their replacements will be imported ensuring the entire buying committee is represented.

3 – Systemic Cleaning. The Burea u of Labor Statistics reports the average person changes jobs ten to fifteen times (with an average of 12 job changes) during his or her career. That has a very tangible impact on the health of your CRM but also a great opportunity to follow your old customers to their new jobs for quick wins.

Data decay presents most prominently within the contact data table and we recommend cleaning / updating contact records every 90 days. The impact will be updated titles, email addresses, and locations while identifying INACTIVE contacts that have moved to other companies. We recommend keeping the old record and labeling it INACTIVE then create a new lead for the individual at his or her new company.

July 2, 2018 / No Comments / 1

New Product Announcement: Look Alike Customers

I am very happy to announce new functionality inside of RampedUp – Look Alike Customers

RampedUp imports Closed Won Opportunities from Salesforce.com (or it can uploaoded via CSV) then that data is being appended and stored in the Customer Insights search Engine.

This allows us to build an Ideal Buyer Profile, score accounts based on the Ideal Buyer Profile, and of course purpose Win Stories for reference in the sales process. It will also allow us to use the parameters of the Ideal Buyer Profile to share Look Alike companies:

This functionality is the core of Account Based strategies. From this page users can download the results into a CSV, push new accounts in SFDC, or use the other tabs within L. As an example, these Company results can be pushed to Trigger Events for actionable data or they can be pushed to People to identify the buying committee at these look alike companies.

For completely net new results – the user can upload a suppression list of email addresses. RampedUp can then empower the user to push these net new contacts into Salesforce as leads or contacts / download results.

June 22, 2018 / No Comments /

API Docs

RampedUp provides API Access for many of our solutions.

https://share.hsforms.com/1g3g0jkUkRZGporU5mMjnrA2mu6w

June 10, 2018 / No Comments /

The Complete List of Eloqua Customers – Marketing Decision Makers

The Complete List of Eloqua – Oracle B2B Marketing Cloud – Customers contains 1540 Companies. Data includes: HQ Name, URL,

Description, Address, Phone, Industry, Employee Size, and Revenue. We also have other platforms such as Pardot and Marketo. Decision Makers available upon request as well.

Account Based Selling Starts with Accounts! RampedUp provides an Account Search Engine to uncover installed technologies like Marketo along with the ability to find trigger events and decision makers at these companies.