Andrew Fogg

10,000 leads in 10 minutesFriday 1 August 2014

presented by

let’s start with the basics

what’s a lead? (we call them dog-leads in the UK)

“a person or entity that has the interest and authority to purchase your product or service”

the info on a business card is the perfect example of what is required

named individual, associated company, contact details

leads represent the first stage of the sales process

but where do leads come from?

where do leads come from?

you can buy databases of telephone numbers, email addresses, mail addresses

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you can attend trade shows and collect business cards

or you can stalk people on social media

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two things are important where leads are concerned: quantity and quality

databases provide huge quantity but famously bad quality

trade shows and social media give great quality but cost time and money, which limits quantity

in

i would like to share a new approach that delivers both quantity and quality

it is based on web data

which is what i do

and it is inspired by our users

i am basically telling you one of the best ways that people have been using our product

shhh!

it is a simple recipe

first – where your people at? find a website where your users can be found

build an API to that website using import.io extract as much data about each lead as you can

pull the data down into a spreadsheet

this will give you thousands of leads and will take you mere minutes

use the data to create conversational, extremely-personalised message templates

Hi [first_name], I was browsing [website_name] and I came across your profile. I noticed that you

mentioned [profile_keyword] and I thought you would be interested to learn about what we do…

make it freaking personal

Hi [first_name], I was browsing [website_name] and I came across your profile. I noticed that you

mentioned [profile_keyword] and I thought you would be interested to learn about what we do…

start sending out messages be creative about the channels that you use

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automate the messaging but don’t go too quickly you need to get the cadence right

so as to avoid being spammy

and because you are starting a conversation and you need to be able to respond and engage

so how do we do this (eat-your-own-dog-food-time)

with import.io you can turn any website into data

without writing any code

without writing any code

this makes web data available to everyone

it is also super-awesome for developers

who used to have to write custom code to get web data

developers are an important market segment for us

there are lots of developers on oDesk

13,000 of them list “scraping” as one of the services they provide

they have the exact problem that we solve

we used import.io to create an API to the list of sraping users

and pulled them all down to a spreadsheet

created a personalised message template that included a link to import.io

Hi [first_name], I was browsing [website_name] and I came across your profile. I noticed that you

mentioned [profile_keyword] and I thought you would be interested to learn about what we do…

created link with: Google URL Builder (analytics) and Google URL Shortener (non-spammy)

built another API to the oDesk messaging system

it logs in to oDesk

navigates to the individual user’s profile

and messages them with an invitation to apply for a job (it is a real job that requires use of import.io)

if the user follows the link we can follow them through to account creation in our analytics

10,000 quality leads

props to Matt Ellsworth who pioneered a lot of these techniques at The Storefront

Matt has a Udemy course that you can follow to learn more