Step-by-step, designed for people who hate sales.

1. What is the strategy?

2. Section 1: Getting Started with Free Lead Generation Tools

3. Section 2: Building a Targeted Contact List

4. Section 3: Crafting Effective Email Sequences

5. Section 4: Monitoring and Optimizing Your Strategy

6. Summary of Steps

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There is a way to get warm sales leads within 14 days, totally for free. 

You don’t need a big budget to be successful, in fact, you likely need a much smaller presence than what you actually think. At Sapient Industries, we were able to generate $5,833,655 in new business sales pipeline in a few months using the same method I’m going to show you here… which by the way… can be easily managed by just one person.

Every business owner I’ve ever worked with could fall into three categories:

1. No budget. They need to get everything out of the mud. They prioritize referrals and social media posting.

2. Has some budget, wants to rely on a person for help.

3. Has some budget, wants to rely on software for help.

The most effective businesses combine all three of these into a singular go-to-market strategy.

Now is the time to adopt a new mindset for sales. I believe that the mindset you need to be successful with sales in this market/climate is:

“I can’t convince anyone of anything, they need to have information available from sources that they can see the truth in. They will go through their own buying journey. This buying journey can be 5 seconds or 5 months long. I can make it faster and more successful by creating positive relationships with my prospects, and giving them relevant information that is geared towards them. If I make my product easy to buy, they will buy it.”

If you hate sales, you’re in the right place. You’re about to learn how to take a lot of the work out of it, and find more qualified buyers to talk to.

Section 1: Getting started with free lead generation tools

The first step is to get set up on the free sales-tech program, Apollo. They have paid versions, but I wouldn’t recommend paying until you know that it is the right tool for you. Once you sign up, don’t select any plans. You will automatically be enrolled in their “free forever” plan. 

Apollo offers a 14 day free trial on their most expensive plan (the professional plan) by clicking on this link:

https://get.apollo.io/0vgnakt6nvbt

*Don’t start the free trial until you complete all of the steps outlined here.*

Here’s the quick run-down on Apollo…

• It is a free database of professional contacts that you can turn into leads. They have 70million+ companies and 200million+ people. For most contacts, they have an email address, a mobile phone number and a physical street address. 

• Apollo is a “sales enablement and outreach” tool, meaning it has some of the features of a CRM (and some of my clients use it for this instead of Salesforce/Hubspot which can get really expensive) while also being able to drum up leads for you.

• They have paid plan choices, which allow you to utilize advanced tools like a phone dialer, a website visitor tracking system, and multiple-domain email sending.

• If you want to find a comparison, I would compare Apollo to ZoomInfo, which would be “Adidas vs. Nike” in my opinion.

ZoomInfo is more expensive than Apollo, and I believe that the data you get from each is not different enough to warrant the large price increase between the two. Anyway, back to getting free leads…

Section 2: Building a Targeted Contact List for Small Businesses

Once you’re logged in, click the Search area on the left side menu.

I like starting with “Companies” then I move to “People”. 

Once you select Companies, start to apply filters. The goal here is to actually get your list to be as specific as possible during this initial period of trying out Apollo. You don’t want a list of 1000+ people. I’d aim to get a list of approximately 200 people. You can do multiple searches as well to hit that number, it doesn’t need to all be in one search.

Start by selecting filters in the “Company” search. Once you’re done picking your filter criteria, you need to click the box next to the company’s name. You can do this one by one or a page at a time. 

Once that is complete, there is a small button that has a person and a magnifying glass on it that says “find people”. When you click on that, you’ll automatically be redirected to the “People” search, where you can input filters for the actual people you want to reach out to, like job title, physical location, etc.

Here are the filters I used for the $5million pipeline I was telling you about earlier:

• Person Location: United States

• Company Location: Anywhere

• Company Industry: Several, I sell into manufacturing the most often, but there are a few I definitely don’t sell to, like banking or accounting. So you can either exclude certain industries and keep the rest, or select your industries you serve one by one.

• People Email Status: Verified and Likely to engage

• Company Revenue: 5Million+

• People Job Title: Facility, Facilities (these were just typed in, just like you would a keyword)

• People Management Level: Manager, Director, VP, Head, C-Suite

• Company Employee Count: I don’t use this as much as long as the revenue filter brings back a good list of opportunities.

Pro Tip: Save your searches frequently, but put the date you last updated it in the name somewhere. This will help you if you’re still looking to figure out your persona. BTW - if you need help with that, you can book a free call with me here and I’ll give you a free gameplan on how to define your ideal customer persona in 15 minutes: (free call link)

Finally, add the people you want to sell to into a new “Sequence”. Simply click the paper plane button that says “Sequence” on it, and select “add to new sequence”. I usually select “Make from Scratch”, but check out their templates if you want help writing email. I give you my email framework below, and you can also join the “sales workshop for people who hate sales”.

Section 3: Writing Effective Email Sequences for Beginners

Once you have all of the contacts added to your sequence, you’re ready to build a quick email pattern that will start sending automatically to those contacts.

Your biggest enemy against this campaign isn’t going to be getting someone to open your email or reply, it is going to be landing in their spam folder. You could research how to improve your email deliverability all day long. Here’s what I will tell you from my experience:

• Word choice matters. Don’t use spam words. Words like “free, save money, lose”... “hot singles in your area”... you get the idea.

• Have the automatic email tool do something that is humanly possible. Example: It is not humanly possible to manually send out 1000 emails in a day.

• I’ve used this free tool a few times to check how my email will deliver, and it seems to work pretty well: https://www.mailgenius.com/

• Limit links and attachments on first-time cold email sends.
  

  If you don’t want to take a deep dive into email deliverability and spam prevention, book a call with me/send me an email, or check out some of my other articles.

How should a small business use an email sequence to get customers interested? 

Here’s my format:

Email #1:

Cut to the chase and be informative. Most of the time I’ll even be clear that I’m trying to sell something. It sounds overly aggressive, but you’d be surprised how many people reply and say they’re interested in getting pricing and taking a meeting with me when I do that. 

I do not recommend sending an email that has the format of:  “Hello {{first name}}, I noticed ____, and that means you may have ____ problem, and I have ____ solution… would you be open to a 15 minute call to discuss?”

I don’t believe in these emails at all. I explain in more detail my personal email philosophy during the free email course I offer (here), but you really have to put yourself in your persona’s shoes. 

How do they buy things? How do they talk to the salespeople they encounter… and not just at work, but in their personal lives? What are their negotiation styles, their tolerance levels when it comes to creativity and how they solve problems at work? The more creative effort you put into this, the better your emails will be at getting prospects to read them. Remember, you can’t reply to an email if you don’t read it first! :)

I want them to get an amazingly clear idea of my main benefit right away in this first email. I like sending pictures and gifs. I believe that it does impact your overall email deliverability in some cases. But most of the replies I get, end up meeting with me, and they tell me in the first 2-5 minutes how much they liked the email I sent them… or I get this alot too: “I never respond to these types of emails!  So congrats, you got me”. If you really analyze this statement, especially the “you got me” part, they are saying that your “call to action” was compelling enough for them to act. 

An interesting observation… most of the time they’ll say “whoever sent me the email” or “you guys”. Rarely do they ever say “me”, specifically. This makes me believe that people don’t care who you are, or who your company is, they care about what you do for them. If you’re not a market leader, introducing “you and your company” is only going to put you further away from your goal. I discuss this in more detail in my cold calling workshop (here).

Email #2:

Social proof. I recommend throwing in testimonial language here. Example framework: 

• This person was like you, they hired us because of ____ going on, and now they’re ___ future state.

• They almost didn’t buy because of ___ main objection, but we were able to ____ solution.

You may be wondering how to close these emails out. Do you ask for a 15 minute call? Ask them to look at a proposal?

Remember how I said think about your persona and how they buy? Be real with yourself for a second: do you honestly believe that they need prompting to set a meeting with you? If they want a meeting, they will figure out a way to get one, or ask you for it. You don’t need to say, “are you open to a 15 minute call?”  I’m here to tell you, they probably aren’t… until they are. Then they will let you know. Don’t waste any swag you have built up so far on some cheap call to action just because you feel like you should. 

Let’s get them to just read the email. I have ways to get them interested without them actually replying. Just get them to read it. We’ll deal with the non-responders later.

Pro Tip: If you have customers already, and are struggling to get the perfect testimonial, you should check out my free “existing customer questionnaire” here.

Email #3:

Give them what they want. In the terms of the campaign I ran with Sapient that ran up $5 million in pipeline, my persona wanted a “ballpark price”. It took me weeks of talking with them to figure this out. Once I added that as my last email, my reply rate and engagement over the phone increased. Find out the one thing your prospect needs before moving forward with what you offer, it will unlock the lead/meeting block you currently have.

This email was simply a reply to the other 2 emails in the same thread, that said “Hi {{first name}} - did you want a ballpark price on this? Thanks so much!

I get several “no”’s. I get several “Yes, I’m interested”’s. They both boost my deliverability because people are replying, and one of them directly leads to cash.

Once you have your steps set up, I recommend spreading them out multiple days apart from each other. Maybe 7-8 days or so. Even that may be a little too aggressive, but ultimately you have to start somewhere. If you can afford to wait longer, I recommend it. A 2 week period between each email is enough to get a “fresh look” with some familiarity. Versus the alternative, you hit them up 3 times in 9 days and they are super annoyed.

The last step is to activate the sequence, which you can do by clicking the activate toggle at the top. Your contacts will now receive emails sequentially, and my hope for you would be to keep adding new contacts every single day to have this run in the background full-time. Do this over the course of 3 months, and you’ll be stunned with the pipeline you built by taking a few minutes to set this up today.

The average reply rate and open rate I see with most businesses now ranges from 0-2% reply rate, and 15-35% open rate. Aim to be at the upper level of these metrics, it is totally possible.

Section 4: Monitoring and Optimizing Your Lead Generation Strategy

When you’re ready to start sending emails, I recommend turning the 14 day free trial on, and select the pro plan since no credit card is required/you don’t have to “cancel”. 

Once you are set up on the Pro plan free trial, you can activate “open tracking”. Key word is “can”. Having open tracking on could place your emails in your prospects spam folder. I activate open tracking for my campaigns, because I view it as a way to turn “cold calling” into “warm calling”. Here’s how I do it:

1. Click into your “emails” section, and open the filters, where you can see “email opened”. Select yes, and click “opened 2 times”. If you want more of a list to call on when you’re starting out, “opened 1 time” should get you active people as well, their buying intent just may not be as progressed, that’s all. 

2. That generated report will allow you to view each prospect, and when you’re on their profile page, simply click “mobile number” to generate all of the possible phone numbers for that particular contact. 

3. Give them a call! However - If you’re like 99% of people, you don’t like calling random strangers trying to sell them something. It is anxiety inducing, awkward, and definitely not fun. That’s why I built “sales workshop for people who hate sales”.

Pro Tip: Keep track of your outreach by either adding a note/task to Apollo under each profile, or, using Apollo’s dialer to automatically input activity notes. I discuss this more in my cold calling blog post (here).

Is calling REALLY not your cup of tea? And you don’t want to hire someone to do it? There is an alternative. Direct mail. You need to send something that you put some creative effort into to help break through the noise. This can be done relatively automatically, and my results from mail campaigns have been pretty good. I actually booked an international car brand’s 1.2 million square foot automotive production plant in Allentown, PA through a letter I sent recently.

Advanced: Figure out who is on your website

Apollo has an interesting feature called “Website Visitors” that they launched recently. All you do is take the script that they provide, and paste it into the header of your website. Depending on who you use for your website hosting, this can be easy or maddening, but once completed you’ll have unlocked insight into which companies visit your website, which pages, and a buying intent score. Apollo is able to trace back the IP address of a visitor typically to a corporate location of some kind, which then triggers them as a visitor, correlating them to a physical location assigned to a company in the platform.. This is not the first time a tool like this has been created, and the #1 question always is: “so how do I know which PERSON is on my website?”. 

I first start with the people I’ve emailed. Start by going to your website visitors and select the companies where you want to see which specific person visited your site. Once those companies are selected, click “find people”. Now that you’re in the person search area, click back into “email opens” and just select “yes”, don’t worry about the number criteria for this exercise. 

From my experience, the people on this list are highly interested, and about as hot of a lead as you can get for free, without social media. 

There’s a way to track the really anonymous people as well, and that’s with a company called RB2B. I would try the 30 day trial, there’s no credit card needed to do it, and its the same thing basically - just add their script to the header of what pages you want them to track, and you’ll get specific PEOPLE who have visited your website. You can get the free 30 day premium plan here: rb2b.com/?ref=salesfix .

4 Steps to Success:

1. Create an Apollo account, and after set up, turn on a free 14 day pro plan trial: https://get.apollo.io/0vgnakt6nvbt

2. Use Apollo to acquire contact information of people to sell to, then use tactics to email them across an automated plan.

3. Monitor the campaign to find indicators of interest.

4. Create next steps by leveraging the technology and taking action. 

Questions? Need me to custom-build this for you? Book a free strategy call today. 

-Andrew Leshak