Use Data to Drive Success When Building a Pipeline

This blog post is based on a webinar by the same name co-hosted by Outreach and Similarweb.

To watch the full webinar recording, click here.

Making the Most of Pipeline Building Efforts

There are two types of leads that make up your pipeline – inbound and outbound – and the way you treat them should be different.

Generating leads is a way to build pipeline, and while we will mostly explore outbound efforts in this post, to learn about lead generation in-depth, you can read our complete guide here.

Inbound leads are when the prospect comes directly to you for example when they fill out a “Contact Us” form, request pricing or a demo, or download content from your website – such as whitepapers or eBooks.

Outbound leads are when you reach out to a prospect in order to actively create your own pipeline. This is what tends to be referred to as cold-calling.

When building your pipeline through outbound you need to pitch your prospects on why your product or solution is a good fit for them, and why they should take the time to meet you or learn more.

When It Comes to Inbound Leads: Follow Up Fast

The moment an inbound lead submits their details, you need to follow up quickly.

According to Xoombi, lead conversions are 391% higher if you call within a minute of an online inquiry. Waiting an additional minute drops that lead conversion to 120%, and if you wait an hour, it drops to a low 36%.

In reality, the average company takes about 47 hours to follow up with a lead.

This reduces the probability of conversion because when a lead comes into your pipeline through inbound, they are most likely actively seeking information about your product, or experiencing a pain-point that you can help them solve.

When someone leaves their details on your site, they want to speak to someone right away.

However, if you wait two days to reach out and follow up it’s likely that they won’t even remember why they were on your website in the first place.

Phoning Is Better Than Emailing, but Timing Is Everything

Following up with an inbound lead by email is about half as effective as following up with a phone call; however, the key is to follow up fast.

Maybe you don’t have time right that instant to give the lead a ring, but that doesn’t mean a follow up shouldn’t be conducted. To make sure you’re reaching out as fast as possible, your best bet would be to email first and call later.

By carrying out this process, you can ensure that the lead will receive an automated email from you as soon as they enter your pipeline, whether it be the middle of the night or the weekend, you can be sure they’ll be followed up on as soon as they leave their details.

Then, once you’re in a position to do so, you can call.

Qualify Using Data to Identify High Potential Inbound Leads in Your Pipeline

Many companies that offer free trials of their product face a common issue being that they receive too many inbound leads.

This results in too much time spent following up on leads that might not be a good fit for the company.

The key in this situation is to gather additional data to help you understand which leads are a good fit for your product and stand a chance to convert.

Let’s look at an example of a logistics company that is receiving inbound leads from multiple eCommerce sites.

Prospect A is an eCommerce company with low website traffic that is likely not converting a lot (low traffic = a low number of potential customers = a low number of potential sales).

This means that Prospect A has very low potential for you because they don’t sell a lot and this represents a small business opportunity.

Prospect B is another eCommerce site in a category that automatically tells you they’re not really shipping any physical products.

This means they are not a good fit for your service because you are looking to partner up with vendors that need shipping solutions.

Many additional data points can be used to help you figure out which leads in your pipeline you should spend time on.

To see how Similarweb data can help you, sign up for our free tool here.

Pre-Outbound

Now that we’ve discussed the best way to deal with the inbound portion of your pipeline, let’s explore outbound leads.

Outbound lead generation is when a salesperson initiates the first contact by reaching out to their target audience.

3 clear benefits of investing in outbound sales will give you:

1. It allows you to focus only on the prospects that can get the highest value from your product.
2. It enables you to educate your prospects from the get-go and decide how you want to frame the value proposition.
3. You can personalize your message for each prospect, and showcase your value proposition relative to their business needs.

In this pre-outbound phase, we’ll want to concentrate on getting to know our prospects, uncovering their business pains, and getting our timing just right.

Use Data to Identify the Highest Potential Prospects

During this step, the main goal is to find a set of prospects who can get the most value from your solution or product.

A way to identify this set of customers is by looking at:

• What type of business they are.
• What products they sell.

Let’s look at the fictional example of Lockdown Logistics.

This company would be looking for eCommerce merchants selling small, non-complex goods, making a high number of sales (because the more they sell, the more the ship).

So what is the type of data that Lockdown Logistics would need in order to find these prospects?

1. Find a site accepting payments. This will most likely bring up a pool of prospects that are eCommerce companies.
2. Find sites within industries where it is common to sell small and non-complex goods. For example, the Beauty, or the Fashion industries are both most likely to be relevant prospects.
3. Find sites that receive a large amount of web traffic. The logic behind this is that the more traffic they receive, the more sales they make, and the more parcels they ship.

All these data points can be found on the Similarweb Sales Workspace, to learn more, click here.

Another way to find new companies for your outbound efforts is to look within your book of business.

Points to consider:

• Who are your best customers today?
• Which of them gets the most value from your solution or product?
• What are their use cases?

And then, try to see if you can find commonalities between them:

• Are they all within a specific industry?
• Perhaps they are all roughly the same size in terms of employees or revenue range?
• Or maybe, you notice they all operate within the same market?

Using these criteria, you can find similar prospects within your own CRM, or lean on external tools.

Do Your Research and Show It

After you’ve found the accounts you want to prospect, you must look to understand your lead in order to be prepared to begin your outbound efforts.

There are a couple of steps you can take to research your prospects:

1. Go to their website, their LinkedIn or 10K page to understand their business, priorities, and the challenges you could potentially help them solve.
2. Tailor a message that will resonate with them by showing your value proposition relative to your competitors.

Here’s a checklist of all the things you need to know before your first meeting with a prospect.

Use Alerts and Signals to Identify When a Prospect is More Willing to Buy

As they say, “timing is everything”, and finding the best time to reach out to your prospects can make or break the sale.

In the picture above, we can see website traffic for HP and Dell.com.

HP drives more traffic, which usually means more potential customers are getting ready to buy.

But Dell seems to be much better at converting the users that do visit their site.

If you are, for example, a company that can help improve on-site conversion, showing them this side by side comparison would make a very compelling case for you.

Outbound & Designing the Perfect Sequence

A sequence is a series of structured touch points that take place over a certain period, that enable your sales representatives to consistently follow up on their messaging.

Call More

It’s been found that on average a sales representative needs 8-15 touchpoints to get a meeting or response.

But most of them usually give up after around 3-5 unanswered touches.

According to Outreach Data, sales reps tend to send more emails than picking up the phone to call; however, Outreach Data recommends keeping an even split between calls and email tasks within any given sequence.

Personalize at Scale

For sales reps, there’s a constant struggle between the need to reach enough companies, and personalizing at scale.

Using the combined data between Outreach Data and Similarweb, there is a painless way of doing this.

Find Prospects With a Common Pain or Opportunity & Use Automation to Personalize at Scale

First, you want to find prospects that have a common pain they might be trying to solve or a common opportunity they are looking to take advantage of.

This could be anything, but let’s explore a couple of examples:

• There has been a regulatory change that affects their industry: Now they have a shared problem and you can help them solve it.
• There has been a significant change in consumer behavior which affects their business (e.g COVID-19): Now they are all looking for ways to engage their customers under different circumstances.

Going back to our previous example of Lockdown Logistics, we know they are looking to find clients who could increase their sales revenue by expanding internationally.

This time around, we are looking for a shared opportunity in their pool of prospects.

The commonality is that they all receive visitors to their website from countries where they don’t currently ship.

By looking at the amount of traffic the prospect receives from abroad in the Similarweb Sales Workspace, Lockdown Logistics can estimate the amount of revenue they could make by partnering up with them and providing shipping to these locations.

Afterward, they use Outreach Data to create a customized sequence of emails that will allow Lockdown Logistics to personalize the email per prospect.

Below, we can see what the email looks like when it’s populated with the corresponding data for their first prospect, American Eagle.

As you can see it appears very personalized, but Lockdown Logistics could be sending this to thousands of prospects and just filling in different variables.

Using Data to Prospect Will Ensure Success

Using data to build a pipeline will allow you:

• Get to know your prospects, ensuring that you’re reaching out to the ones who are a correct fit.
• Find opportunities in which your product or solution will solve a pain-point for your prospects.
• Personalize at scale to meet your monthly goals.