Prospecting

In his New York Times bestseller “Never Eat Alone,” Keith Ferrazzi described a scene he witnessed that year at school:

Bill took personal notes on index cards for everyone he met — be it lawyers, grocers, peers, or scholars. Every night for 20 years, he would call people from his Rolodex of contacts, even as he worked his way up the political ladder. He’d ask them things based on what he wrote down in his little black book — and in the process, made a massive network of real, meaningful relationships.

When he ran for president in 1992, Bill called everyone in his Rolodex and asked them to join his campaign. Overnight, he had a nationwide network that eventually catapulted him into the White House.

Moral of the story: genuine relationships can make you the most powerful person in the world.

In this chapter, we’ll lay out a step-by-step process for how to find, understand, and prepare to connect with people intentionally and meaningfully, in a way that’s real and authentic.

In essence, how to prospect.

This is no longer a task that can be bifurcated to teams of SDRs — it probably never should have been. In the context of Full-Cycle Selling, prospecting is a fundamental skill, shared across the individual, the team, and the organization, to bolster the pipeline of all three.

Because if you don’t hunt, you can’t eat.

After this chapter, you’ll walk away knowing:

• If contact-based or account-based prospecting is right for you

• How to refine your targeting with precise ideal customer profiles (ICPs)

• What signals indicate a lead is primed to buy

• How to uncover untapped, best-fit leads

• How to prioritize your leads based on their value

Let’s build your own little black book. Who knows where it’ll take you?

When it comes to prospecting, the old cliche holds true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

In a study of over 700 B2B purchases worth $3.1 billion in sales, RAIN Group found that the biggest factor that separates sales winners from second-place finishers is their ability to connect with people on a personal level.

Whether you are a salesperson with accounts pre-assigned to you in your customer relationship management platform (CRM), you’ve been given a geographic territory to target, or you’re a founder just starting out, your goal as a prospector is to intimately understand every account — and every key player at those accounts — in your book of business. It’s your job to:

• Know exactly who they are

• Find their contact information

• And develop a thoughtful plan to get to know them

This can be done one of two ways: contact-based prospecting, where sellers reach out to individuals, or account-based prospecting, where sellers reach out to a company’s entire buying committee. There is no one, right way — in fact, Apollo survey data from sales leaders tells us there is nearly a 50/50 split on organizations that use contact- vs. account-based prospecting.

It really depends on what you sell and who you sell to.

If you sell something highly-transactional, or something that is easy for a single person to make a decision on and buy, contact-based prospecting is a good place to start.

Contact-based prospecting is when reps find and identify the right individuals within an organization. One strategy for doing this, especially for highest-value leads, is to thoroughly research the contact’s company, vertical, and who they are as people.

This sets you up for hyper-personalized engagement, a tactic Samantha McKenna, CEO and founder of #samsales, used to close companies like Comcast, LinkedIn, Google, and Yelp, and take her business to eight figures.

“There are three layers to how we should understand [individual] prospects: the human, the company, and the space,” says Sam. “Knowing your buyers as humans is an art.”

Account-based prospecting is when salespeople look at and sell to a target company holistically. This is likely the better choice if you’re selling an expensive product with a longer sales cycle.

At many companies, there is a division of responsibility and power where one person can’t (or won’t) make a major decision alone — even a CEO can be hesitant if their team isn’t bought in. Gartner reports that as many as ten individuals are involved in the majority of B2B purchasing decisions (and yet, 78% of sales representatives continue to rely solely on one buyer to close a deal).

Account-based prospecting helps you break into accounts and requires that you identify and strategically map out multiple people within an organization to cast a wide net for the right decision maker and get proper buy-in as early as possible.

Before you start prospecting for contacts or accounts, you need to understand which ones are actually a good fit for your business.

Research says that up to 50% of the average sales team’s prospects aren’t a good fit for what they sell. So it’s really no mystery why Apollo survey data revealed that 44% of sales teams are converting less than 5% of their leads.

“I get 50–70 emails a day and I can't tell you how many emails I get where someone is trying to sell me something for an engineer or a Head of Product — roles that are just not applicable to what I'm doing,” says Nick Feeney, VP of Revenue at Loom.

Better results start with more precise targeting — before you ever hit “send.”

First, you need to identify and create your ideal customer profiles.

ICPs, also called “personas,” are sets of attributes that detail which types of individuals and companies get the most value from your product or service. These attributes include specific demographic and firmographic characteristics like job title or role, seniority, location, company type, company size, and industry.

Start with no more than three titles. You'll test out your initial assumptions and use the learnings from those tests to refine your targeting.

As you build out your ICPs, Cynthia Handal, Head of Global Sales at Simera, recommends building “a bingo sheet of questions” across key attributes like company size, revenue, industry, and technologies used.

We’ve created a comprehensive targeting framework to help you answer those questions — see figure 2.1 for an example.

Once you have a rough idea of who your ICP looks like, you can use sales intelligence tools to find people who fit that description. In Apollo, for example, you’d use filters to narrow down your search to just your ICP.

The most commonly used filters in Apollo are:

• Job titles

• Industry

• Keywords (similar to industries but more granular)

• Location (countries or states)

• Management Level (C-suite, management, senior, or entry level)

• Num. of employee (SMBs, mid-market, or enterprise)

By building out your ICPs and personas, you are essentially creating the targeting framework for your sales organization. And the best, most comprehensive targeting frameworks include not just one, but multiple personas that you could target within any given account.

To do this, audit every closed/won deal your team brought in over the last few quarters to find:

1. Who signed the deal?

2. Who else was on the email threads or in meetings?

3. Who was on the implementation call with your onboarding team?

Once you do that, you’ll be left with three distinct personas (see figure 2.2):

1) The Buyer. This is the person who signed the deal, the check writer, the boss. Ultimately they have to buy in, but they’re often not actually using your product or service — their team is.

2) The Champions. These are the other people who were on the calls and the email threads. They either benefit from what you’re selling directly, or their team benefits, and without them pushing for you internally, you won’t win the deal.

3) The End Users. These are people who ultimately have to interact with your company and use your product or service on a regular basis. Their opinion and experience matters.

These are important to identify. Building multiple relationships across these personas within an account — also called multithreading — is proven to boost win rates and revenue. “As the size of buying committees continues to grow, effectively multithreading your opportunities will not only help you close bigger deals, but also prevent you from losing deals when your champion changes companies,” says Revenue Funnel CEO Hannah Ajikawo.

The data says she’s right.

In an analysis of 10,000+ sales deals, researchers found a strong correlation between the number of buyers involved in a deal and increased deal size (see figure 2.3).

Now, exactly how big is the pool of each of those ICPs? How many of them can you readily get in touch with?

These questions are integral to business planning and forecasting, especially as you’re just starting out, and the answer lies in your total addressable market (TAM). Your TAM is the total demand for your product or service across your ICPs and reflects the maximum amount of revenue your business can generate by selling to them.

That shiny number you get when you add up the results from each of your ICPs is, in essence, your TAM. It might be easy to think there are 10,000 or even 100,000 people out there who could realistically buy your product, but there's almost certainly not that many who could buy your product today or in a timeline that's relevant to you. So, you want to narrow down your TAM to “active TAM” — the pool of folks from that ICP who are ready to buy right now.

Research from Fortune 500 sales trainer and author, Chet Holmes, reveals that only 3% of your TAM at any given moment are active buyers (see figure 2.4).

Your TAM isn't as big as you think it is.

If your strategy is to blast as many people as you can, you're only dipping into the people who could theoretically buy from you but are not realistically ready. These may be the right people, but if it’s the wrong time, you’re only wasting future opportunities and quite literally burning through your TAM.

Instead, think of TAM as a long-term list of possibilities. Try to focus as much as you can on those 3% of people who are “buying now,” and fill in around the edges with those 6-9% who are “open to it.”

Remember Bill Clinton’s black address book? One might imagine that when a young Bill Clinton encountered someone with a background in fundraising, policy expertise, or media relations, he’d pay extra close attention — perhaps even marking a star by their name in his little black book. He was aspiring for political office and someone with these qualities would be a true “Tier 1 lead” to Bill.

Your business has these too — specific attributes, unique to you and your offering, that indicate a lead is a more probable customer and deserving of your full attention.

We call these the “signal filters” – the one-cut-deeper stuff like:

• Whether or not they recently received funding,

• Their annual revenues,

• How many people they’re currently hiring for and in what roles,

• What technologies they use, or

• Whether they’ve visited your or your competitors’ websites.

These filters can be layered on top of your personas in Apollo to help you identify your Tier 1 leads, then infused into your messaging to create hyper-personalized outreach at the right time

This hyper-targeting can be incredibly powerful. John Kim, CEO and Founder of Paraform, used the combination of personas and signal filters to source his startup’s first 100 customers.

As a recruiting platform, Paraform's most important lead signals are 1) if a company is recently funded and 2) if they are hiring.

So on top of his ICP of mid- to enterprise-level accounts, John conducted searches of recently funded accounts with an open headcount and newly listed job postings.

When you apply the right filters as you build out your ideal customer profile, you can narrow down to exactly which prospects are the most valuable to reach out to right now.

Here’s a complete breakdown of filters available in Apollo that will help you prospect for your best, most active opportunities.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations of signal filters — you’ll quickly learn which buyer behaviors align most with your offering.

Davit Svanidze, CEO at LeadRebel, knows the power of a well-filtered list. “It’s important to have some trigger,” Davit says, “a signal that shows you that a company is in your market right now.”

After much experimentation, Davit found the magic combination of Apollo filters and custom prospecting signals to build target lists with Tier 1 leads that either:

• Directly expressed interest in their offerings

• Already used technology that was compatible with their software

• Recently changed jobs and were looking for new tools

Reaching out to better leads has a massive impact on your closed-won revenue — with more refined targeting, LeadRebel increased their email conversion rate from .5% to 4.5% (a 9x increase!).

Often, people who have low email conversion rates jump to thinking that something is wrong with their email deliverability. But there are a number of reasons it could be underperforming, one of which is poor targeting. Refining your targeting can lead to very tangible improvements down the funnel. If you do think email deliverability is a concern, we’ll cover everything you need to know about that in the next chapter.

The most expensive thing you can do in sales is spend your time with the wrong prospect.

Jeb Blount, renowned sales executive and best-selling author, comments that salespeople who struggle with prospecting think of their prospecting list like a square; they treat every prospect the same, randoming attacking their database with no tiering system and no real objective. But top sales organizations “have no interest in hunting and pecking for opportunities.” They strategically tier their prospects using factors like:

• Size of the opportunity

• Probability the prospect will convert into a sale

• How much is known about the prospect, professionally and personally

The best salespeople think of their prospecting list like a pyramid.

For this, let’s revisit Chet Holmes’ TAM chart (see figure 2.6).

Lead prioritization starts by creating three buckets within this triangle:

Tier 1: The 3% buying now

The VIPs, the A+ listers, the crème de la crème, if you will.

Tier 1 leads are your best-fit customers that most closely mirror your ICPs and/or current customers. These are the leads that you’ve identified with signal filters, and are ones you can most reasonably assume are “buying now” — hence their place at the top of the pyramid. The data you’ve uncovered about them also serves as highly-relevant information you can use to personalize your outreach.

Tier 1 leads deserve the bulk of your time and resources because, according to the Pareto Principle, 80% of your revenue comes from your top 20% accounts (see figure 2.7).

Time spent giving these leads multichannel outreach, systematic nurturing, and hyper-personalized sequences (more on this in chapter six) is guaranteed time well spent.

Tier 2: The 6-7% open to it

If you’re segmenting properly, you’re going to get through your Tier 1 leads relatively quickly.

The next bucket of prospects you should focus on are your Tier 2 leads. These leads aren’t your best leads, but they are still good leads. You have their up-to-date contact information and they’ve shown at least one or two relevant data signals that tell you they’re likely “open to buying.”

Depending on the data you have, you might treat them slightly differently than Tier 1-ers, but they are still high in value and worthy of personalized engagement and strategic outreach.

Tier 3: The other 90%

All sales teams will eventually reach the point where they’ve worked through the leads they have the most data on and the most confidence in.

Which brings you to your Tier 3 leads, the amorphous bucket of most of your TAM that is either 1) not thinking about buying, 2) unsure if they are interested in buying, or 3) definitely not interested in buying.

Your job here is to identify which bucket they fall in (i.e. their disposition towards buying) and strategically move them up (see figure 2.8).

Before my time at Apollo, when I was still leading sales teams and training new SDRs, I told my teams this about Tier 3 leads: “It’s not your job to turn a no into a yes — it’s your job to turn a no into a maybe and, eventually, a maybe into a yes.”

Lead prioritization feels doable for an individual rep, but for an entire organization, it can become overwhelming quickly. That's where lead scoring comes into play. An Apollo survey revealed that nearly 30% of sales teams have no system in place for prioritizing and scoring their leads — nothing, nada, zip. And these teams made up 80% of the group who reported they “never” hit quota.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Your leads aren’t created equal. Your business and product are unique and there will always be certain lead qualities that you value more. For example, if you sell real estate, a lead’s location is priority numero uno. If your biggest deals come from intake forms, form completion or website visits signal a lead that’s worth your time.

Lead scoring models allow you to assign weight to specific attributes of each persona, helping you automatically rank every lead in your database and giving your reps a strategically prioritized list of leads. Most lead scoring models use "points" to score individual leads based on factors like company size, revenue, industry, if they've shown intent to buy, etc. The higher the points, the more likely they are to convert into customers.

As a result, you get a road map for parsing through your prospects and delegating the subsequent tasks across your team. Take, for example, the sales organization at Superside. With their leads scored and prioritized, they cut down on handoffs for their most important leads by passing them directly to their AEs.

“Everything is optimized within [Tier 1] cadences,” says Andreas Drakos, Senior Director of RevOps. “We use lead scoring to understand good accounts and good personas and we want the AE to take that lead directly.”

To create a lead scoring model, here’s what you want to do.

Step 1: Define your criteria. Reference your ICP (you should be overly familiar with it at this point) and lay out which lead attributes define your ideal customer. This includes everything from job titles, revenue, and technologies to behavioral attributes like emails clicks and form fills.

Step 2: Weight your attributes. Not all criteria carry the same importance. For example, a lead attending a webinar might be more significant than their job title. Assign weighting to each attribute based on scale (ex. not important → very important) or numerically (ex. 0–20, where 20 is the max). To help you out, see figure 2.9 for an example of a weighted lead scoring model that we’ve found to be effective.

Step 3: Gather data. Create even stronger scores by syncing behavioral data from your CRM using Apollo’s custom fields.

Our data revealed that Apollo users who go through these steps to build a simple lead scoring model are booking 47% more meetings than those who aren’t (see figure 2.10).

And it has just as big of an effect at the bottom of the funnel as it does the top. Apollo Scores was Built In’s secret sauce for skyrocketing both win rate and annual contract value (ACV) by +10%.

Now that you have a clear picture of exactly who can get value from your product and how to identify them, it’s time to venture beyond the database, because prospecting happens everywhere and there are dozens of places to find key buying signals on your prospects.

Researching your prospects on the web, Linkedin, or any other data sources will help you in two key ways:

Better understanding your top prospects will also help you understand their mindset and what’s most relevant to them right now.

But the internet is…a big place. What exactly are the signals you should look for to better understand and qualify your leads on a personal and professional level?

Looking at LinkedIn alone, 80% of its 900 million members have a say in business decisions, totalling a pool of 720 million potential prospects. As a lead source, LinkedIn has unlimited potential. But then again, so does a gold mine — and that potential is useless without a lot of heavy equipment to get at the gold.

Manually gathering insights, searching for contact info, pulling a contact into your CRM, and pushing them into an engagement platform can take three-to-five minutes per contact and far too many different tools and tabs. That time adds up, which is why it’s critical to use tools like the Apollo Chrome Extension to cut that time down to seconds — and find anyone’s contact information from anywhere on the internet.

"I use the Chrome Extension for all my initial email extraction…it’s my first step in the prospecting process,” says Olha Tsyperdiuk, Lead Generation Specialist at Coupler.io. The team at Coupler.io are now masters of LinkedIn prospecting, sourcing 20% of leads from LinkedIn that hold a 5% meeting rate.

Gear up! We’ll deep dive into research for personalization in the next chapter.

Recognize that you’re building a system in which any salesperson — SDR, AE, sales leader, founder — can look at their pool of leads and know that it’s an opportunity worth engaging. That there is potential for a relationship because these list of humans are:

• Fit to buy your product

• Likely to want your product

• Likely to want your product right now

• Well researched and well understood

• And ultimately, worth your time and resources

It naturally lends itself to a sales system where the responsibility (dare we say — the joy) of establishing a relationship with prospects is equally shared across your organization. They have the contact data, the prioritization, the context, and the confidence that the next person on the other end of their outreach could be their next big deal.

All that’s left is to build a system to engage them.