Everyone's heard the “white hat SEO” tactic of being yourself. Just put out quality content, and views will come. Yet there’s no denying that algorithms matter. They have the power to sway our decisions, exacerbate our biases, alter our subconscious, and affect our lives in unpredictable ways.

Reach, engagement, and follower growth have dropped by 50% for almost all LinkedIn creators in the last year, according to the highly anticipated LinkedIn Algorithm Insights 2024 report by Just Connecting HUB.

When changes are happening for 95% of creators, the issue isn't random. It's algorithmic.

Understanding even the basics of how the LinkedIn algorithm changes work can mean the difference between being seen by hundreds, and seen by millions.

Background On LinkedIn's Algorithm

LinkedIn has over a billion users worldwide, including more than 238 million in North America. 65 million people use LinkedIn to look for work every week, and 6 are hired every minute from the platform. The potential benefits of extending your reach are enormous—if you understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works.

Unlike other social media platforms, LinkedIn is built for professional networking. The LinkedIn algorithm is unique because it isn't designed for content to "go viral." It's more interested in showing people content that is relevant to them—in order to stoke more meaningful comments and relationships.

LinkedIn is upfront that the metric that matters is engagement. It's even built into the way they detect and handle spam. The more positive engagement you get, the more LinkedIn feels good about showing it to others. It also shows you what it thinks will be most relevant based on what it knows from your LinkedIn profile, connections, interests, and how you've interacted with content.

If you send someone a direct message, the chance you'll see their post again shoots up 70%, according to the Just Connecting report. If you save someone's post, there's a 90% chance you'll see their next one. How long viewers spend on your post is also factored in, which suggests long-form posts may have an advantage.

The Biggest Algorithm Changes

Should your LinkedIn poll have two answers or three? The difference can be a 25% drop in reach. LinkedIn algorithm updates can have a big influence on how people engage with your post. Among other things, the latest algorithm change has flattened much of the differences in algorithm for mobile and desktop LinkedIn users, so these differences are felt more or less across the board.

Comments Matter Even More

‎The latest LinkedIn algorithm update gives comments slightly more weight in boosting reach. Longer comments (>15 words) are twice as effective as shorter ones. "As an author, adding another 2-4 comments after the initial first hour can effectively reintroduce your post into the feeds of all participants, typically resulting in an additional 25% growth," according to the Van der Blom report.

Posting helpful, quality comments on other people's posts also helps your profile by increasing profile views, followers, connections, and, therefore, people seeing/interacting with your own content. However, stay away from letting AI do the work for you, which nets a much lower response.

Collaborative Articles

LinkedIn is leaning hard into some of the new features they've unveiled, like Collaborative Articles. Just commenting on one has a significantly higher chance of showing up on people's LinkedIn feeds than dropping a note on a regular post. Users who contribute enough to earn the Top Public Speaking Voice badge are also promoted more. Any badge you earn will give your profile a boost, but recent platform updates have raised the bar for qualifying.

Creator Mode

While not strictly an algorithm update, LinkedIn is not setting all profiles to Creator Mode by default. The biggest impact is that how your followers engage will have more impact than contacts. It also opens the option for everyone to use LinkedIn Audio Events (think one-off podcasts) and LinkedIn Live—which get 12x more engagement than ordinary video posts.

Hashtags

Previously a social media golden child, hashtags—especially custom ones — no longer have a material positive impact on reach. However, the first 2-3 hashtags are included in your post URL, which is helpful for SEO.

Broadly used hashtags are also useful for helping people search for and find content related to a topic. (For example, if you're interested in #socialselling, LinkedIn may suggest content from #sales.)

Outbound Links

It may surprise you to learn that including a link to an external site leads to a 25-35% drop in reach. The Van der Blom report attributes this to LinkedIn users preferring to stay on the platform—behavior that feeds into the algorithm de-prioritizing those links.

The report recommends circumventing this penalty by publishing the post without outbound links and then editing the post to include them. Since the latest algorithm update, comments made by the author that include a link are now given less visibility.

Format of your LinkedIn Posts

One notable addition to the LinkedIn formula is formatting. "For the first time, we've observed that factors such as the ideal length of text, subject matter, and posting frequency may differ depending on the format you choose," according to the Van der Blom report.

Some formats have fallen in and out of favor over the years. For example, PDF posts used to get more than twice the reach of ordinary posts, but it appears the algorithm is starting to de-prioritize them.

‎Optimal Post for Storytelling: Text and Photo

The most common post format is a combination of text and images, which make up 48% of LinkedIn content.

The ideal text and photo post has:

• 900-1,200 words focused on a single timely topic with relevant keywords (which improves searchability)
• Starts with a compelling hook, has an authentic voice, and ends with a strong and clear call to action.
• Short sentences (<12 words) and generous use of line breaks to avoid blocks of text.
• 1-5 relevant, personalized (not stock) images in a vertical format, with brand colors, that include people, and aren't screenshots or promotional images. GIFs are especially relatable, and therefore effective.

While high-quality visuals are crucial for LinkedIn posts, making them might be challenging. Editing each image manually is time-consuming and demands specific skills, whereas working with a designer might be costly. Instead, you can use AI tools such as an AI art generator or photo editor to create visuals by writing text prompts.

Optimal Post for External Calls-to-Action and Building Thought Leadership: Text-Only

Want people to download a report from your website, or take another action off the platform? According to Van der Blom's report, text-only posts with a strong hook (e.g. a bold statement) and ending with a question are especially effective. For an even smoother user experience, consider including a phrase like "Scan the QR code in our profile bio to access the full report instantly" at the end of your post.

Text-only posts are also great for sharing advice, strategies, or war stories about being in your field. This is especially useful for executives who want to establish themselves as thought leaders and build a following of people who trust their insight and advice.

Optimal Post for Engagement: Videos

Videos are a great example of how reach momentum is controlled by the algorithm. They lost favor for a while, but have been growing in reach again since September 2023, according to the Van der Blom report.

If your goal is to get people engaged with your content, leveraging the best AI video generator can significantly enhance your strategy. The Van der Blom report suggests keeping videos between 1-2 minutes unless your video is very engaging (then you can go up to five.) High-quality visuals, clear audio, subtitles, and anything to make the experience accessible to a broad audience will increase viewership and positive perception. Utilizing AI video generators can help meet these quality criteria efficiently, broadening your content's appeal.

Optimal Post for SEO: Articles

Articles are the bottom rung in terms of reach but are invaluable for SEO. They also help build out the Newsletter function, which is available exclusively to LinkedIn users who have "Creator Mode" switched on. Since the middle of last year, the platform has allowed creators to create multiple newsletters—helpful for subject matter experts with more than one core subject area.

The most impactful articles are original content (not regurgitated from a corporate blog) between 800-1,200 SEO-optimized words and posted on weekdays, when people are in the "office" and may be more willing to engage with long-form, work-related content.

The best-performing articles feature a single high-impact video, hyperlinks to credible sources, and a compelling cover image—and are posted bimonthly rather than once a week. You can further extend your reach by promoting the article in a post and sharing it with LinkedIn groups that will find it relevant.

Key Takeaways for LinkedIn Users

There is no one perfect format, time, or action that can guarantee views. Rigidly following the "optimal" post structure won't do much if your content isn't compelling enough to get people to engage. On the other hand, consistently putting out great new content that resonates with your social network will trump any advantage from timing or algorithm hacking.

The algorithm is trying to adapt to human behavior in order to continue providing more relevant content and user engagement. It also doesn't just work on a post-by-post basis. It has a running "memory." If the last 10-15 things you've posted do poorly, it's a good measure that you may not be posting content people want to read. That being said, there are some changes that can give content creators a boost.

Tips for Maximizing Engagement on LinkedIn

Skip the Engagement Pod

LinkedIn's Editor-in-Chief, Dan Roth, has said that the platform will penalize manufactured engagement (e.g. engagement pods where a group agrees to like everything for each other).

Directly asking for engagement in the post still seems to offer a modest boost, according to research by Just Connecting. If you're going to ask your readers for a favor, an instant repost (without any additional text) now leads to an even higher boost in reach (40% vs. 30% last year).

However, the most effective LinkedIn content strategy is to go with the algorithm, not against it. Authentic content and connection with other LinkedIn members will always trump manufactured likes and generic comments.

Tag Your Posts

When it makes sense, tag 1-4 people who are likely to respond to your post. Their engagement is worth 1.5x more than someone not tagged—but be careful. If your response rate is less than 60%, your reach could slow. When in doubt, tag them in the comments, which doesn't come with the same penalty. Don't tag more than 15 people, which could get your post tagged as spam.

Time your Posts

There's a lot of different advice about the best time to post on LinkedIn, but the answer will depend on your target audience. If you are targeting a global audience, The Algorithm Insights 2024 Report suggests you'll get the most traction if you post between 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. in your local time. In other words, if you're posting from New York, that will be about early morning in California and evening in Singapore.

Post Consistently

While posting blog posts daily works well for SEO, posting too often on LinkedIn may dilute your reach. According to the Algorithm Insights 2024 Report, your posting rhythm "conditions the algorithm to serve your content reliably to your audience."

While the report offers specific rules (like one video per week, or two if it's a company page), it seems more important to loosely plan to post a few times a week and then be open to letting conversation flow. For example, if a post is still getting significant traction, it makes more sense to let it ride than break momentum with a new post.

Stick Around After Posting

Conventional advice says that the first hour after posting is crucial. The algorithm evaluates how people react to your post to gauge its quality (or flag it for spam).

Now it seems the algorithm is also looking at how your post is also reviewing engagement at the 6-hour and 24-hour marks. The result is that some posts are "seeing substantially more reach on the 2nd and 3rd day compared to 1 year ago." It also helps to circle back around these time milestones to add comments to your own post.

You can start the conversation off by adding comments in the form of questions or further insight. If you tag people, make sure they will be interested in what you have to say—a lack of response is a negative sign for the algorithm. Then stick around to respond to comments, especially in the first hour after posting.

LinkedIn engagement is a game of momentum. You should ideally try to extend the momentum of anything you post, share, or do. For example, keep the conversation going after a LinkedIn Live session by sharing resources, or a highlights-only breakdown of what happened.

Use Polls

The Richard Van der Blom report found that LinkedIn polls are heavily underutilized tools. They achieve twice the medium reach and are often featured in LinkedIn's Trending Content. They're especially effective on company rather than individual pages.

The key is to pick a question that will appeal to a broad base, explain what you're trying to achieve with the poll, and avoid topics that are too promotional or political. Van der Blom's report recommends sticking to three answers and considering allowing an option to expound (e.g., "Other, see comments.") Continuing the conversation in the comments and sending invitations to connect with voters are all great ways to piggyback on the poll to grow reach.

Potential Implications Of The Algorithm Changes

Businesses with company pages have seen their initial reach drop by 25% in the last year since the latest update. Comments, likes, instant reposts, and "See More" clicks all help (in that order), but the effect is dampened if they're performed by employees. LinkedIn has also removed featured hashtags, which means companies should be incorporating them into their posts.

While all the rules can be overwhelming, it helps to remember that LinkedIn's goal is to foster a community that offers real value to people who use it. Offering free and helpful content—not locked behind paywalls or in return for contact information—goes a long way. It also won't hurt as LinkedIn continues to tweak its algorithms.

All LinkedIn posts benefit from a strong hook, a conversational tone, and compelling images—especially GIFs. The algorithm has long favored "dwell time," or how long people spend on your post, so anything that keeps them on the page longer (e.g., an in-depth analysis) will help.

Research by Just Connecting also suggests that the LinkedIn algorithm can only be affected by up to 16.6%. The base level of reach is determined by your network, follower-to-connection ratio, past content engagement, and whether influencers are engaging with it.

That means algorithm changes, while important, are just a small part of the puzzle for businesses and marketers going forward.

Optimizing Social Selling on LinkedIn with Warmly

If you're going to make LinkedIn social selling a core part of your growth strategy (and considering the rewards, every B2B company should be investing in it), then you have to remember the part it plays in your overall sales strategy.

Because LinkedIn doesn't exist on its own. It works in tandem with your website. With multiple options for adding CTAs across your posts and profile (as you can see in the screenshot below), LinkedIn can become an extension of a B2B website.

‎With the right strategy, you can align your LinkedIn demand generation (optimized to work with the algorithm) and your website demand capture - and that's where Warmly comes in.

There's no point generating lots of interest in your product with posts, directing people to your website to (hopefully) convert, and then losing them once they're there. That's a waste of your demand generation efforts.

With Warmly, you can:

• De-anonymize visitors to your site.
• Use automated chat to engage and nurture prospects.
• Get notifications when the warmest leads perform high-intent actions (like visiting your pricing page, or reaching out to a salesperson), so you can get your top-level SDRs and AEs involved.

And, with AI Prospector, you can create personalized outreach campaigns for those hot-ticket leads for email and LinkedIn.

The end result? A cyclical, signal-based revenue orchestration system, fueled by AI and human interaction.

Book a demo of Warmly today to see our clever workflows in action.

Warmly is revolutionizing the sales experience by providing a more efficient approach to connecting with potential customers. 

We know that’s a big statement to make. And we stand by it. 

We are the first signal-based revenue orchestration platform that automatically de-anonymizes and converts qualified website visitors. It goes like this: Drop in a code snippet to unveil visitors, and sync your CRM with tools like Outreach and Salesflow to auto-sequence target accounts' buying committees. Let AI chat handle hot leads and seamlessly transition to a live video call with your SDR, all on your website.

In most cases, good things take time. This isn’t one of those cases. We do this all at a fraction of the cost of our competitors, and we can get you started in just one day. 

Why Warmly Is Different (The Short Answer)

Many of our competitors (like Drift) are built for enterprise companies. That’s not what we’re about. Instead, we’re built for small to medium businesses (SMBs) — We’re 6sense plus Drift but focused on automation that empowers smaller teams at a price point that doesn't break the bank.

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Why Warmly Is Different (The Long-ish Answer)

We combine automation, AI, and A/B testing to optimize engagement strategies across various channels. By unifying disparate tech stacks and automating processes, the Warmly platform enables businesses to efficiently orchestrate their sales efforts and drive meaningful interactions with potential prospects.

Our platform offers users access to two primary signals: website visits and research intent. Leveraging these signals, businesses can proactively reach out to prospects via email, LinkedIn, and chat messages, ensuring timely engagement and maximizing the likelihood of conversion.

This strategy, which we call "warmbound," merges inbound and outbound motions to create a cohesive approach to lead generation. By utilizing inbound signals to drive intent and automating outbound outreach through channels like LinkedIn and email, Warmly enables businesses to maintain a continuous flow of engagement with prospects.

Plus, Warmly focuses on lead prioritization and segmentation based on factors such as Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), historical intent, and engagement intent. This enables businesses to tailor their outreach strategies and allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that the most promising leads receive timely and personalized attention.

But how do you go from anonymous website visitors and no lead gen strategy to a fully-optimized revenue orchestration strategy?

Let's show you how, with Warmly.

Part 1: Integrate your Tech Stack

Benefits:

• Data accessibility and insights: Seamlessly access and leverage CRM data within Warmly's platform, enriching insights into CRM activities, visitor behavior, and more.
• Streamlined workflows: Bidirectional data flow enables informed decision-making and action-taking directly within Warmly, eliminating the need to switch between platforms and enhancing productivity.
• Real-time updates: Receive instant notifications and updates on CRM activities, improving responsiveness and agility in managing leads and opportunities.
• Increased efficiency: Swift setup and centralized access to CRM data save time, eliminate manual data entry, and boost overall productivity.
• Simplified integration: Quick and hassle-free setup ensures you can effortlessly add prospects to email sequences, enhancing Warmly's platform's ease of use and efficiency.
• Data security: Warmly's limited access to your email sequencing tool ensures data security, while sender designation prioritizes mailbox availability for enhanced security.
• Insights enhancement: Enrichment of Warmly's platform with sequence data provides better insights for decision-making, extending its capabilities and empowering users to leverage email sequencing seamlessly.

Add Warmly Script Tag to Your Website

The Warmly script tag allows Warmly to monitor interactions on your site. Leads are tracked, and visitor behavior is analyzed to the T. This data can then be used to optimize marketing strategies, personalize user experiences, and improve conversion rates. And it’s super simple to set up—you can literally copy and paste the script code. 

Connect your CRM

Warmly offers integrations with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot, providing users quick and efficient access to their CRM data within the Warmly platform. Here’s the rundown:

Integration Process

• Implementation Speed: Warmly's integration with Salesforce and HubSpot takes only a few minutes to implement fully.
• Authorization: Warmly uses OAuth to authenticate with the CRM systems. Before integrating, Warmly requests a set of basic permissions.
• Access Control: Users can enable Warmly access to only read their CRM data or read and write data, which can be controlled through a toggle switch.

Salesforce Integration Overview

Warmly reads Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity-level data from Salesforce. Data flows into Warmly's platform, populating additional fields such as Warm Accounts/Warm Visitors tabs and Slack notifications with relevant CRM information.

HubSpot Integration Overview

Warmly reads Company, Contact, and Deal-level data from HubSpot. Like Salesforce integration, this data populates Warmly's platform, enriching features like Warm Accounts/Warm Visitors tabs and Slack notifications.

Connect your Email Sequencing Tool (Hubspot, Outreach, or SalesLoft)

Warmly's integrations with popular email sequencing tools like Outreach, Apollo, and SalesLoft are designed for efficiency and ease of use. The integrations enable your team to seamlessly add prospects to your email sequences directly from the Warmly platform.

Outreach Integration

Setting up Outreach integration takes just a few seconds. Access it through your Warmly dashboard's Settings tab, navigate to Integrations, select Outreach, and follow the prompts.

Apollo Integration (for Sequencing)

Similarly, you can set up Apollo integration for sequencing in seconds. Simply follow the precise steps outlined in the documentation for seamless integration.

Salesloft Integration

Guess how long it takes to integrate Salesloft with Warmly? If you said just a few seconds, you would be correct. Head to your Warmly dashboard's Settings tab, find the Integrations section, select Salesloft, and follow the prompts to complete the setup.

Part 2: Set up Segments

Benefits:

• Enhanced lead prioritization: Segments enable prioritization of high-engagement prospects and companies, allowing users to focus their efforts on leads with the most potential.
• Improved workflow efficiency: By filtering traffic based on predefined criteria such as historical intent, engagement, and session duration, users can streamline their workflows and allocate resources more effectively.
• Personalized marketing and outreach: Segments facilitate targeted marketing campaigns by allowing users to tailor their messaging and outreach efforts to specific audience segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of communication.
• Enhanced data visibility: Segments provide comprehensive insights into visitor behavior and lead characteristics, empowering users to make data-driven decisions and optimize their strategies for better results.
• Streamlined lead tracking: With segments, users can easily track leads' interactions and behaviors across their website, enabling better lead management and follow-up strategies.

Segment by Intent Level and Target Account Fit

Setting up high-intent segments with Warmly is streamlined and intuitive. Segments act as filters, allowing you to create targeted workflows based on visitor engagement levels and specific criteria.

You can easily configure segments by accessing the Settings tab and navigating to the Segments section. Using filters such as hot, medium, cold, and bad, you can define segments based on factors like perfect ICP fit, historical intent, and engagement activities on your website.

Whether you're on the free or paid plan, you'll find pre-configured segments and ample customization options. You can combine filters using 'or' logic, creating diverse segments tailored to your needs.

For instance, you can filter out company traffic, competitors, customers, universities, and governments. Additionally, you can filter by intent level, session time, referral source, and demographic information.

Take a look:

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Part 3: Set up Personas

Benefits:

• Targeted outreach: Personas enable users to focus their outreach efforts on individuals who hold influential roles within their target companies, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their communication.
• Streamlined prospecting: With predefined personas, users can quickly identify and add relevant contacts to their outreach sequences, saving time and effort in the prospecting process.
• Enhanced lead nurturing: By aligning outreach efforts with specific personas, users can tailor their messaging to resonate with the needs and interests of their target audience, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
• Simplified workflow automation: Warmly's AI Prospector tool allows users to automate prospecting tasks, such as adding contacts to outreach sequences based on predefined personas, further streamlining the prospecting workflow.
• Improved sales efficiency: By engaging with individuals who match their target personas, sales teams can prioritize their efforts and allocate resources more effectively, leading to higher productivity and better outcomes.

ICP Personas by Title/Job Function

Firstly, navigate to the settings and personas section within Warmly. Here, you can create personas based on job titles or functions that align with your target audience. For example, if you're a sales and marketing tool, you might create personas for sales leaders, heads of sales, or vice presidents of sales. You can specify criteria, such as whether an email or LinkedIn profile is available for each persona.

Once you've established your personas, you can leverage them effectively while prospecting. For instance, if a visitor from a particular company hits your website, you can quickly identify the relevant persona associated with their job title or function.

Using Warmly's AI Prospector tool, you can then add them to an outreach sequence with just a few clicks. This streamlined process allows you to target the rest of the buying committee efficiently, ensuring that your outreach efforts focus on the organisation's most relevant decision-makers.

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Part 4: Set up Slack Notifications

Benefits:

• Improved responsiveness: Be alerted to prospect activities, leading to quicker follow-ups and increased conversion rates.
• Enhanced team collaboration: Get everyone on the same page and step up your communication with centralized Slack notifications.
• Real-time insights: Alerts about your segments empower timely actions, strengthening customer relationships and driving business growth.

Slack Notifications Based on Segments

Integrating a Slack channel with Warmly allows you to receive real-time notifications whenever significant events occur on your website, such as a prospect starting a session, landing on a specific page, filling out a form, or engaging with an AI chat message. This integration lets you stay informed about visitor activities and promptly respond to potential leads or customer inquiries.

The setup involves creating a dedicated Slack channel for receiving notifications and granting Warmly the necessary permissions to interact with it. You can customize the types of events that trigger notifications based on your segments, ensuring that you only receive alerts relevant to your business objectives.

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Part 5: Set up ‎AI Chat (AI Chat‎) 

Benefits:

• Scalability of AI: Leveraging ChatGPT, the Warmly AI Chat delivers personalized and customized messages to prospects at scale, surpassing the capabilities of sales reps.
• Efficiency and focus: AI Chat automates prospect engagement, freeing sales reps from the manual task of initiating conversations. It ensures all relevant prospects are messaged based on segment filters, notifying reps only when a prospect responds, thus optimizing their time and focus.

First, a Prompt, Then An Alert

Warmly's AI Chat feature integrates ChatGPT prompts and Slack alerts to streamline prospect engagement. This enhances traditional Warm Calling and Inbound Chat capabilities.

With AI Chat, customized messages are sent to prospects automatically and personalized using ChatGPT. Then, notifications are sent to sales teams via Slack only when prospects respond. This approach aims to boost engagement by delivering tailored messages at scale while alleviating the manual burden on sales reps. Additionally, it offers increased flexibility and efficiency in prospect communication, ultimately optimizing sales processes and maximizing productivity.

Part 6: Set up Inbound Chat Workflows

Benefits:

• Personalized engagement: Create tailored conversational journeys for website visitors, delivering a customized experience.
• Efficient automation: Automate prospect engagement with AI-powered chat, saving time for sales reps.
• Qualification focus: Notify sales reps only when prospects respond, ensuring efforts are directed towards qualified leads.
• Proactive approach: Identify high-intent leads and initiate conversations, driving meaningful interactions.
• Cost-effective solution: Access affordable conversational chat workflows, providing SMBs with a competitive advantage.
• Easy setup: Implement Inbound Chatbot Workflows quickly and efficiently, without the need for extensive training or resources.

Relevant Customer Conversations Only

Warmly's Inbound Chatbot Workflows revolutionize customer engagement by offering an affordable alternative to Drift's conversational chat function. Through customizable workflows, Warmly enables businesses to interact with prospects in a personalized manner, driving meaningful conversations and ultimately boosting sales.

Setting up Inbound Chatbot Workflows with Warmly involves creating tailored conversational journeys for website visitors. Using ChatGPT prompts, prospects navigate through a logic tree of potential answers, ensuring relevant and engaging interactions. These workflows can be personalized based on various criteria, such as demographic data, intent level, CRM criteria, and traffic source, ensuring that each prospect receives a customized experience.

Additionally, Warmly offers a complementary AI-powered chat solution for high-intent leads, leveraging integrations with third-party buying intent data and CRM tools. This proactive approach to website chat allows businesses to convert warm leads into sales conversations effectively. 

Part 7: Set Up Auto Prospecting via Email Sequencing

Benefits:

• Improved targeting: Personalized email sequences and automated workflows allow you to better target your audience based on specific persona types and segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
• Deeper insights: Integration with Apollo API or Warmly's credits enables you to track individuals who visit your site from outbound emails and analyze engagement metrics more comprehensively, providing valuable insights for refining your strategy.
• Higher conversion rates: With a cohesive and tailored approach to engagement, you can expect to see higher conversion rates as you engage with your target audience more effectively.

Personalized Email Prospecting 

Integrating your Apollo API key enhances your prospecting activities. The integration lets you monitor individuals who arrive on your site from outbound emails through the setup of query parameters, providing deeper insights into engagement metrics.

Once integrated, you can craft personalized email sequences within leading outreach platforms like Outreach or SalesLoft. These sequences can be finely tuned to match your target audience and messaging strategy, ensuring a cohesive and practical approach to engagement. Moreover, Warmly offers automation for prospect workflows, automatically assigning visitors that align with specific persona types and segments to predefined email sequences.

By embracing automation and harnessing Warmly's capabilities, you can refine your prospecting workflow and optimize outreach endeavors. This approach facilitates more meaningful engagement with your audience, increasing conversion rates and amplifying the impact of your outreach initiatives.

Part 8: Set up Auto-Prospecting via LinkedIn Sequencing (with Salesflow)

Benefits:

• Targeted outreach: By defining criteria like industry and job title, you ensure that outreach efforts are directed towards relevant prospects.
• Accuracy: Features like visitor location search enhance the accuracy of prospect targeting.
• Scalability: With automated workflows, you can scale your prospecting efforts without increasing manual workload.

Adding LinkedIn to Your Prospecting

First, get started with Salesflow by visiting salesflow.io and logging in to your Salesflow account. If you haven't already, purchase your Salesflow seat, with Warmly users eligible for a 20% discount if purchased through Warmly.

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Within Salesflow, you can identify targeted accounts and personas using Warmly's prospecting tools. Filter and segment leads based on specific persona types within the target companies. Utilize Warmly's prospector tool or integrate with Apollo using your Apollo API key to identify and enrich key stakeholders within the targeted accounts. 

‎Then, set up LinkedIn sequences in Salesflow by creating a new campaign for LinkedIn sequencing. Choose the "Connection Request" option, allowing you to automatically connect with targeted individuals who visit your website. Set connection limits, personal notes, and follow-up messages to optimize your outreach strategy.

You can customize connection requests and follow-up templates by crafting personalized messages addressing recipients by their first name and mentioning their Company's interest in Warmly's services. You can also set up follow-up messages to be sent if there's no response to the initial connection request.

Configure sequence activation and scheduling by defining the schedule for your LinkedIn sequencing campaign, specifying the days and times for sequence activation. Activate the campaign once contacts have been enrolled to initiate the outreach process.

Finally, monitor and respond to responses by tracking your LinkedIn sequences' progress within Salesflow. Respond promptly to any replies received directly from your inbox. This integration allows you to streamline your LinkedIn sequencing process, ensuring timely and personalized outreach to potential prospects visiting your website.

Warmly: The All-in-One Revenue Orchestration Platform

So there you have it—Warmly is revolutionizing the sales game by providing an efficient, cost-effective solution for connecting with potential customers.

With our platform, you can seamlessly integrate your tech stack, unveil and convert qualified website visitors, and engage with prospects in real-time, all without breaking a sweat.

So why wait? Experience the Warmly difference today and supercharge your sales efforts like never before. Book a demo now.

There are lots of tools out there today purporting to be the future of revenue orchestration. However, not that many can actually accomplish enterprise-level end-to-end sales prospecting for the price of an SMB platform.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to Warmly’s sales orchestration platform: Salesflow integration. 

Following our new Inbound Chat Workflows, you can now use Warmly and Salesflow to create automated LinkedIn outreach campaigns for your ICPs. 

Outreach Strategy: Challenges and Current Trends

Sure, you’re not cold calling anymore. Sales prospecting has come a long way since the days of ringing hundreds of random phone numbers and hoping the person will pick up.

Today, sales reps and B2B marketers are much more focused on optimizing leads before reaching out. Why waste time with people who aren’t going to pick up or who aren’t interested in buying at all?

However, this outreach strategy requires you to get a few things right in the first place.

• Identifying the right ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas.
• Understanding intent signals from your prospects.
• Website visitor data you can rely on.

With sales and marketing teams becoming increasingly integrated and the number of B2B tools skyrocketing, the process of conducting outreach to prospective leads can quickly become unworkable.

Today, it’s also not enough to just go after potential prospects via email (and it's increasingly challenging to catch someone on the phone). 75% of B2B buyers today use social media to make buying decisions, so you need to bring the selling to where they are.

The Value of LinkedIn Sales Prospecting

Approximately 141 million LinkedIn members are daily users, while almost 50% of LinkedIn’s entire user base are monthly users. You get the picture: there’s a huge opportunity for B2B sellers on the platform.

With more and more B2B buyers turning to the LinkedIn search engine to find opportunities, companies, and new prospects, you're missing out if you’re not already there. 

But it’s not just about the scale of social selling on the platform. Engagement is a huge factor in LinkedIn prospecting. 

InMails—LinkedIn’s cold outreach solution—have a reply rate of 10-25%, while email campaigns in the software industry on average see an open rate of not much more (28%). 

And email marketing reply rates? They lag behind at around 5-10%, depending on how effective your campaign and messaging are.

The truth is, if you want to see results from sales prospecting, it’s better to use multiple channels than focus all of your efforts on one. And that means spending time conducting LinkedIn and traditional cold email outreach.

More channels = a wider net in the sea of B2B buyers. And a greater chance that those fish will bite.   

Salesflow + Warmly = A New Way to Do Outreach Campaigns 

LinkedIn automation tools are nothing new—the platform has always been a place to conduct business, and being able to automate messaging and connection requests is a massive time-saver for founders. 

Recently, the Warmly team had the opportunity to hear sales prospecting tips from Brian Gerrard, Outreach's outbound guru. Our takeaway? Effective prospecting is all about combining quality data with the right amount of outreach. 

Prospect not a match for your business? They’re not going to answer your message. Don’t message enough? Then you’re not doing your best to nurture them. 

This is why the combination of AI-driven LinkedIn automation and a sales orchestration platform (like Warmly) can really take your outreach campaigns to the next level.

Sure, your current workflow for sales outreach might already include LinkedIn automation.

But what if you could ensure that LinkedIn connection requests and messages were really going to the people who want to buy?…

…At the exact moment they’re ready to buy? 

Combining intent signal data from Warmly and the powerful LinkedIn prospecting tools from Salesflow, you can now automate the entire cold outreach process, adding another channel to your sales process. 

Plus, on average, Warmly’s internal Salesflow campaigns see a response rate of 14%. 

The Power of a Salesflow Outreach Campaign

• Automatically send connection requests to LinkedIn prospects. 
• Send personalized LinkedIn messages to new connections based on demographic, role, or other segment. 
• Set up follow-up sequences personalized to each segment. 
• Auto-like the most recent post on your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. 
• Automatically send 200-500 connection requests a week.

The Power of Warmly

• De-anonymize 15% of contacts and 65% of companies that visit your website.
• Track buying intent with Bombora integration. 
• Automatically notify sales reps when high-intent accounts are browsing your website. 
• AI Prospector personalizes and sends emails to key stakeholders. 
• Enhance lead nurturing with the combined power of human and AI web chat.

Warmly + Salesflow = An Automated Sales Pipeline

• De-anonymize website visitors and filter by target audience and intent to find the leads ready to buy.
• Auto-enroll potential leads in email and LinkedIn sequences using Warmly’s AI Prospector and Salesflow integration. 
• Personalize outreach by bringing in human sales reps at any moment to capitalize on high-value accounts or optimum intent moments. 
• Optimize your LinkedIn marketing by targeting the right accounts at the right time, improving conversion rates. 

From Cold Prospecting to… Warmly

Now you know why we think Warmly and Salesflow integration is so powerful.

Next, let’s run through how to get set up in Warmly so all your outreach sequencing is ready to go, hands-free.

Warmly is designed so that our AI tools can run the software autonomously, freeing up your SDRs and AEs to focus on closing high-ticket deals. But we never want you to feel out of control, so you can seamlessly bring a human into the sequence at any time. 

To get the most out of LinkedIn prospecting with Salesflow and Warmly, you’ll first need to set up some things in your Warmly account. 

Step 1: Add the Warmly script tag

To ensure Warmly can track your website visitor data, you first need to add the Warmly script tag to your website. This can go in the main code for your entire website, or you can add it just to a few pages. 

We have follow-on tutorials for adding the Warmly script tag to Webflow and Google Tag Manager. If you don’t use either of us, just reach out to Warmly, and we can help you set it up! 

Adding Warmly script tag to Webflow 

To add Warmly tracking to your entire website, head to your Webflow dashboard, find your entire website, and click Settings. 

In Settings, click ‘Custom Code’ and add the script tag straight into the Head code box. 

If you only want to add the script tag to specific pages, you can do this through Webflow Designer. 

Find the specific page to which you want to add the tag, click Settings, and scroll down to where it specifies ‘Inside <head> tag.’ 

Adding Warmly script tag to Google Tag Manager 

On Google Tag Manager, you’ll want to add a New Tag in your main dashboard. Then, add a Custom HTML to the Tag Configuration.

Afterward, you’ll need to set up Triggering to confirm whether the tag appears on your entire website or just specified pages.

So, add a new Trigger and select Page View. If you want to add the tag to your entire website, keep ‘All Page Views’ selected. If you want to specify pages, click Some Page Views and add each Page URL to the list. 

Step 2: Set up Slack integration

Now, you can set up your Slack integration to ensure your sales team receives instant notifications when ideal prospects show up on your website or complete certain actions, such as starting a session or visiting a page. 

In Warmly, you’ll find Slack integration in your Settings. Click Get Started, log in to your correct Workspace, and select the Slack channel in which you want to receive updates. 

Once this is set up, you can add specific filters within Warmly that specify when notifications should be triggered.

For example, if you set up notifications for prospects visiting your website (you can segment to filter only those visitors that you really care about—more on this in the next step), once the action has been triggered, you’ll receive a Slack notification in the channel you specified. 

Step 3: Build out segments and personas

Now it’s time for arguably the most important part—setting up your segments and personas. You’ll find these by going to settings on your Warmly dashboard. 

Segments

Segments dictate the kind of visitor data you want to be notified of. There are many different ways you can specialize personas to the needs of your sales teams and your potential customers. For example, you can filter by company size, estimated revenue, time spent on your site, or even the trigger for that visitor arriving on your site (for example, they came through email).  

Once your segments are set up, you can apply these to your Slack notification settings and only get notified when someone from your target company arrives on your website or spends time on your pricing page, for example. 

Personas

Personas help you get down to account-level specifics—like buying committees within the companies you want to target. This will help you customize your email outreach strategy (and LinkedIn outreach) by targeting specific people who work at your target companies.

For example, if you want to set up an outreach campaign targeting sales leaders, use the persona options to add specific job titles. However, you can filter by more categories, including role, state or region, and seniority level, to target the exact people you want to nurture.  

Step 4: Set up email sequencing

Outbound workflows are only available to users with a Business or Startup-tier Warmly account.

Once your segments and personas are set up, you can use them to create targeted outreach sequences in email through Outreach integration.

So, you might want to target a specific company you know is looking at your website and then craft an outreach campaign to target specific people. On the company page, head to the Prospects tab to filter accounts with valid email addresses.

Then, add them to an Outreach email sequence with just one click.

Bringing Salesflow Into the Mix 

Once you’ve got Warmly set up and personalized with segments and personas for your lead generation strategy, you can also harness the power of LinkedIn outreach. 

Salesflow integration means that you can now add prospects to a LinkedIn sequence directly from your Warmly dashboard. With AI Prospector, you can build email and LinkedIn sequences that work in tandem to target your ideal customers.  

This integration allows you to optimize your social selling strategy and ensure that the right people see your brand—at the right time. 

LinkedIn Prospecting with Salesflow and Warmly

To take advantage of all-in-one prospecting and cold outreach within Warmly, you’ll need an account with Salesflow—however, customers purchasing through Warmly get a 20% discount on a Salesflow subscription. 

The first step is to add your Account API token from Salesflow to the Warmly integration page. Once this is complete, campaigns created in Salesflow will be automatically integrated into Warmly, allowing you to add accounts to your LinkedIn sequences with just one click. 

Here’s how it all works. 

Step 1: Add campaign

Firstly, you’ll need to set up a campaign within Salesflow. Once prompted for which campaign type you want, choose new connections. This means all new visitors to your website (after being filtered by segments and personas) will be automatically sent a connection request on LinkedIn, along with follow-up messages if applicable. 

Afterward, you can specify the number of connection requests you want to send out daily and include an option to like your new connection’s latest LinkedIn post. 

Step 2: Personalized outreach message  

Next, add a personalized note that will appear alongside your connection request. Despite the usability of LinkedIn automation tools, you always want to personalize as much as possible. In one study on cold email outreach, personalization increased open rates by 29% and response rates by up to 50%. 

Keep your LinkedIn message snappy and personal - nobody wants to see another generic connection request that says, “Hey! Want to connect?” 

At this point, you can also add follow-up messages that will trigger a specific number of days after your connection request has been accepted. These don’t need to be long or complex—you want to nurture your prospects through cold messaging as if they’re already warm. After all, these LinkedIn profiles might have already visited your website, read your emails, or spent time on your pricing page.  

After setting up your sales outreach messages, you’ll be able to choose the days and hours that your campaign is active. 

Step 3: Integrating Salesflow campaigns in Warmly

Now that your campaigns are all set up, you can start adding prospects to them from Warmly. There are multiple ways to do this. In the example below, we’ve chosen a company associated with accounts that have spent more than 10 seconds on the Warmly website.

Head to your chosen company’s page in Warmly and filter by a persona, such as sales leaders who have LinkedIn.

Now, you can use Salesflow integration to add these contacts to your Salesflow sequence with just one click. Once they’re added, Salesflow will initiate the campaign and begin sending out connection requests and personalized messages you already created.  

Automating Email and LinkedIn Outreach with AI Prospector

If you want to remove even more of the research and outreach time associated with LinkedIn prospecting, there’s another option. With Warmly’s AI Prospector, you can automate the entire email and LinkedIn outreach process with just a few clicks. 

All you have to do is add persona and segment filters to the AI Prospector tool and see how Warmly handles all your personalized outreach. 

Below, we’ve created a workflow that will auto-email anyone who has:

• Visited the Warmly website.
• AND applies to the specified segments and personas. 

Once you’ve specified the number of personas you want to reach out to and added them to a relevant Outreach sequence, you can let Warmly handle the repetitive process of sending emails to anyone who visits your website that you want to nurture. 

The same process applies to LinkedIn outreach with our Salesflow integration. Add a workflow in AI Prospector, include the segments you want to target (core ICP, for example), and add your personas. 

Then, you can add your workflow to the Salesflow sequence you already set up (as in the step-by-step guide above.) Toggle enable on, and you’re set: Warmly’s AI Prospector will automatically find LinkedIn profiles that match your personas and handle the entire outreach process (including sending connection requests, messages, and follow-ups) to your prospects with Salesflow. 

Practical Use Case: How Warmly + Salesflow Enhances Your Outreach Process

With Warmly's solutions, you can adjust your outreach strategy depending on the type of leads arriving at your website. Let's look at a few possible situations, as this is where you'll witness the full power of Warmly and Salesflow integration.

Warmly uses data from your:

• ICP filters
• CRM (historical intent)
• Website and email engagement  

To give each lead that arrives at your website a warm lead score. Anything we deem to be a cold lead (they're not in your CRM; maybe they only visited your website for a few seconds) gets a cold outreach process: AI chatbot on the website, an auto cold email sequence.

However, when those leads get warmer, you start to see how Warmly can automatically filter opportunities to ensure you can nurture the warmest prospects - saving your sales reps valuable time.  

Bad Leads

Let's face it: only a very small proportion of your website visitors are going to be in the market to buy, or even genuinely interested in your product. There's no point dedicating any time to leads that don't qualify for your ICP, are from a competitor, or we can't tell which company they work for at all.

If Warmly detects a bad lead on your site, Inbound Chat will be automatically turned off. Your sales reps are too good to be engaging with useless leads.

Cold Leads

Warmly can immediately distinguish which of your visitors are cold; for example, if they aren't in your CRM, we can't identify their role, or they only spend minimal time on your site.

So, say someone arrives on your homepage. They're from a company that largely matches your ICP, but it's not ideal. We're also not sure of their role at said company.

These leads will see Warmly's Inbound Chat. Differing from the more specialized AI Chat, Inbound Chat will send you a Slack notification if a cold website visitor take a high-intent action through the chatbot, like asking to speak to your sales team. Otherwise, they're not actively approached by sales reps.

Cold leads will also be auto-added to a marketing email sequence. These might prompt a visitor to check out more of your solutions, if they viewed your services page, or directed to your blog if they landed on a blog page.

Medium-Warmth Leads

Say someone arrives at your website who has been regularly researching solutions like yours across the web. As long as the visitor matches your ICP (in terms of company size, industry, and role), Warmly's AI Prospector can auto-enroll them in a warm email sequence. Our AI Chatbot will also reach out to them when they're on your website and prompt them to engage.  

With Warmly's Bombora integration, we can also   they've been researching in the past, giving us a sense of how close they are to buying what you're selling.

Warmly wouldn't necessarily add in LinkedIn outreach at this stage in the sales cycle, especially considering the limits on connection requests on the platform. But if you know that your customers are highly engaged on LinkedIn, you can use Salesflow integration to craft an outreach sequence that targets specific medium-warmth accounts that arrive on your website, where you can nurture them with AI and human collaboration.

Hot Leads

Hot leads are another story. If someone is spending 30 seconds or more on your pricing page, or we can see that multiple people from the same organization are landing on your site - now is the time to throw everything at converting them. They're hot.

In this case, AI Prospector would enroll them in a combination of LinkedIn and email sequences, prompting them to engage and/or book a demo. If you get a Slack notification that a hot lead is on your site right now, maybe a sales rep hops onto a video call with the prospect on the Chatbot to engage with them in real time.

Thanks to Warmly's advanced intent signals, you can be sure that only the most attractive leads (based on your ICP, CRM, and intent data) are being added to those more personalized outreach processes: LinkedIn, personalized chat, warm email sequences.

Warmly's Integration Process

Whatever your ICP or specific segments/filters, Warmly implements the same workflow each time - so you can be sure that you're only being looped in when a really juicy lead lands on your site.

For every prospect, the process is this:

1. Lead lands on site and Warmly categorizes according to intent data.
2. If cold, AI Chat is disabled; Warmly's Inbound Chat is enabled.
3. If warm, lead is engaged through AI Chat and entered into relevant email sequence.
4. Warm leads are nurtured in a cyclical process, moving through outbound and inbound channels (from LinkedIn back to your website, and vice versa) until they're hot.  
5. If hot, lead engaged through AI Chat, email sequence, and LinkedIn sequence. There's the possibility for your human sales reps/AEs to get involved at any moment thanks to real-time Slack notifications.

The result? More efficient outreach, and higher conversion rates.

End-to-End Outreach Campaigns with Warmly and Salesflow

Social selling is an integral part of the B2B marketing and sales today. But it's not just about building an engaged following or driving word-of-mouth recommendations about your product: social platforms like LinkedIn are there to drive leads to your website, where they can increase knowledge and even book meetings with your team.

If your LinkedIn and website goals aren't aligned, you're not going to see the benefits of an omnichannel B2B sales cycle. And that's why Warmly's new Salesflow integration is so impressive.

Thanks to the combined power of buyer intent and warm lead scoring (Warmly) and personalized LinkedIn outreach (Salesflow), you can manage your entire lead classification and nurturing process across one platform. Our high-level data guarantees that you’re prospecting accounts who are ready to buy from you right now, optimizing your sales process.

Interested in how you can do accomplish better outreach with Warmly’s AI Prospector? 

Book a demo today—or sign up for free to try our deanonymization tools right now.

‎So, you SQO’d a deal? Sick. Now, you think you can actually close it? Let's see.

Naturally, your close deals rate depends on dozens of factors: the accuracy of your ICP, the quality of your lead generation, the strength of your SDRs, and more.

But identifying an SQO doesn't automatically mean you're going to close. The average close rate sits at around 20% for all B2B companies, though high-performing sales teams can inch that up to 30%. Even the best B2B salespeople can fall at the final hurdle.

At Warmly, we've optimised the sales process by bringing in inbound sales representatives to our sales teams, which has a significant effect on the quality of new leads and speeds up the process of identifying SQOs. After that, it's all down to our AEs.

Specifically, AEs at Warmly are expected to do a minimum of 3 out of 16 of the following B2B sales techniques if they've got a good deal on the line. With the following B2B sales strategies, the KPI for all AEs is to improve close rates by 15%.

A Rundown of Our B2B Sales Strategies

The Must Dos:

1. Pre-amble: The basics
2. Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?

The Options:

1. SQO Follow Up Sequence
2. Multi-thread
3. 3Ws Recap
4. Good Word Referrals
5. Charm the Prospect’s Reps
6. Gift-giving
7. Get Personal
8. Gap-selling
9. Targeting Customer Success
10. Business Case
11. Sales Leadership Over-the-top
12. Loop in Decision Maker/Stakeholder
13. Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick
14. Sign the Deal on Conditions
15. Customer Referral
16. Get Wacky

Strategy Details: The Must Dos

1. Pre-amble: The basics

Post SQO, it's a good idea to first get your house in order before getting involved with potential buyers.

• Add a Buying committee.
• Add everyone on LinkedIn and follow their company for company news.
• Ensure the next meeting is on the books.
• Ensure you have the full list of steps and timeline from now until the finish line. A recommended line of questioning:

"Working our way backwards, what needs to happen to be able to sign?”

“What is the process you used to sign with your last vendor?”

“Why can’t we sign today?”

“Will you be the signer? If not, when can I get them on a call?”

“Do you need a security/privacy/compliance review?”

“Who else on the team needs to see this? Do you want ground level reps to see it? What are their names/emails?”

“Do you need to do a data trial?”

“Do you need a business case?”

“Will there be a meeting with the CFO? Can I get them on a call? What are their names/emails?”

“By what date do you want to start seeing impact? Assuming a two-week onboarding we will want to sign one month before.”

2. Mid-amble: Do you even have a deal?

So many supposed 'qualified' sales leads are not SQOs. You will improve your barometer over time but it’s highly encouraged to review C/L deals and decide what you missed so you can look for it in the future, and refine your B2B sales strategy.

Key Questions: Understand

• Has your champion purchased a tool before?
• Are you talking to the decision maker who will be signing?
• Has the prospect articulated which key annual/quarterly business level priorities this project aligns to?
• Did your prospect explain what budget this is going to come from and if they’re authorized for budget?
• Do you really have the 3 Whys?

For “Why Do Anything?” (Problem), could they articulate the cost of their business of making no changes?

For “Why Warmly?” (Solution), could they articulate why they can’t manually do this? Why they can’t use another tool? Which other solutions they’ve already tried that have failed?

For “Why Now?” (Urgency, is there truly real urgency? Have they articulated the day by which they have to deliver results? Have they said what happens if that day passes and problem is not solved?

• Can your champion articulate the 3 Whys you wrote for them internally? They need to verbally say the 3 Whys out loud back to you to know they can do it internally.
• Can the prospect articulate how it will be added into their existing processes & tech stack?

Key Questions: Learn

• Surface objections:

“Why wouldn’t you move forward with Warmly?”

“What do you think X other stakeholders biggest objection with Warmly is? If you don’t know, can I ask them directly?"

• Arming the champion:

“What are you going to say when the decision maker says we shouldn’t move forward with Warmly?”

“Which of these 10 pieces of collateral do you think will have the most impact when viewed internally? How do we get them viewed?”

Our B2B Sales Strategy: Details

Once an AE has run through the pre-amble and mid-amble, it's time to get to the meat of closing deals. At this part in the B2B sales process, as mentioned above, we expect Warmly AEs to complete at least 3 of the following 16 sales tactics, and it's up to them how they do that.

The very best sales reps are flexible and adaptable. That's why we don't prescribe a 3-step process for closing deals: it's a case of personalizing for each and every prospect company and their unique needs.

Our ultimate list of techniques for effective sales closing is a go-to road map for a successful sales cycle.

B2B Sales Techniques Part 1: First Step Options

1. SQO Follow Up Sequence

Adding sales leads to sequences is an easy way to stay top of mind, with little to no work on your end.

• Drop the champion/decision makers and each new person you meet into a SQO follow up sequence.
• Drop the finance decision makers in a CFO Sequence/Financial Decision Maker Sequence.

2. Multi-thread

A successful B2B sales strategy involves more than one person. Really, you need to be in conversations with 3+ people in the organization, and ideally have strong relationships with each of these people.

Start the process of looping in people early by:

• Asking the champion for coffee chats or 15 min intros.
• Find warm intros into the buying committee or anyone in the company and get them to pass you along to a GTM team.
• Try to loop every person on their end in every email (no sparing inbox!)
• Inform the buying committee on new developments/updates as the deal progresses.
• Offer/ask to join a team meeting.
• Offer value to the buying committee (see other strategies.)
• Don’t let your champion box you out by trying to be the liaison.

You can also reduce the burden for the champion and speed things up by:

• Getting on a Slack channel with the champion then direct add the buying committee with invites.
• Sending good forwardable warm intros to the champion to intro you in a new clean email thread with a compelling subject line.
• Direct emailing the additional person (assuming they're not the boss of the champion - ask permission for that) and ask for forgiveness not permission.

3. 3Ws Recap

Because the cornerstone of a real deal is if the champion/decision maker can articulate the 3 Whys, an easy recap slide to kick start a post-SQO meeting is always helpful - for both yourself and potential buyers.

It helps you realign the deal and surface any issues. Plus, when a new person is joining the call you need to catch them up on the Problem/Solution/Urgency and figure out what new pain points they would add.

Key questions while screen sharing:

• Has anything changed since we last spoke?
• Before we start, let me review the 3Ws for you, is this right? X New Person, do you have anything to add here?
• Let's review our timeline - we accomplished X/Y, have any new steps popped up? Is our decision date still the same?

Remember that a 3Ws recap is sneakily co-building the business case together with the prospect.

Part 2: Cementing Strong Relationships

4. Good Word Referrals

Very often, a successful B2B sales strategy really can be about who you know. Warmly’s leadership team should have an in at many of your prospects, and this can make a huge difference in your warm sales pitch. Ask for a connection of ours to put in a good word for your deal via a warm intro from ConnectTheDots.

5. Charm the Prospect’s Reps

If the prospect's reps (who will inevitably have to use Warmly) love you and the tool then you’re in good shape already. In this case, you can turn the charm-meter up a little more - here are some suggestions:

• Join one of their team meetings to say 'Hi' for 5 minutes.
• Show their reps the platform to see if they will like it.
• Host a fun upbeat lunch-n-learn for their sales reps to learn about the latest in sales tech.

Remember: the motivations of reps are super different from managers. To get them on your side, make sure your demo touches on:

• How much time they’ll save not doing manual work.
• How Warmly will empower them to make more money.
• How you and our SDRs use Warmly ourselves (maybe bring an SDR to show their workflow) to make it more human.
• Show that we at Warmly are real GTM experts by offering them a tip or two maybe they haven’t thought of that you you use.
• Be friendly by offering them your cell phone number and connecting on LinkedIn. Tell them about our free SDR community SDReady they can join for tips/content.

6. Gift-giving

Please check with leadership for our current limits on gift-giving. However, if you think it'll help strengthen customer relationships and contribute to the buying process, we can work something out. For example:

• Offer them an AI-generated personalized spirit animal photo ($4).
• If you or another team member is in the same city as them we can buy them lunch or coffee for an in-person meetup.

7. Get Personal

Deals always close faster when you make an effort with your customer relationships. No, B2B buyers don't need to become your best friend, but you'll build strong relationships if you get a little personal with people.

Some suggestions:

• Get their cell phone number and send them a selfie or a fun thing that you did that weekend.
• Learn about their pets, kids, plants, hobbies etc - and recall that info in calls as fun conversation starters.
• Send them recommendations for restaurants in their city or for travel locations they want to go to.
• Before you join a call with them, change your Warmly Nametag to add a fun fact in your bio that you share with them or make up that you share it with them “Oh wow I see you ski, I love skiing."
• Ask them when their birthday is: “This might be premature but what is your birthday? We love to send our customers a little birthday present.” Then just add a reminder to send them one on the day.

Part 3: Dialing Down on the Value Proposition with Solution Selling

8. Gap Selling

Gap selling is like ice cream. Too often, we go in first with neapolitan instead of chocolate.

To clarify: Warmly is not special in the mind of the B2B buyer. Warmly is a tool that helps them solve a problem and they have a lot of tools to solve different problems. To sell our platform is to understand how to focus on selling a small piece of the platform to the right person to solve that person’s problem. The right tools + the right people = closed deals. This is solution selling.

This strategy involves AEs making a map of the prospect company's current techstack and sharing how and where we fit in. And there's an easy three-step process for doing that.

Step 1

Listen to your prospect to find the key pain points, and the problem they want to solve. Then, match that problem to a subset of the Warmly platform.

For example, "I want better inbound without doing any work." = Focus on AI chat.

"I want better inbound with a human touch." = focus on warm calling.

Step 2

Find out all the tools they use. For each tool, understand where we could plug into their techstack (as seamlessly as Lego clicks together) to make it better and save them money for just that one problem.

Step 3

Figure out who in their organization is responsible for which tools. Start by sharing with the champion but then ask to share with other stakeholders.

We want to explain:

• Where do we Integrate* with what they already have.
• Where can we Replace* what they already have (because it’s better, e.g. saves time or is cheaper.)
• Where can we Add* to what they already have by offering them a discounted partner tool or our own.

But don't get distracted. Be clear that we have a great core value proposition for the one pain point of the champion and the one solution (subset of Warmly). This is how we get our foot in the door.

Then with the prospects you can paint a picture for how over time we can save them time and money by Integrating, Replacing or Adding in other places across the organization. For example, maybe you get the marketing team excited about how to optimize their marketing strategy by replacing Drift at renewal with our Chatbot, but for now we’re going to get started with sales to save time by automated outbound emails to warm leads.

Don’t forget that we have partner companies via the Warm Bundle that can step in as part of this tech stack adjustment. So when the prospect asks if they can replace Drift Fast Lane with us (Drift’s scheduler and form builder), we can say yes, that we partner with Default and Warmly to do just that for half the price.

9. Targeting Customer Success

Equal in importance to our software is the strong belief that we can offer value to potential customers through our other services. The B2B sales process doesn't have to be all about our products, but what other knowledge and expertise we can offer.

Warm Bundle Intros

Ask them if they are planning to make any GTM software purchases this year. As experts in the GTM space and because we’re a layer across all GTM software - you can ask them if they’d like any intros to our top chosen players/innovators from the bundle. Explain how as a Warmly customer they get 10-25% of all of these, however you’re happy to intro them before they commit to Warmly too. We're helping them out, not just pushing a sale.

Content

Do they need help with any pain points? Recommended long-form blogposts or videos we’ve made intending to teach & train GTM leaders on GTM strategy from our 100s of customers. Ideally tie something you know about their business to why you’re offering the relevant information.

To elicit a response, be sure to ask them a question about the content. E.g. “What did you think about X in the context of your business? Is there someone else on your team I should send this content to?”

Customer Referral

Can you find anyone in your network that might like what they do? Even if you can’t, you can say, "My CEO offered to try to find a lead or two for you manually from his network before we get started - would you want that?"

If they're interested, ask the prospect to share:

• Their ICP/ideal B2B buyer persona or target account list.
• A preferred two-liner on what they do.
• Which person our CEO should loop in for the leads he sources.

Strategy Session

Tell prospects that because we’re recognized as revenue operations gurus for our work the past five years in sales and marketing automation, and because we integrate with all the important tools under the sun, we could do a GTM strategy session with them. You can offer this pre-sign for an hour for any Mid Market deal+ and post-sign for 30 minutes for any other smaller deal.

The session would be a deep dive on their techstack and recommendations for them to maximize success from what we’re seeing work in 2024. Specifically, we’ll look at how to orchestrate humans and the right tools together in harmony to maximize pipeline. Notably, it won’t necessarily include Warmly - we can talk about things like conferences, lead magnet ideas, CRM setup, sales rep quota setting and inbound optimization. Let them know we typically charge $1000/hr for this as advisors to a dozen startups for this strategy.

Pull in someone in sales leadership for the call (lean on your founder for big deals and for founders of small startups early in their journey). You can then make the point that we’ll try to offer more over the course of the year in consulting value than the cost of the software alone.

10. Business Case

With tight budgets, everyone needs to make a clear economic argument on how we make them more money over the status quo. So, make ROI business cases that are flexible and matched to your sales process needs depending on the prospect.

Select a business case that fits! However, it's important that if they have a specific problem they want to solve, give them the business case for the specific solution, not for the whole platform.

Part 4: Bringing Authority to Sales Pitches

11. Sales Leadership Over-the-top

Sometimes, it's a good idea to get leadership involved to help close deals or just speed things up.

Your first option is to ghost write an encouraging email from us to your prospect and we’ll send it off. Wording options could be:

• "Hey, I am excited about this deal, X Rep told me a lot about you!"
• "Hey, I’m CEO, I’m looking forward to our next call, X Rep tells me we’re meeting on Thursday - can I meet you then?"
• "Hey, I heard you have concerns about X, can I give you my founder perspective on it in our next live call?"

It might even be preferable to add leadership to a late-stage call to encourage the prospect to show up. Consider using it as a carrot to get their decision makers in on a call as well.

12. Loop in a Decision Maker/Stakeholder

Whenever you need to loop in a decision maker, it’s a good strategy for you to do it - not the champion. Primarily because the champion is lazy and could take awhile to do it and not set you up well to meet with the DM.

Let’s say you had a great demo call with Stakeholder 1 and got permission to loop in Stakeholder 2 in a direct outreach (CC’ing the first stakeholder). Why this is a good situation: you save time from Stakeholder 1 having to do the follow up so you can get to second meeting faster.

But beware of common pitfalls. If your follow up email is not eye-catching or too lengthy, Stakeholder 2 may ignore it or take forever to reply. Additionally, Stakeholder 2 might be annoyed that Stakeholder 1 didn't ask them first.

Some crisp email suggestions:

• We address Stakeholder 2 and CC Stakeholder 1, not the other way around (nor address them both). Otherwise Stakeholder 2 will skim the email and not reply (since they don'y think its for them).
• The subject line should make it feel like a warm intro.
• It should be super short and all about scheduling. If it's an intro, we don't need to spend 10 sentences convincing Stakeholder 2 to book with us.
• Put almost everything in a PS to make the email short - ain't nobody got time to read long emails but everyone reads a PS.
• Use Stakeholder 1's words as weapons to convince Stakeholder 2 to take a meeting. Stakeholder 1 has way more internal understanding than we do so their words matter more than ours. You can also share a snippet from the first meeting where the junior champion was really excited.

Part 5: The Final Dash to the Finish

13. Create Urgency with Carrot and Stick

It's a tried and tested B2B sales strategy, but carrot-and-stick sales pitches do work.

Carrot methods include:

• We have an end of month special - X creative discount if you sign by end of month.
• I’m one deal away from hitting my quota! It would be such a gift to me to be willing to sign this month?
• We have 2 slots left this month for GTM Strategy Sessions with our CEO. They're totally free, custom, tailored 1:1s to maximize your success on tools and people efficiency. Do you want to take one and add it on after our next meeting?
• Take a meeting to offer temporary increase on their lead limits.

Stick methods:

• Shoot - our board meeting is coming up next week and my CEO told us that the board is going to make him raise prices by 10-20% since growth has been so consistent. I’m sorry, but I can only honor my original quote if you’d be able to commit to signing by X date.
• Our sales VP is making me close/lost the deal and focus on higher priority deals, should I push back and ask him to hang in there another week?
• Sounds like our founder is going to meet with your founder soon via their investor connection. He’s asked me to share an update on our deal progress to communicate over - what do you think I should say?

14. Sign the Deal on Conditions

Every objection is not a deal breaker, its actually just a potential condition. In a deal cycle, you need to surface as many objections as possible and don’t be afraid to ask and suggest objections to see what is real. You should never be surprised if the prospect turns you down and an objection came out of left field.

Once you get all the objections you can handle them in two ways.

• Overcome it through assuaging them with collateral, discussion, testing - whatever.
• Sign the deal on the condition that we overcome those objections. If we know we can overcome it then it's no problem to sign on it!

For example, in a deal where their primary remaining objection was Hubspot compatibility, we offered to move forward on the condition that Hubspot was to their liking.

In the contract, we said, “Customer may terminate this agreement and entitled to a refund within 2 months if they are not satisfied with the depth of the read/write functionality of the Hubspot Integration."

We need to be careful with vague contract terms like “They can opt out any time if they aren’t happy with Hubspot” to avoid issues. 

Good objections to be willing to sign on:

• I’m worried implementation will take a long time.
• I’m worried this integration won’t work the way I need it to.
• My security team needs you to pass this special security questionnaire.
• My manager is worried your business will go under in the next year and we’ll have wasted time with you.

We know we can crush all these things!

Bad objections to be willing to sign on:

• I want to do a monthly contract.
• I want 1000/leads/month.

The best way to illuminate objections (under which some can be included in the signing of the contract) is to ask for them and mirror back what you heard while asking for more objections.

• “Tell me some reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
• “Ok, I hear that you are worried implementation will take a long time. Are there any other reasons you are skeptical about signing?”
• “Prospect, what I heard you say is that you’re ready to move forward and sign this contract today on the condition that we have an easy implementation, 1000/warm leads/month and you close your fundraise to be able to afford this next month. Is that right?”
• “Ok, well, I can’t promise you 1000/warm leads/week since that's dependent on how much you use us and how much marketing automation you set up and your industry reply rates but hopefully X, Y, Z make you feel better. But how about I add in the contract that it’s only binding if the implementation is easy and you close your fundraise?"

15. Customer Referral

Prospects will feel comfortable if they know that others have gone in their footsteps. Think of their ICP and try to match as best you can. Namely their title (e.g. Deman Gen) and company’s GTM motion (e.g. PLG) and find a similar industry (e.g. DevTools).

Then, follow our referral process so as to not bombard our agreed-upon advisors and current customers to serve as referrals. Bonus points if you can find an example of social proof on the Wall of Love to share with the prospect.

Try to save this for really the last step - and only if they insist on it.

Part 6: Free Reign

16. Get Wacky!

Here's space for you to add in your own suggestions on unexpected/wacky/innovative B2B sales techniques. Feel free to try your own where you think it'll work - but the below often work, seriously!

• Add a calendar invite on their calendar for 5 mins without their permission. Usually, they show up or you get a reply. Both are ideal outcomes.
• Ask to join one of their internal team meetings for 5 mins to say hi. Explain that you’ll cover 1 min on Warmly then share 3 trends you’re seeing in GTM that will help give knowledge to their reps.
• Make a ChatGPT rhyming poem about them or about the deal going cold and email it to them or post it on LinkedIn.
• Use emojis to start your subject lines of emails to maximize visibility in their crowded inbox.
• Take a selfie video when you’re on the move to show them you’re human and ask where they are at in their deal cycle.
• Send a gift card that is specific to something that aligns with their interests.

Building a More Effective B2B Sales Cycle

Want to learn more about how Warmly trains our sales reps in B2B selling? Warmly founder Max Greenwald shares even more secrets on LinkedIn (Warmly's going 100% clear in 2024, if you didn't know already.)

All that's left to say is, if you want to crush your sales quotas in 2024 - maybe give Warmly a try?

At Warmly, we believe that enterprise-grade revenue orchestration doesn’t have to come with an enterprise price tag.

Our goal has always been to bring AI-powered revenue orchestration to the SMB market, and our latest feature release is helping do just that.

Introducing Warmly’s inbound chat workflows, the new Drift sales chatbot.

Following the recent acquisition of Drift by Salesloft — which is just one episode in an ongoing series of acquisitions and consolidation in this space — many small and medium-sized businesses are looking for a more affordable way to orchestrate conversational chat workflows.

The State of Conversational Chat 

Alright, a bit of background.

The revenue space (sales and marketing software tools) has been undergoing massive changes in recent months.

Some of these changes are technological (owing to the increased adoption of AI), but a lot of it is strategic and takes the form of mergers, acquisitions, and a general move away from standalone best-in-class tools to tech stack consolidation and all-in-one suites.

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft is the perfect example of this.

Both tools, by themselves, are struggling to meet projected valuation and revenue outcomes. 

The acquisition speaks to a challenging market environment not only for software companies but also for their customers, who are looking for ways to cut down on costs, reduce the number of vendors they are working with, and consolidate their software stacks.

This might make sense at the enterprise level, but for SMBs, it opens up a huge rift that was already cracking when Drift got bought by Vista Equity back in 2021 and shifted its focus towards large companies abandoning the small business.

SMBs simply can’t afford enterprise-facing tech like a Salesloft-centric stack.

Small businesses were already looking to Drift alternatives, but for many, this is the final nail in the coffin.

That’s due to the concern that the acquisition represents a lack of future development and the ability to innovate (bigger companies move more slowly).

So, small and medium-sized companies with aggressive growth goals who need to stay competitive are looking for a more agile alternative to conversational chat.

Well, here it is…  

Warmly’s Inbound Chat Workflows 

Warmly’s latest solution, inbound chat workflows, is a direct alternative to Drift’s conversational marketing function.

The difference?

It’s actually affordable for SMBs.

Sure, Drift has a couple more features that focus on the enterprise use case, but for what small and medium-sized businesses need, we’re basically at feature parity.

Here’s how it works:

A sample workflow with Warmly’s new sales chatbot

On the front end, customers interact with a chatbot that pops up in the bottom corner of their screen.

It’s completely customer-led, meaning they get a signal to engage, but it's up to them to initiate the conversation. 

Then, depending on how they engage with the chatbot, they move down a logic tree of potential answers. Think of it like a “choose your own story” book. The answers they choose as they engage with the chatbot determine what content they see.

For example, here’s what the initial option set looks like on our own site:

What comes next depends entirely on which option the visitor clicks. For instance, choosing “Looking to learn more about Warmly” delivers this:

On the back end, you create what those conversational journeys look like. 

Let me show you what I mean. Here’s what that same workflow looks like as you build it in Warmly.

At each level, you can craft the exact text that the chatbot displays, the potential answers a prospect can choose, and the various branches/scenarios that can come thereafter.

Zooming out, you can see how the whole workflow looks:

Every workflow you build should lead to a desired outcome, which will be relevant to the customer's needs as well as your business goals and processes. For instance, you might have the chatbot suggest that the customer speak with a sales rep.

The appropriate rep can then receive a notification via Slack, take over the chat, and even engage the prospect in a live video call right on the website using our warm chat feature.

In the workflow builder, you can choose which CRM owners to mention in Slack and even select a rule for whom notifications should go to if there are no CRM owners assigned.

Personalized workflows for relevant customer conversations

Here’s where things get really interesting:

Not every prospect needs to be presented with the same chat workflow. 

Using Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization feature, you can identify who is visiting your website (at the company or individual level, depending on the prospect), integrate best-in-class firmographic and intent data, and then automatically activate a given workflow based on filters such as:

• Demographic data (for example, the industry that the company is in)
• Intent data (e.g., the number of people from that company who have visited your site)
• CRM criteria (such as deal stage or account owners)
• Traffic source (whether they came from paid ads, referral traffic, outbound email campaigns, etc.)

But that’s not the only conversational chat solution.

Warmly’s Approach to Website Chat 

Our new conversational chatbot workflow tool is just one feature we’ve added to our expansion revenue orchestration solution.

For high-intent leads, though, we’ve actually got something even better:

Warm AI chat.

Our AI-powered chat solution gathers all of the intel you have on the prospect — thanks to integrations with third-party buying intent data from Bombora, best-in-class company and contact data from 6sense and Clearbit, as well as your CRM and sales engagement tools.

Then, it custom crafts messaging to convert website visitors into real sales conversations.

PS. Learn how the team at D2D Experts uses AI chat and sales emails that convert at 10x the rate of their human-written outreach.

The big win here is that prospects can interact with the chatbot in plain English, and it appears as if they’re speaking to a real person who not only understands what they’re after but responds in context.

It's a more proactive approach to website chat. That said, it's generally better reserved for identified site visitors who have demonstrated at least some level of intent.

Here’s how Max Greenwald, our CEO, recommends building rule-based automation to make proper use of both our warm AI and inbound chat features.

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With this broad framework for website visitor interaction, you can strike the right balance between proactive chat for high-intent prospects and reactive chat for low-intent visitors.

That last category is important, too.

You don’t want to be wasting resources engaging with people who are never going to be your customers (such as a non-ICP fit), so why bother funneling them through to a sales rep through an AI-driven or inbound chat workflow?

Warmly: The SMB’s Revenue Orchestration Platform 

The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft highlights one of the key problems with Drift originally:

It was too focused on the passive inbound chat use case.

Warmly’s introduction of sales chatbot workflows is an SMB-focused replacement for Drift, but rather than being a standalone tool; it sits within a wider architecture of AI and automation-powered revenue orchestration.

Here are just a few of the other features Warmly offers to help small and medium-sized businesses compete with enterprise-grade behemoths:

• Website intent and visitor deanonymization
• Best-in-class contact data and third-party buying intent data via Bombora, integrated directly into your CRM
• An AI-driven chat solution for warm leads with automatic notifications to sales reps via Slack when prospects are ready to engage
• The ability to convert website visitors to paying customers with live video chat
• Automated email and LinkedIn outreach to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns

To sweeten the deal, you can get started for free right now without having to speak to a sales rep or go through a painful qualification process.

While our AI chat and inbound chat workflows are only available on our paid tier, you can start de-anonymizing your site visitors for free.

In the world of sales, the age-old question persists: “How many sales discovery calls are too many discovery calls?”

 When you’ve got KPIs to hit, that limit can seem very far away. And with the advent of sales prospecting automation tools, it’s easy to think that a full calendar means better chances at closing. 

There’s no doubt that adding automation tools to your sales tech stack can increase leads. In one study, 80% of marketers saw their leads increase when using marketing automation tools. 

But are more leads always better? 

Here, we come to the biggest paradox in sales: that quality always beats quantity when it comes to new leads. 

And when you’re targeting those juicy, high-ACV leads, you might want to put down the snazzy marketing automation tools and go old-school. 

The History of Outbound Prospecting

Sales prospecting has come a long way since the early days of large-scale campaigns. It was only in the 1950s that marketers realized that consumer behavior could significantly impact sales; thus, demographic segmenting was born. 

Since then, the sales process has become more aligned with marketing goals. Sellers learnt that inbound prospecting was as valuable as outbound, and could vastly increase the number of qualified leads. 

Throughout all of this, one thing was key: it’s quantity over quality. Hit as many people as you can (even if they don’t exactly match your ideal customer profile), and see what sticks. 

Cold outreach reigns supreme

Until the turn of the millennium, B2B lead generation was a case of outbound prospecting. Whether this was conducted via direct mail, cold calling, or email (the first email marketing campaign was conducted way back in 1978), selling was simply a case of finding your prospect’s phone number, reaching out, and persuading them to buy. 

Unfortunately, frozen-cold outreach doesn’t come with fantastic odds. The average cold-calling success rate is just 2%. Every salesperson intrinsically understands there’s a fine line between being persistent and becoming a nuisance.

And so, sales prospecting gets a bad rep. Why bother cold emailing hundreds of people when you could focus on marketing to bring in those qualified leads naturally? 

Image Source 

It all goes digital 

Salesforce was founded in 1999. By then, it was clear that sales and marketing were going digital and that companies had to make a concerted effort to align their sales prospecting methods with the marketing team. 

Online advertising exploded. Email marketing took off. In 2005, HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan coined the term ‘inbound marketing.’ 

In the age of rapidly increasing internet adoption, B2B companies realized that it wasn’t all about aggressive cold selling: it was equally valuable to educate those potential customers who weren't buying from you yet. 

The Rise of Sales Automation

Between the early 90s and the late 2010s, the B2B SaaS market flooded with sales and marketing automation tools. Now, you didn’t even have to write those emails to prospects—software could create an email sequence for you. 

In 2020, McKinsey reported that one-third of all sales tasks could be fully automated. It was no longer necessary for your AEs to be filling up their time with things like regular check-ins with prospects. In fact, 44% of sales reps are too busy to even attempt follow-up. 

Image Source

The value of the marketing automation market is estimated to reach $13.71 billion by 2030. But where does this leave sales prospecting? Is it increasingly a case of leaving lead generation to the bots while sales professionals focus on strengthening relationships? 

Or do we need a more flexible approach?

Do More Leads Equal Quality Leads?

So, now we get to the main question: is the quantity of leads better than the quality of leads? We’ll be honest, at Warmly, we’ve had our fair share of experiences with quantity over quality. 

We once had 80 meetings, but most of the companies we talked to weren’t a good fit. There was no urgency or priority for them to solve the problem. You can imagine where that got us: it was like throwing a party and realizing that most of the guests were only there for the free food and didn't care about celebrating your cat’s birthday. 

Spending ages talking to people who aren’t serious is wasted time. Not only does a higher quantity of leads reduce the time you can spend on each lead (you’ve got KPIs to hit! Not time to burn!), but it also reduces the chance of sufficient personalization for each lead. 

Of course, this is where automation can be a help, not a hindrance—initiating conversations at the top and early middle of the sales funnel. However, according to HubSpot research, 75% of marketers believe that personalized experiences drive sales and repeat businesses. 

As much as chatbots and other AI marketing automation tools are helpful for this stage of sales prospecting, they fail the personalization test. So, while they can be handy for getting those little fish onto your hook initially, automation isn’t something you want to use on a whale. 

Nurturing Ideal Prospects, Not Every Prospect

Having 1,000+ qualified leads sounds like a great prospect until you realize you don’t have the manpower to reach out to every single person, let alone follow up. 

We knew Warmly was guilty of prioritizing sales KPIs over nurturing specific prospects at times. So, we spoke to Brian Gerrard, sales director at Outreach, about his take on the quality vs. quantity debate. 

His response? “Disqualify fast.” 

There’s more to it than that, of course. His approach to outbound sales is a multi-step process of identifying ideal prospects. 

1. Identify the whale companies. Discard any others. 
2. Filter those prospects by those that fit your ICP.
3. Research. 
4. Engage with low-level accounts at that company. 
5. Engage, engage, engage. Do research. Learn what they need. 
6. Then, target the executive decision-makers. Tell them how your solution fits their problem.
7. Follow up. 

Unfortunately, given the level of individual research required and the flexibility needed to engage effectively, this kind of sales prospecting isn’t something that you want to entirely rely on automation for. 

So, your sales teams need to be more proactive. And to do that, they need the right data.

Harnessing the Power of Intent in Sales

This is where intent comes into play. Intent allows you to generate smarter leads, not more leads. 

It’s like having a secret weapon that lets you know who’s genuinely interested in your cat's birthday and who’s just there for the free food (you want the people who care—not the gatecrashers.) 

Intent data can be split into explicit and implicit. Explicit signals could be something like search queries, while implicit signals demonstrate intent less obviously, like a user spending time on your pricing page. 

Using revenue orchestration tools (like Warmly,) gives you the power to classify leads based on how ready and willing they are to buy at that moment. 

This adds an additional dimension to your sales prospecting, where you can filter for your ICP and by how likely they are to buy, resulting in higher-quality leads. Then, refocus your AE’s efforts onto these qualifying leads.

Effective Sales Prospecting: Back to Manual

We know that there’s a place for automation in the sales pipeline, but when it comes to whale accounts that have shown intent, there’s no substitute for manual personalization. 

In fact, when your AEs and SDRs aren’t tied to automation KPIs, you’ll give them much more freedom to innovate their sales strategy. In the end, sales is about instinct, not prescriptive tasks. 

But what’s the secret behind implementing an efficient manual sales strategy? 

Manual = more?

Brian Gerrard doesn’t disguise the fact that manual is his preferred way of selling. “Call me old,” he told us. 

But it’s not just about a preference for legitimate interactions—there’s proof that manual prospecting works. 

In one test, a personalized communication sales team was pitted against a 100% automated team. Naturally, the automated team contacted far more prospects, but that’s not the end of the story. 

In fact, the team that conducted personalized sales outreach booked 60% more meetings than the automated team. Bespoke communication also resulted in a higher percentage of booked meetings.

Image Source: Outreach

The takeaway? Manual might take longer, but as long as you’re targeting the right prospects, the ROI is higher. 

Take an example from Warmly. One of our AEs got a prospect’s attention on the 8th email of a 12-step sequence. But what if those eight emails were actually three manually-written emails? Would it have taken so long to get their attention?

Probably not.

“Warm prospecting never ends.”

Ultimately, the mantra is, ‘Warm prospecting never ends.’ With manual sales prospecting, you have to be in nurture mode for every lead, all the time. 

The process starts with research, and that’s accomplished before you even get to stage one of the eight-stage refinement process outlined above. After that, you’re continually nurturing your prospect with every touchpoint. 

Although ringing someone up or pinging them a DM on LinkedIn might sound like cold outreach, as long as you’ve done intent research beforehand, that customer is already warm—even if they’ve never spoken to you before. 

Consequently, you can categorize every prospect as one of two things: either active or an opportunity. 

An active lead is one where you’ve agreed on the next step with them. An opportunity lead, meanwhile, may not be ready to buy just yet, but you want to keep them within the sales cycle. 

With opportunity leads, the hardest part isn’t converting them—they’ll do that in your own time, as your intent will tell you. The hardest part is making each and every interaction with them unique. 

Step-by-Step Manual Sales Prospecting

Sure, manual prospecting takes time. But there’s no reason why your manual sales prospecting techniques can’t be as streamlined as your automation tools. 

To do that, you need to identify the most effective sales prospecting tools and get more confident with turning off that auto-sequencing. 

The Before Stage

Research, research, research 

Everything starts with your target accounts—but identifying those can be one of the biggest challenges of sales and marketing today. 

To evaluate accounts, refer to your ideal customer profile, competitor research, and those current customers with 100% net revenue retention (which we call retainable addressable market.) 

Then, cross-reference these segments with potential leads to find those companies, decision-makers, and organizations that are really the best fit. 

Create an account plan

If you’re letting an automated tool manage your outreach, then it might never have come to mind to create an account plan. However, your most valuable accounts deserve it. 

Your plan doesn’t have to be long. Pick out the most vital information that you and your sales team need to know to prove that your solution is best. PR releases, LinkedIn posts, and recent webinars are some of the best places to find this information. 

Match every piece of info you find with your target’s business objectives. If you’ve done your research right, you can usually identify one or two areas they’re evidently struggling with.

Find alignment in your sales deck

Now it’s time to bring all that information together in a powerful sales deck. 

Naturally, your value proposition is crucial to your deck. But if you can’t explain where your solution fits into your prospect’s existing workflow, you may as well give up now.

As part of your sales deck, particularly for mid-funnel prospects, build a flow chart that explicitly outlines how you'll make their work easier. 

Sometimes, you might not be able to build this kind of flow chart right away with the information that you have. Maybe it takes 1-2 calls with lower-end accounts to gather the information. But when you do have it, it makes your pitch significantly stronger. 

Initiating Outreach with LinkedIn Sales Navigator

One of the most valuable tools for B2B salespeople is undoubtedly LinkedIn Sales Navigator. According to Brian Gerrard, this is the missing piece for many sales professionals.

LinkedIn reports that sellers using Sales Navigator create 15% more sales pipeline and 42% larger deal sizes. 

It’s also a great tool when implementing manual sales processes into your prospecting. 

Building account lists

Your first step with Sales Navigator is building the right account lists. To do this, identify a target company in Sales Navigator and pull out which functions you want to target at that company.

Ideally, you want to target decision-makers at the company in question, though perhaps you’ve identified managers as relevant B2B buyers for your market. 

Once you’ve got a list of target accounts, you can create a custom list.

Image Source: Brian Gerrard 

Effective nurturing 

If you’ve done your research right—into buyer intent signals, product fit, and the correct target accounts—then it should be enough to get you in the door. This is exactly what we mean by ‘warm prospecting never ends’: with enough research, your cold prospect becomes a warm lead in the middle of the sales process. 

And now that you’ve got your Sales Navigator list, it’s time to start the outreach.

Identifying outreach opportunities 

There are 875 million members on LinkedIn, but just 16% of US members are daily active users (DAU). To streamline your outreach, you want to target just those accounts in your customer leads list that have recently posted on LinkedIn. 

Within Sales Navigator, you’ll now have the option to open a recently posted update by any of your leads and interact with it. Or, go straight for a message. 

Image Source: Brian Gerrard

To manage this manual outreach, create custom tasks for your SDRs or AEs in your CRM based on each prospect. The aim of this is to make each interaction with the lead personalized according to their recent updates—not an auto-sequence that might just be personalized to a set of accounts at each organization. 

Long-term prospecting

When you’re aiming for high quality over high quantity, you’re naturally going to spend more time with each prospect. This allows you to really craft each touchpoint to be entirely personalized. 

But say you know you need to follow up with a lead. How do you know which channel to use? Ultimately, in a personalized sales prospecting process, you’re going to have to tailor every single interaction based on what you know about that prospect and your relationship with them. 

So, if someone hasn’t reached out in a while, don’t waste time with another unanswered email—go straight for a phone call. 

If they’ve been pretty responsive in the past, maybe you go for another LinkedIn DM.

Or—remember that one-page flow chart we made? Now could be the time to reach out over email and remind your prospect that you exist and you’re here to solve their problem. 

As Brian Gerrard notes, if that prospect is an MQL—they have the budget, and they have the intent—then hit them as much as you can, respectfully. 

And when you hit them, do it with personalization. A multi-step email sequence generator isn’t clever enough (yet) to gather information during the sequence—for example, if your target company has started a new project. Only you can reach out with a “Hope it’s going well with [X]!” 

High-Quality Leads + Effective Manual Outreach = Long-Term Success

In this era of changing B2B buyer behavior and the influx in social selling, you can’t expect a fully-automated sales prospecting plan to get results. Today, buyers want more independence in the decision-making process. Bluntly, they’re fed up with cold calls.

At the same time, there is a place for automation in your sales process. When you want to A/B test at the top of the funnel, hitting 100 people rather than 10 people in the same amount of time is preferable. 

But when it comes to those bigger accounts—the ones you really want to be closing deals with—personalized interactions can easily make a difference. 

Combine high-quality visitor and intent data with a targeted and personalized sales strategy, and you’ve got yourself a strategy that will optimize your entire sales prospecting process.

How Warmly Can Help You Identify The Right Sales Prospects

While quantity has its place in sales, it’s the quality that truly matters. So, a successful sales prospecting process depends on finding the right balance—knowing when to focus on quantity and when to shift the focus to quality.

Unfortunately, high-quality leads are only as good as the data you’re collecting. If you can’t get accurate data, the chance of converting leads is slim. 

Using a signal-based revenue orchestration platform like Warmly can help consolidate your sales process. Find the right accounts (with intent) more quickly, and get notifications when a human AE needs to be looped into the sales process for personalization.

Figuring out what kind of marketing motion you’re going to invest in can be tricky.

There are a ton of different terms, strategies, and approaches, many of which share overlapping boundaries.

Some even sound the same. Demand generation, demand creation, and demand capture all sound pretty similar, right?

While they do share a lot in common — they are intimately connected — they aren’t synonyms.

In this article, we’re going to shed light on the differences. We’ll explain exactly how demand creation differs from demand capture and what the two have to do with the overarching idea of demand gen.

Demand Creation vs. Demand Capture: A quick overview 

Demand creation and demand capture are the two components of demand generation, a marketing approach that focuses on educating out-of-market buyers and capturing in-market buyers.

Demand Creation is the first part of the puzzle.

It focuses on raising awareness for a given problem and creating demand for a solution to that problem.

Demand Capture is the second half.

It focuses on capitalizing on the 5% or so of your target market who have demonstrated a need and interest in your product category and converting them into customers.

As such, the question of “demand creation vs. demand capture” is kind of a moot point.

You can’t capture demand if it isn’t first created, and creating demand without a mechanism for turning it into revenue is pretty pointless.

What is Demand Creation? 

Demand creation is a marketing strategy that seeks to connect with and educate out-of-market buyers.

Here’s the idea:

95% of your total addressable market isn’t ready to buy. Many of them not only don’t know about your product, they probably aren’t even aware of the problems that your product solves.

That’s the big problem that demand creation seeks to solve.

It's about getting in front of potential buyers and raising awareness about the problem, how serious it is, and the consequences they’re facing as a result.

That conversion naturally leads to one about solutions:

Okay, so here’s this problem. Here’s how you solve it.

This means that the second part of demand creation is about getting your target audience passionate enough about solving the problem (that you’ve educated them about) to build demand for a solution.

That’s where demand creation ends, and demand capture takes over.

What value does Demand Creation provide? 

The big win that comes from demand creation activities is that you are literally creating your own market.

Rather than waiting for the 95% of your market to (maybe) identify the problem on their own and then hopefully hear about your solution, you’re bringing both to them.

And since you’re the one helping them learn about the problem and the available solutions, you’re already top of mind once that demand is built and ready to be captured.

Great demand creation efforts also help paint your organization as a trusted brand and industry expert.

For example, in creating content related to the challenge in question, you may also provide some helpful advice and even resources for solving it, such as a free template.

Of course, your actual product does a much better job of solving the issue, which is something that your demand capture efforts will demonstrate.

How do you Create Demand? 

For most companies, content creation and distribution make up the bulk of demand creation strategies.

This can include content types as diverse as SEO-focused blog posts, webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, and social media marketing campaigns.

What matters is the context of the content.

You’re not pushing out a sales pitch and explaining why your tool is the best in its category (I mean, you are, but you do that outside of your demand creation activities).

Instead, you’re helping prospective customers understand a given issue they didn’t realize they were facing.

This post on LinkedIn from our founder Max Greenwald, is the perfect example of a purely educational piece of demand creation content:

What is Demand Capture? 

The demand capture process is all about attracting people in the 5% of the market that are ready to buy and converting them into sales prospects.

This can be considered an alternative to the traditional lead generation approach, though there is a huge amount of similarity here, and the two could easily be considered synonyms.

Demand capture is ambivalent to who created the demand.

Yes, your demand creation campaigns ideally flow into demand capture tactics, as the portion of the market that you’ve educated moves down the marketing funnel and gets closer to buying.

But you’re not exactly going to say no to an opportunity who learned about the problem and solution at hand from a competitor, are you?

In fact, some demand capture campaigns even go as far as poaching the demand that competitors have created, such as “X vs Y” comparison-type blog posts.

What value does Demand Capture provide? 

Demand capture isn’t really a “should we or shouldn’t we” situation.

If you’re not capturing demand, you’re not capitalizing on the interest and trust you’ve built through demand gen activities, and you’re not bringing in fresh warm leads to your sales team.

But beyond that simple answer, focusing on demand creation as a practice (vs. a traditional lead generation approach or just patiently and passively waiting for some inbound leads to arrive) is beneficial because:

• It allows you to specifically target audience segments 
• You’re capitalizing on the brand affinity and recognition you specifically and purposefully built with demand creation efforts
• It’s highly measurable, which means you can continuously optimize your campaigns 

How do you Capture Demand?

Demand capture is all about attracting potential customers and bringing them into a marketing and sales funnel.

There are plenty of ways to do this.

Lead generation content like ebooks and guides that prospects have to exchange an email for are common methods.

Often, however, these aren’t particularly intent-focused. You don’t necessarily know, for example, how close to buying someone who signed up for your webinar is.

There are a few other options, however.

One such method is to use conversational chatbot tools, like Warmly’s AI-powered warm chat feature.

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Using Warmly, you can deanonymize website visitors, pull in firmographic and intent data from best-in-class providers, and have our AI chat engage with website visitors you’ve attracted using educational content or email marketing campaigns.

Some other channels and tactics for capturing demand include:

• Free trials or freemium product tiers
• Warm referrals from your partner network
• Customer referral programs
• Paid search (PPC)
• Social media and display advertising 
• Review sites like Capterra and G2

Demand creation and Demand Capture: How they work together 

Now that we’ve established that it isn’t really a question of demand creation or demand capture but rather that the two are both important components of demand generation, the question remains:

How do the two work together?

Here’s a brief overview of what that process might look like:

• Top-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as blog posts and webinars, educate not-in-market customers about the perils and consequences of a specific problem they’re facing.
• As buyers become problem-aware (they now know about the problem at hand and what it means to them), they start thinking about solutions.
• Middle-of-funnel marketing efforts, such as retargeting ads and email marketing campaigns, guide customers through the process of weeding out potential solutions.
• As solution-aware customers (they know what kind of solution could solve their problem) work through this journey, they learn more about your product and become product-aware.
• Demand creation is complete. You’ve educated the person about the problem and raised demand for a solution. Now, demand capture can take over.
• Bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts (those aimed at attracting and converting purchase-ready buyers) help potential customers understand why your product is the best fit for their needs. 
• A demand capture device closes the deal, and the sales process proper can begin.

That demand capture device might be a free trial activation, a personalized demo sign-up, or a customer interaction with an AI-led chat tool that engages the buyer, pre-qualifies them, integrates buying intent data, and ultimately ropes in a sales rep to close the deal via a live video call.

That’s exactly what Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is designed to do, by the way.

Getting started with demand generation

So, where to from here?

A successful demand generation campaign rests on a solid foundation of both software tools and processes.

Let’s start with the prior:

Check out our guide: Our Top 13 Demand Generation Tools For 2024.

Sales teams run on leads.

But just like a performance vehicle, a high-performing sales team needs quality gas (leads) to do their best.

This means that as you set up to run your next lead generation campaign, the focus shouldn’t be on the quantity of leads as much as the quality of leads.

Quality, in the context of sales, being a proxy for how well they match your ICP (ideal company profile).

In this article, we’re going to guide you through the process of generating qualified warm leads that allow your sales team to perform at their optimum.

We’ll discuss how to best set yourself up for success in a lead gen campaign before diving into six powerful tactics for generating better leads. Finally, we’ll sign off with a discussion on how to get the most out of your leads once you’ve got them in your CRM.

What is a Lead Generation Campaign? 

A lead generation campaign is a marketing endeavor designed with the express goal of generating leads.

A lead in this context is any person who has expressed interest in your company, product, or brand and has handed over their context details (generally an email address but sometimes a phone number) in exchange for value such as:

• An ebook
• A free trial
• A webinar
• A free interactive tool

Is Lead Generation a Variable Strategy?

Lead generation gets a lot of bad press in marketing circles.

That’s because lead gen campaigns are often measured exclusively on the number of leads they generate. More leads equals a more successful lead generation campaign.

This sets up some bad incentives, mainly that marketing ends up being too focused on pushing more leads through to sales, regardless of how much of a fit they are for the product in question or the degree of purchase intent shown.

Take, for example, this ebook about lead gen from HubSpot.

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If I download this guide as part of my research for writing this blog post, I could be considered a lead.

But in reality, HubSpot knows nothing about my potential fit for their product, and I haven’t shown an iota of purchase intent.

For this reason, lead gen is often thought of as an example of bad marketing focused on vanity metrics.

And it can be. But it doesn’t have to be.

If, instead, you:

1. Set out clear expectations as to what defines a qualified lead and when they’re fit for sales interactions
2. Focus on building lead generation devices that actually demonstrate purchase intent
3. Use lead generation as a device for capturing demand built as part of a demand generation campaign

Then lead gen can actually be a super viable strategy for fueling sales teams with high-quality, high-intent leads that they truly have a chance of closing.

To achieve that, you’ve got to do a bit of pre-work.

Let me explain.

How to Get Set up For a Lead Generation Campaign 

Before you start running ads, producing a content plan, or marketing a free trial in order to attract more leads, there are a couple of things you’ll want to have nailed down.

Taking your time to clarify expectations, build an efficient software stack, and align sales and marketing on what a lead even is, will help ensure you see a solid ROI.

Make sure you’re clear on your audience 

First step is to get super clear on who it is you are targeting.

Frameworks like ICP and customer personas are a good move here, but you need to do more than just create static documents.

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Work to create alignment between all GTM (go to market) teams on who your target audience really is.

Then, only prospects that truly fit your key ICP criteria can go through to sales as a “lead.”

Determine how you’re going to categorize leads 

Not all leads are equal, even if they fit your targeting criteria.

Some leads will be in the early stages of the customer journey. Others will be poised to buy. Some will barely scrape past the minimum company size outlined in your ICP, while others will far exceed it.

To distinguish between different lead types — allowing your sales team to prioritize outreach and your tech stack to accurately route leads to the right sales rep — you’ll need to set up some lead categorization guidelines.

Cold/warm/hot is a reasonable framework where you can set up lead scoring rules based on engagement criteria to determine how hot a lead is.

Others use the “qualification” framework to categorize leads:

• IQL (information qualified lead): The lead is just trying to find an answer to a question.
• MQL (marketing qualified lead): These are warm leads that are more familiar with your brand and product.
• PQL (product qualified lead): You’ve established that the prospective customer is a good fit for your product and perhaps vice versa,
• SQL (sales qualified lead): The lead has expressed an active interest in your product or service and is fit for a salesperson interaction.

By the way, we’ll cover lead routing and scoring a bit later on in our discussion on what to do post-lead gen.

Decide on your marketing channels 

Next step is to decide on the marketing channels you’re going to rely upon to get in front of new eyeballs, drum up interest, and ultimately convert people into leads.

Here are your main options:

• Social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, TikTok, Facebook, etc.)
• Email
• SMS
• SEO content (your blog and other search-optimized website pages)
• Content marketing efforts (webinars, ebooks, guides, podcasts, etc.)
• Affiliate marketing
• Influencers
• UGC (user-generated content), reviews, and referrals 

Pretty much all of these are going to be used to drive traffic back to your website, where you’ll use a dedicated landing page and some form of lead capture device — a downloadable ebook, entrance to a webinar, a free trial, etc. — to convert that visitor into a lead.

As such, your website and the landing pages you host within it aren’t really channels per se. They’re kind of a non-negotiable as part of your lead gen campaign.

Get your tech stack set up 

Finally, you’ll want to make sure you’re set up on the tech level.

To a certain degree, you won’t be able to nail this all in one go. 

You’ll learn as your lead gen campaign progresses about what specific features and functions you need, and you will be constantly updating and reintegrating your SaaS stack.

However, a good starting point would be to have something in each of these categories ticked off:

• A CRM to act as the hub for your lead gen campaign and to store customer contact details
• Advertising solutions to drive traffic to your site
• A landing page builder to design campaign-specific landing pages on our site 
• Lead capture tools like forms
• A chatbot tool to engage visitors on your site and convert them into sales leads
• Webinar hosting solutions 
• A lead routing solution to ensure the right prospects reach the right sales reps in a timely manner
• Email and maybe SMS marketing software 
• A meeting scheduler tool so prospects can book time on a sales rep’s calendar 

6 Powerful Lead Generation Tactics 

Okay, now we get to the good stuff:

How to actually bring in all those hot prospects.

A quick note first. This is not the be-all and end-all list of lead gen tactics. There are dozens of options available to you, and any one of them might work well for you.

What these are, however, are some of the most commonly used and highly effective strategies for pulling in warm leads.

1. Build a media brand 

Content is very often the backbone of lead generation campaigns.

Typically, this takes the form of gated content like ebooks, reports containing original research, or webinars — all of which require potential customers to fork over their email addresses in order to access. 

In our opinion, you’re much better off thinking of content as something your company produces as a media brand rather than a lead generation device per se.

Let’s take a look at HockeyStack, a GTM analytics tool, as an example.

They’ve gone as far as creating an entirely different brand, naming their media empire The Flow.

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The Flow is kind of like a B2B Netflix. 

One of many series available on The Flow is “Can You Dashboard It?” where their GTM team member Nate Branscome shows how real marketers use the product to track key metrics.

And the lead gen?

To access the content available on The Flow, you’ve got to subscribe, using, of course, an email address.

2. Tap into your partner network 

One of the best ways to generate leads is to get warm referrals from brands you’re working closely with.

These brands should be in your general vertical but not direct competitors.

For us, those are companies like Salesflow, Sendspark, and Letterdrop. They’re all broadly in the GTM space, but aren’t an overlapping tool competitor for the same share of wallet.

We collaborate with these brands mainly on content, like this webinar with Bethany Stachenfeld of Sendspark.

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That’s a great way to expand the reach of your demand generation content, but we can get a little more direct when it comes to chasing leads.

One of my favorite tools for tapping into the power of a partner network is Reveal.

Reveal syncs partner data into your CRM, automatically mapping over account details and helping you identify new opportunities.

It can tell you, for example, the gaps between the accounts in your CRM and the active accounts a partner has. 

We could identify, for instance, an account that Sendspark recently closed but that we don’t have in our sales pipeline. 

If we feel that they’re a fit for Warmly’s ICP, we could reach out to the account manager and ask for a warm referral (which will be a much more effective way into a conversation than a cold email).

3. Ask for referrals from existing customers 

Speaking of referrals, asking for an introduction to potential customers from existing users is a great one-two combo.

Not only does it deliver quality leads that already trust your brand (because they’ve been referred by someone they know and trust to give good recommendations), but it also provides an opportunity to interact with current paying customers.

A good way to incentivize this behavior is with a simple referral offer like a discount on their next invoice or even a direct payment.

Woodpecker, for example, pays you 20% of the recurring revenue on closed deals as part of their referral program.

4. Go freemium or offer a free trial 

Lead generation is all about offering something for free in exchange for contact details.

Why stop at content, though? 

What better way to capture interest (and customer data) than by actually giving prospects a taste of your tool?

There are two ways to go about this.

A free trial is a common approach, where the user gets full access to your platform for a set length of time (14 days seems to be the norm), after which they need to whip out their credit card. 

This is generally the point when a sales rep reaches out to try and close a deal.

A better alternative here, though, is to:

1. Give them at least 30 days (more time in the platform means they’re more likely to embed it in their workflows and be compelled to continue paying).
2. Have sales (or a customer success agent) engage early on, helping them to get the most out of the tool from the outset and encouraging adoption.

Freemium is an alternative structure where you offer a simplified version of your product entirely free of charge.

It needs to actually be usable, however. Otherwise, it's just a free trial under a different.

At Warmly, we have a free option available, and many of our customers get value out of it every day.

On our pricing page, prospects can see exactly what the difference is between the free and paid plans in terms of seat, lead enrichment, and feature limitations. 

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Both are viable options for generating leads. Generally speaking, though, free trials are better as part of a startup sales motion, as earlier-stage companies haven’t yet validated their ability to convert free users to paid plans.

5. Create an interactive tool 

An alternative to the freemium or free trial models is to break out a simple feature into a free interactive tool.

Take SEO research tools Ahrefs.

They offer a selection of free tools, such as a keyword generator or a broken link checker.

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These tools give potential customers a taste of what Ahrefs can offer. Of course, it's just an appetizer (though it's still usable). The mains are available only in the paid plan, and Ahrefs smoothly directs buyers over to the pricing menu.

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6. Drive engagement with an AI chatbot 

One of our favorite ways to turn traffic into leads is by engaging website visitors with an AI chatbot.

This works best when you’ve got a visitor identification software platform set up on your website. 

This way, you can deanonymize the visitor, sync third-party buying intent and customer data, and have your AI chat tool craft personalized messages that go beyond “What brought you here today?’

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Warmly takes care of all of the above, but a unique feature is the ability to engage customers in an instant live video call.

Here’s how it works:

Once our AI chatbot identifies a level of purchase intent that requires a sales rep interaction, a Slack notification is sent to the account owner or sales team.

Then, sales can take over the chat, offer a live video call, and even close the deal right there.

That’s how brands like Pump use Warmly to drive revenue fast.

Get the case study: How Pump $20,000 closed in the first week using Warmly.

What’s next? Post-lead gen steps 

So, you’ve successfully generated some high-quality leads.

Where to from here?

Lead Scoring 

The first step here is to score and categorize your leads based on the categories you created back in the prep stage.

In short, you award points to leads based on activities they complete. A form fill for an ebook might be worth 5 points, a webinar attendance might be worth 12, and so on.

Then, you determine the thresholds they need to pass in order to reach certain categories. For example, you might determine that a lead that hits 80 points tips over into the SQL category or is categorized as a warm lead.

You can also set override functions here to consider high-intent actions. For example, if a prospect reviews the pricing page more than three times, they might get upgraded to an SQL regardless of how many points they have.

Inbound marketing tools like Outfunnel are helpful here for automating lead scoring.

Routing 

Next comes routing.

This is essentially the process of determining the appropriate sales rep to send a lead to based on factors such as prospect industry, rep availability, or territory distribution, and then mapping those leads over to an account in your CRM and routing them to the right salesperson.

Chili Piper is a solid tool here, and Warmly also has automated qualification and routing workflows built in.

Use lead routing to send urgent, hot leads right through to sales reps, as well as to route scored and categorized leads to an appropriate inbound SDR.

Sales Process Orchestration 

Once your leads are scored and routed, its time for your sales process to kick off.

What these steps actually look like depends on your exact sales motion.

You might go straight to a phone call, put a prospect into an email nurturing campaign, or run an omnichannel playbook with personalized and targeted ads, LinkedIn outreach, and dynamic video email.

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Your specific tactics and channels will depend on what your data says works best, but there is one piece of general advice that we can give here:

Automate.

Use modern sales orchestration tools to automate as much of your sales motion as reasonable while using AI to maintain a degree of personalization.

This approach will help you nail speed to lead — the early bird really does get the worm in the sales game — while reducing your total overhead by reducing the number of human reps you’ll need.

Consider this workflow in Warmly:

1. A prospect lands on your website after discovering the insightful and educational content you’ve been publishing.
2. The person is anonymized, matched to an account in your CRM, and enriched with best-in-class contact, behavioral, and intent data.
3. An AI chatbot delivers personalized messaging, engages the visitor, and captures more intent information.
4. A synchronized outreach campaign is triggered across LinkedIn and email, synced to your sales tech stack.
5. The outreach campaign drives the visitor back to your pricing page, and the prospect signs up for a free trial.
6. The prospect is categorized as a high-intent lead and routed to the right sales rep, who receives a notification via Slack to engage. 
7. The rep schedules a customized demo and consultation call with the customer to help them get the most out of their free trial.
8. At the end of the trial period, the rep leverages user behavioral data to connect with the prospects’ buying needs and motivations and closes a paid deal.

Seven of the eight steps listed above happen automatically, without the need for manual sales team intervention, thanks to Warmly’s deeply integrated architecture and automated sales orchestration.

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Making the most of your lead generation campaign with Warmly

Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform, is the perfect partner for your next lead gen campaign.

You can capture leads with our automated meeting booker, enrich account information with best-in-class data sources, and run AI-powered outreach sequences across a variety of channels.

It’s how companies like Namecoach turn traffic into revenue.

Get the case study: Discover how Namecoach booked 26 meetings in 6 months using Warmly.

Influencer marketing is everywhere.

The global market for influencer advertising was worth $21 billion dollars in 2023, and is predicted to grow to $52 billion by 2028.

When you think of influencer marketing, you may think of internet celebrities making sponsored posts on Instagram to sell perfume sunglasses. However, B2B is a much bigger market. The global B2B eCommerce market alone is worth 5X that of the B2C market.

B2B influencer marketing is a strategy of partnering with influential figures in the industry to boost your brand's reach and credibility. The most common benefits to influencer marketing is brand visibility, high ROI, warmer leads and more engagement.

75% of the B2B companies already use influencers according to a 2023 Ogilvy report, and 93% planned to use them more in the coming year. If your B2B marketing strategy does not include influencers, you are missing a powerful tool for reaching new audiences.

Understanding B2B Influencer Marketing

Having a B2B influencer marketing strategy is absolutely essential in 2024. While folks might happily gamble $20 on a pair of sunglasses they saw on TikTok, B2B deals are worth many (million) times more, and require more stakeholders to sign off. B2B sales are also made based on trust and relationships.

How B2B brands partner with influencers can vary enormously, from direct endorsements to co-authored content. The most effective strategy is putting your brand in the orbit of influential people with the same focus, growth trajectory, and target audience. Ideally, companies build long-term partnerships with like-minded influencers, and grow both brands in tandem.

Benefits of B2B Influencer Marketing

Effective B2B influencer marketing leverages the oldest and most powerful marketing strategy we have: word-of-mouth, particularly the mouths of industry experts.

And if you want to get it right, you need to build relationships with the right people before your competitors.

Amplifying Brand Reach

When you partner with influencers, you are not just tapping into their networks. You are leveraging the influence of both sides of the partnership to grow. Almost 60% of brands say that building more interest in their product or service is their top priority for influencer marketing.

LinkedIn algorithms are designed specifically to prevent posts from "going viral." The platform looks at engagement signals to figure out what posts to show to more people, even those who don't follow you or the influencer. Having a top contributor commenting on your company's LinkedIn posts extends your reach not only to their followers, but to other users asking questions or engaging on posts in the B2B space.

Algorithms for search engines, social networks, and marketplaces work the same way. The more people who engage with your content, the more other people will get to see the content. Influence begets influence.

Boosting Brand Visibility

Research shows that parasocial influence is a powerful driver on "brand credibility and purchase attention" according to a recent study published in Nature. Leverage influencers' expertise and authority in your industry by asking them to help you create helpful, hilarious, or otherwise value-adding content—and then amplify it across all your and their networks.

Who are the B2B influencers?

While anybody with clout can be a tastemaker, B2B marketers are typically established thought leaders and experts who have:

• employees, customers, journalists, policy makers, or industry leaders with credible expertise
• talented content creators
• been recognized in their field
• are subject-matter experts
• have dedicated followings
• are some of the most relevant and trustworthy sources of information and advice in their field

The place to look is often among people who are already fans of your product. Find existing customers, business partners, and employees who are already talking up your brand, and explore how you can grow those influencer relationships.

‎If they're mentioning you on social media, it's usually either customers, or folks who are brand-aligned in another way. These existing influencers will naturally be more receptive for you to reach out and ask for a 15-minute call where you can:

• Jam about how to create content together, amplify each other’s posts, swap engagement, or push your brand.
• If your long-term goals are aligned, offer them equity so they’re bought in.
• Add them to the affiliate program, so anyone they refer get 20% of ACV.
• Bring them onto a podcast to give them a platform. You can then cut that content into clips and amplify it across your socials.
• If they’re a customer, turn their testimony into a case study.

Building Your Influencer Strategy

According to a study by TopRank Marketing, the most effective B2B influencer campaigns:

• Use consistent, ongoing or "always-on" campaigns with professional influencers and niche experts
• Compensate influencers with payment, product, equity, or more.
• Measure and track performance.
• Leverage technology and AI
• Get outside help from an influencer marketing agency or influencer marketing platform.

Establishing goals and objectives for your influencer marketing campaign

Is your goal to build brand awareness, generate reviews, or drive more leads to your pipeline? Social listening tools like Brandwatch and Sprout Social can help you figure out where your brand stands now, and the delta from that to where you want to be.

Use the information you gather make SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive) goals about what you want to accomplish with your influencer marketing efforts.

Goals and KPIs

Increase Brand Awareness

• Potential KPIs: Followers, impressions, total engagement, web traffic

Reach

• Potential KPIs: Reach, engagement, new followers, web traffic, use of promo codes and trackable links

Drive Pipeline

• Potential KPIs: SQLs/SQOs, calls booked, sales

Increase User Generated Content

• Potential KPIs: Product reviews, testimonials, social media posts, hashtag, usage, influencers/brand advocates

Creating Detailed Buyer Personas

The first step of any marketing campaign is creating detailed buyer personas. That will help you figure out what influencers hold clout in the spaces you want to—well, influence.

If you're doing account-based selling, you will already have an idea of specific businesses you're targeting and what they're doing online. Who are the people your stakeholders engage with the most?

Many people who are targeting the B2B space will immediately think of LinkedIn. Surprisingly, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are more common influences on B2B purchasing decisions according to a 2023 study by Gartner. An omnichannel approach will expand the body of people who might be able to help grow your brand.

Unlike B2C influencer marketing, B2B tastemakers are not just great content creators. They are subject matter experts that provide real value to their followers. The most influential marketers narrow their content in on one subject they know well and become known for that niche.

Becoming an influencer yourself (by posting original, helpful content on your specialty) is an organic way to find and attract the types of people that align with you in value.

Selecting the Right B2B Influencers for Your Brand

Influencers don't need to be mega-brands that will command high fees for a sponsored post, but have no real commitment to your business. B2B transactions are built on trust. A clear advertisement without overall alignment can easily backfire. Brands looking to leverage influencers need to find people that align on long-term goals for the same audience.

56% of CMOs interviewed believe that the best way to optimize use of B2B influencer marketing campaigns is to "build long-term relationships that show true brand advocacy."

The right influencers are not necessarily the ones with the most followers, but who are most attuned to your goals. As they build their own brand and narratives, your brand's influence will grow organically alongside them. Smaller influencers (sometimes called micro-influencers, or even nano-influencers) may also have higher personal engagement—and therefore more direct influence on purchasing decisions.

Collaborating with Influencers

More than half of B2B purchases are influenced by word-out-mouth, according to Forbes in 2018. Since 2020, B2B buyers increasingly reach out to peers and do their own research before reaching out to a sales team. That means most of the work of convincing the prospect will usually be done by the time they talk to a sales rep.

The content you put out should therefore enhance brand loyalty and trust, prove use case and effectiveness through testimonials, and expand reach.

Building Relationships with B2B Influencers

As with any other relationship, approaching B2B influencers is about building trust. While you may need to cut a check, a influencer partnership should always create mutual value.

If you or other employees are budding influencers , it will be easy to sell the mutual benefits of co-creating and cross-sharing content. Sharing equity is another way of long-term alignment on co-growing your brand.

When you partner with an influencer, their brand is essentially "picking a side" in your industry. Warmly's influencer partnerships include advisors like Josh Norris. When someone in his circle is looking for a revenue orchestration platform, he already has a brand that he uses, loves and trusts to recommend. Influence can also grow like a tree. Other influencers will see what side your brand partners have picked and reach out to work with you, too.

Create Compelling Content with B2B Influencers

There are limitless ways to leverage an influencer partnership:

• Co-creating engaging and authentic content.
• Cross-amplifying content across both your networks to increase engagement
• Having them engage with your brand's social media posts to increase reach and engagement with their followers
• Guest blog posts
• Podcast interviews
• Co-hosting webinars
• Attending industry events as an ambassador
• Endorsements

Content can be product-based, narrative-based, or build "top-of-mind awareness." For example, Warmly's goal is to establish ourselves as the number one media go-to-market in our space. We post (and cross-post) authentic content about the technology we're building, so when people think "revenue orchestration platform," Warmly automatically comes to mind.

Successful B2B Influencer Marketing Examples

There is nothing that says B2B influencer marketing has to be staid. ‎The people you're targeting are professionals, but they're also people. A great B2B influencer marketing campaign will entertain as it sells. For example, HockeyStack's The Flow—including their popular comedic "The Worst Marketer in the World" series—and Lavender's Lavender Land channel are the "B2B-equivalent-of-HBO-and-Netflix."

Obaid Durrani and ToddClouser are the masterminds behind the Easy Mode Framework that helps brands build media empires. Their success implementing the framework with Lavender and HockeyStack have put them on the map as master B2B influencers.

Common Pitfalls in B2B Influencer Marketing

PR Disaster

Working with influencers is not all upside. There are risks associated with co-branding, like Disney's famously disastrous partnership with PewDiePie. That's why it's more important to find influencers who have a similar long-term brand trajectory, than to hire the biggest megaphone you can find to amplify your brand.

Misattributing Results

With long lead times and buying cycles, it can be hard to tell which part of the marketing puzzle to credit. Unlike B2C, B2B influencer marketing is less about a direct line from influencer-to-deal, but staking out your part of the market and partnering with brands in that space that will grow with yours. Overfocusing on content that drives sales directly similarly misses the point.

Controlling Influencer Content

When you partner with an influencer, you ideally trust them as masters of their brand. Trying to control the type of content can backfire, as can paid branded content. "69% of consumers trust influencers, friends and family over information coming directly from a brand," according to agency Matter Communications.

Conclusion

The ROI on B2B influencer marketing is staggering. Companies report a return of $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing in 2022.

Influence is the new currency. It's no longer enough to just buy ads to promote yourself, because anybody can do that. Ads also don't have the same credibility as seeing the face and presence of a recommendation by, say, Scott Leese.

The best way forward for B2B brands to boost brand reach and credibility is to find the right B2B influencers and gather as many of them as possible into your company's orbit. Then build long-lasting, mutually beneficial brand partnerships.

All you need are 60 comments to go viral on LinkedIn. The more people you get talking about you, the farther your message will reach. It quickly becomes a virtuous cycle, or an influence flywheel.

Salesloft, one of the industry leading sales engagement platforms, has acquired Drift, the industry leader of conversational marketing (aka website chatbots). No financial terms were disclosed.

The merger combines Salesloft's AI revenue orchestration platform, including Salesloft Cadence, with Drift's premier AI chatbot. It's a move that - according to the official press release - will result in a powerful end-to-end AI revenue orchestration platform servicing the entire buying journey.

But what does this merger mean for the wider sales technology market? And what does it mean for B2B buyers?

What's our take on the Salesloft Drift acquisition?

Firstly, it's a sign from the market (and their investors) that individually they could not meet projected valuations and revenue outcomes, but when combined together, the synergies might stand a better chance. As Salesloft CEO David Obrand puts it, the acquisition "introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform."

Except they weren't the first. The category of AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform had already been claimed.

For years, other companies like 6sense and Demandbase had been building around the idea of combining the sales technology and the marketing tool stack into an all-in-one solution to automate workflows on top of. Similar to Drift, 6sense and Demandbase primarily focused on the enterprise.

Warmly was the first AI powered revenue orchestration platform purpose built for the SMB. And it does so by giving you the option to plug in your existing tech stack.

SMBs typically require more automation because they don't have the same access to marketing teams, sales people, and resources as enterprises do. So we adapted to that need.

We call it signal-based revenue orchestration.

Trends in Sales and Marketing Tech Stack Consolidation

The Salesloft Drift acquisition seemingly follows an ongoing trend of sales and marketing tech stack consolidation, where market leaders are trying to become the all-in-one unified go-to-market solution.

Here's what we mean.

SaaS Mergers: Improving Sales Development?

ZoomInfo acquired Chorus back in July 2021 for $575 million, allowing them to compete with Gong.io, the industry leader in call recording and intelligence. But it's part of their larger acquisition strategy to increase net retention revenue outcomes year over year by upselling existing customers on new offerings that keep them sticky to ZoomInfo's platform.

Apollo.io took a different approach of natively unifying the sales tech stack by building everything in-house. The company started as a B2B contact database, then combined that with email sequencing, and recently raised $100MM in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures in August 2023 to create the full-stack sales technology platform. 60% of the funds are invested into product development. They have a PLG sales motion which has saved them from having to invest as heavily into a large salesforce.

Hubspot, the SMB CRM of choice, went the reverse of Apollo and started as marketing automation software that then added CRM capabilities later. And in November 2023 Hubspot acquired Clearbit, one of the top B2B data providers. For the first time, CRM, B2B contact data, buyer intent signals, and workflow all came under one roof.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it, "Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

With the rise of AI and ChatGPT, you can start to see sales technology giants leaning into consolidating the tech stack not only to improve the entire customer experience, but also because it breaks down data siloes to seamlessly integrate data across systems.

Entering the Era of Revenue Orchestration

Data is the new oil. It's the lifeblood of the orchestration. But data alone is not enough to accelerate pipeline conversion rates.

It needs to be combined with action.

As we combine sales workflow, data, and AI and automation, we move into the new era of revenue orchestration. And that means an ongoing arms race to reach B2B buyers.

Drift and Salesloft: A Tale of Two Giants

Let's zoom into the Salesloft Drift acquisition for a second, because there's a deeper story here.

Back in in 2021, Vista Equity acquired a majority stake in Drift, which valued the buyer engagement platform at $1 billion. In 2022 Vista paid an estimated 23x multiple for Salesloft, which valued it at around $2.3 billion.

These were during the good times of SaaS. But SaaS has taken a turn for the worse as we headed into 2023.

Drift: The Hero of SaaS

There was a time when Drift was the darling of B2B sales technology. Initially, it was Intercom that started the real push of website chat, especially in B2B. But while intercom pushed more into support, Drift moved into marketing.

The eventually created the category and movement around conversational marketing and got chatbots to appear on all the websites. Their key pillar of its growth was B2B buyers from the SMB market.

Anybody could add a script tag to their site and you'd see the iconic Drift chatbot icon on the bottom right hand corner.

The Drift sales development team grew revenue quickly by doing one-call closes using their own product.

The sales team would chat directly to website visitors, post a Zoom Link in the chat, and close a $6,000 to $8,000 a year deal right on the website.

Drift grew from $6 million in revenue to $47 million in revenue in 2 years. It was insanity. It was around this period that that Vista Equity stepped in.

Enter Private Equity

After Vista Equity entered the proverbial chat, Drift was forced to move upmarket and stopped caring about SMB/the lower-middle market B2B buyers. SMB just isn't seen as a place to stay for an aggressive PE firm that wants predictable revenue outcomes. Small companies churned too quickly.

Plus, companies with high website traffic typically received the most value out of Drift, which by and large is a marketing tool designed to capture leads passively visiting the site. The more site visitors, the more leads.

Consequently, it was easier to prove ROI and justify a higher price tag. PE saw enterprise revenue as more stable, which meant a higher multiple could be attached to the conversational AI company.

Drift initially did have a vision to expand outside of its conversational marketing wedge and help service the entire customer experience from top of funnel marketing to bottom of funnel sales, as well engaging customer experiences post-sales .

But ever since Vista took over, Drift shut down all expansion and focused product development on enterprise features and sticking to the marketing use case.

Remember the days when you could add a Drift chatbot to your site for a couple hundred a month? Those are gone.

Today, Drift's lowest tier is $2,500/month ($30,000/year), which is ironically desc "For Small Businesses."

$2,500/month: Small Business?

For Drift's Advanced and Enterprise tiers, we've heard our customers being quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to upwards of millions a year. For Drift, the economics of the lower end of the market didn't make sense.

This showed in the product and buyer experiences as well. Complicated workflows, long implementation sessions, high price tags. It became a best-in-class point solution instead of an end-to-end platform, which put a ceiling on its growth.

There was a point where Drift wasn't even integrated in the CRM, a gap that Qualified exploited by building natively on top of the CRM to streamline the sales use case.

But moving up-market proved to be more difficult for Drift. Growth started to slow. And at the bottom, new entrants started popping up everywhere.

Chatbot software listed on G2

At this time, sales technology company valuations dramatically decreased; many investors were told not to deploy capital and to hold; and B2B buyers stopped buying. And as a result, churn and downgrades increased across the board.

It's no surprise that Drift had layoffs, releasing 159 employees in 2023. Case in point: Drift's employee growth rate has regressed 20% in the last 2 years.

Drift's Employee Count For the Past Two Years

Drift and Salesloft: A Merger of Equals

It made sense for Vista to combine Drift with Salesloft, two complimentary market leaders in sales development and customer engagement that are struggling to keep their dominance and justify their valuation multiples individually.

Salesloft has similarly come up against stiff competition from entrants like Outreach.io, Instantly.ai, Gong.io, Hubspot, ZoomInfo, and Apollo, all of which have their own sales prospecting capabilities that rival Salesloft's.

Tack on the fact that 93% of outbound emails these days are automated, with response rates generally reaching less than 2%, and it's obvious: the category of email sequencing is reaching a point of diminishing returns for its buyers.

Salesloft's acquisition of Drift, which we see more as a merger, is an opportunity for both companies to decrease costs, improve revenue outcomes, and leverage new synergies, especially fulfilling both company's initial visions of expanding beyond their own stage of buyer journey.

Salesloft CEO David Obrand posted on LinkedIn “[The acquisition] introduces to the market the first and only AI-powered Revenue Orchestration Platform that serves the entire buying journey. By closing the gap between sales and marketing, which has long been a major pain point in the revenue motion, go-to-market teams can now orchestrate a hyper-personalized, omnichannel buyer journey at scale.”

Typically, marketing tools don't cross over into sales, outside of ABX platforms like 6sense and Demandbase, so this would be one of the first acquisitions of its kind.

Naturally, it will take time to fully integrate the two sales technology platforms to create the AI-powered revenue orchestration experience that David Obrand has promised. And it won't be cheap: the point of consolidation is also to upsell offerings, especially if you're aiming at improving the entire buying journey.

What would that look like?

Sales reps could do things like sequence prospects via Salesloft, then continue the conversation with the prospect when they visit the website using Drift.

Drift can cookie and track session activity for all website visitors, and once a target company is identified, teams can use Salesloft to multithread the conversation with all key stakeholders in that target account by adding them all to sequences.

All of this orchestrated by Conductor AI of course.

Salesloft and Drift: Legacy Software Under Fire

As Salesloft and Drift are sorting through the acquisition, there will be a window of opportunity for new entrants to claim the AI revenue orchestration category for themselves by adapting to the changing landscape of how companies successfully go-to-market. We predict that these companies will move quickly to establish themselves.

There will be companies like Apollo.io who will opt to build the unified go-to-market solution natively in-house. This is better than the acquisition approach because data can move seamlessly across all their sub products.

And there will be other companies that will keep themselves platform-agnostic and act as the unified API layer that stitches together the sales and marketing tech stack, resulting in the entire customer experience becoming more coherent. Call it go-to-market middleware.

It's difficult for a single platform to be #1 at every use case. There will always be niche use cases that are better served by specific tools.

In this scenario, you would be able to plug in your favorite tools that you're already using.

Maybe you like ZoomInfo data better than Apollo's, Outreach more than Salesloft, 6sense more than Demandbase. It would give you the opportunity to mix and mash the best-in-class point solutions for your specific market and revenue outcomes.

I think Zach Howland, a sales tech stack expert who has implemented multiple CRM and sales tools across various companies, said it best.

"Flexibility is enhanced utility. The market needs to be more nimble for the coming scramble to modernize sales technology as AI becomes more robust."

Warmly, the Signal-Based Revenue Orchestration Platform

Hi! We're Warmly, the signal-based revenue orchestration platform, purpose built for the SMB market that Salesloft and Drift are neglecting.

Instead of building everything natively or consolidating, we give you the flexibility to plug in your favorite sales and marketing tools.

We then infuse your tech stack with the best-in-class intent and enrichment data from 6sense, Clearbit, and Bombora to automatically orchestrate the right sales workflows at the right time.

We're AI powered. We're free to get started. And you can be fully setup in minutes.

And you can save yourself the $30,000/year because we built a Drift competitor chatbot natively into our platform as well.

Find out how D2DExperts closed $80,000 in revenue from Warmly in the first 12 days of use.

From content creation and distribution to LinkedIn sequencing to customer advocacy, demand generation is a broad and varied practice.

This isn’t your classic sales playbook that just needs a mobile phone and email address.

We’re talking complex tech stacks, deep integrations, and the ability to run across sales, marketing, support, and success.

In short, to really succeed with demand generation, you need some powerful tools in your tool belt.

And let’s be honest. It’s not as if you’re short on options.

In fact, the bigger problem is wading through the huge demand gen software market and figuring out what software platforms are worth your time and money.

In this article, we’re going to help you with that.

We’re going to discuss 13 of our favorite demand generation tools, across varied disciplines such as podcast recording, lead routing, and B2B advertising.

1. Content Optimization - Positional 

For many companies, SEO and content are the backbone of demand generation.

And to succeed in this arena, you’ve got to make sure your SEO content is properly optimized. For that, we use Positional.

Positional is an AI-powered toolset for SEO and content teams.

The platform is centered around a content optimization solution, which is what we primarily use it for. 

Positional helps you ensure that each piece of blog content you create covers key themes, includes important terms and keywords, and meets user experience requirements, such as the inclusion of images and subheaders.

Positional also has a bunch of other great content production features built-in, such as:

• Content planning and keyword clustering capabilities
• Keyword tracking (powered by Semrush data)
• Internal link optimization
• On-page content analytics like bounce rates, in-depth page scoring, and heatmapping
• Auto-detection of AI-written content (ideal for when you grow content operations to include external contractors)

Positional Pricing

Positional is still in private beta, so you’ll have to book a demo with their Co-founder Nate to find out more.

2. Content Publishing - Letterdrop

Letterdrop is another content-related tool that we at Warmly use as part of our demand generation strategy.

This one is all about increasing the reach of the content you publish.

We use Letterdrop to publish directly to our website (on Webflow’s CMS), and automatically post on social media platforms like LinkedIn to expand our reach.

We also take advantage of Letterdrop’s LinkedIn social selling automation. Whenever someone from our company posts on LinkedIn, we can program the post to be liked and even shared automatically by other Warmly team members.

Letterdrop has a few features that overlap with Positional, such as internal linking and SEO monitoring.

One cool unique feature of Letterdrop, though, is their integration with Gong.

You can pull insights from Gong’s sales call recording feature to understand pain points and objections and use them to power blog and sales enablement content ideation.

Letterdrop Pricing

Letterdrop has a useable free option, and costs $995 a month for their Growth plan.

3. Video Content Production - OpusClip 

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When it comes to content formats to fuel a demand generation campaign, video is perhaps the ultimate option.

We use video for podcasting, webinars, explainer videos, and case studies, which we house on our media page.

For all of these video formats, we use OpusClip to create shareable videos.

OpusClip is an AI video editor. You give it a long video, and its AI engine scours the recording for the best parts that it can turn into viral clips.

It has a GPT-enabled portal, so you can make requests in plain English, like “Give me a 30-second clip from the first hour of the video.”

You can also add contextually-relevant B-roll to longer videos or cut between two cameras with active speaker detection.

OpusClip Pricing

OpusClip has a free option, with paid plans starting at $9 a month.

4. Video Editing - Capcut 

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Capcut is another video editing tool that we use as part of our demand gen content creation tech stack.

Where OpusClip is more of a unique tool that couldn’t do what it does without AI, Capcut is closer to a traditional video editing suite, but with AI built on top.

It has video editing and creation features like text to speech and animations, AI editing tools like video upscaling or auto video generation, and even some photo editing tools for visual content creation.

It also has a handy mobile app, which is cool for editing content on the go from a tablet or phone.

Capcut Pricing

Capcut doesn’t appear to advertise pricing, but sources say you’ll pay in the range of $8 a month for the most basic plan.

5. Visual Content Creation - Canva 

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When it comes to demand gen tools, few companies have been as disruptive as Canva.

Canva is an online graphic design tool.

It offers a ton of great templates, hundreds of fonts to use, and an easy-to-understand drag-and-drop editor.

But perhaps the best thing about Canva is that it's free.

Well, there are paid plans available (it's a freemium tool), of course, but the free version is seriously usable.

If you’re looking for the right demand generation tools for visual content creation, Canva should be at the top of your list. 

Canva Pricing

As mentioned, Canva has a seriously functional free plan.

For more advanced content creation features, though, you’ll want to upgrade to a paid plan, starting at $15 a month.

6. B2B Advertising - Metadata 

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Metadata is one of the few exclusively B2B demand generation software solutions on this list.

Metadata came up on the back of a great B2B advertising toolset, catering specifically to an audience running account-based marketing campaigns.

That’s still definitely where they excel. Metadata has fantastic ad automation functionality, a deep reporting and analytics suite, and some powerful audience targeting features.

Now, Metadata is expanding its offer, positioning itself as a B2B marketing OS. The idea here is that Metadata sits at the center of your demand generation marketing tech stack and helps orchestrate and automate demand generation campaigns.

As such, the solution now offers features and developments like:

• A huge range of integrations with marketing automation tools like Salesforce Pardot
• Website personalization functionality
• Lead data enrichment 

Metadata Pricing

Metadata costs $60,000 a year, with a $540,000 annual ad spend limit.

If you want to spend more than that on ads, you’ll need to chat directly with the sales team to organize a custom deal.

7. Podcast Recording - Riverside 

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Riverside is one of the best demand generation tools for anyone using podcasts as a content format.

We use Riverside primarily for recording remote podcasts, where the hosts and attendees are recorded using the webcam or phone.

Beyond that, Riverside has a tonne of great features that make it a seriously powerful inbound marketing tool, such as:

• AI-powered show notes
• Captions and transcriptions in over 100 languages
• A teleprompter and media board to enhance your hosting abilities
• Video editing capabilities 
• Bite-sized clip generation powered by artificial intelligence 

Riverside Pricing

Riverside comes in at $15 or $24 a month, depending on the plan you choose.

There is also a free plan, though it comes with limitations on content length.

8. Interactive Website Content - Outgrow 

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Outgrow is somewhat unique in the demand generation software space, serving the need to create interactive website content like quizzes, calculators, and forms.

Outgrow has a bunch of different use cases.

You can use it to enhance on-page engagement, gather critical insights about customer buying preferences, or simply as a lead capture tool.

To help you get started quickly, Outgrow offers a number of helpful templates across formats like polls, surveys, and assessments.

Outgrow Pricing

Outgrow pricing starts at $14 a month, scaling up to $600 a month depending on the features you require.

9. Programmatic SEO - The.com 

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The.com is an interesting tool. It uses AI to spin up web pages very quickly to target long-tail keywords.

It is ideal for demand gen efforts toward the bottom of the funnel, such as creating a bunch of “competitor vs. competitor” pages to increase your organic traffic.

The.com is more about AI-generated landing pages and programmatic website content than it is about SEO blog posts. For that, we still use human writers.

But you can use The.com for things like localized landing pages to hit local SEO requirements and to automatically generate personalized web pages that speak to the exact user on your site.

The.com Pricing

The.com doesn’t advertise pricing. You’ll have to speak with a sales rep.

10. Heatmapping - Hotjar 

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Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool centered primarily around a web page heat mapping solution.

With this heat mapping tool, you can see exactly how users interact with content on your website: what draws eyeballs, what promotes conversions, and what causes users to leave.

You can view heatmap data based on movements like scrolling or clicks or even record full user sessions and watch how they navigate your site in real time.

Beyond the heatmapping functionality, Hotjar has a few cool features to understand the impact of your demand generation efforts, such as:

• Customer surveys and questions for real-time and contextual user feedback
• 1-on-1 customer interview functionality
• The ability to compare how user behavior changes depending on the device used 

Hotjar Pricing

Hotjar pricing is a little complex. You pick and choose the modules you want based on the features you require.

You’ll pay a minimum of $32 a month for the most basic heat mapping functionality.

11. Buyer Identification and Engagement - Warmly 

Much of demand generation is about bringing potential customers over to your website. But then what?

You’ve spent all that time, money, and effort on generating demand. You want to know exactly who it is on your site, so at the very least, you can attribute traffic to specific demand generation programs.

That’s where Warmly comes in.

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Warmly is our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform, and it’s the perfect demand generation solution for de-anonymizing website visitors.

Here’s how it works:

When someone lands on your website, whether its via one of your content marketing tools, social media efforts, or blog posts, Warmly identifies what company they’re from, and often provides you with the LinkedIn of the exact person who visited.

You’ll also get access to data like what pages they visited and for how long, so you can properly personalize sales efforts like email outreach.

From there, you can use a combination of Warmly’s engagement features to activate an omnichannel campaign, such as an AI-driven website chatbot or automated email and LinkedIn outreach.

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Warmly Pricing

We built Warmly for the small or medium-sized business looking to scale up account-based playbooks without having to invest 6-figures in an ABM platform.

Pricing for Warmly starts at $1200 a month, but we also offer a seriously-usable free plan. Get started for free (without having to talk to a sales rep).

12. Lead Routing - Chili Piper 

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Chili Piper is more or less considered the defacto lead routing tool.

On the back of a successful demand generation campaign, new leads enter the sales funnel, and Chili Piper helps you route that prospect to an appropriate inbound sales rep.

You set the routing rules so that leads get distributed based on factors that you choose, such as rep availability, territory assignment, or customer segment.

Chili Piper naturally integrates with popular lead generation tools such as Formstack and ClickFunnels, and they also offer a one-click scheduling tool to make it easy for prospects to schedule a demo or meeting directly with a salesperson.

Chili Piper Pricing

Chili Piper pricing starts at $15 per user per month.

13. Customer Knowledge - Deeto 

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Deeto is something unique in this space, billing itself as a “prospect empowerment platform.”

The idea here is that Deeto connects prospects in your sales pipeline to real-life customers who are currently using your tool.

That way, prospects don’t need to rely on tools like reviews and case studies (which, let’s face it, are often a little doctored). Instead, they can get the info they need right from the source.

There’s a smart-matching algorithm that uses factors like role and company size to help prospects find the right person to speak to, or they can browse a database of customers and schedule a discussion.

Check out our podcast episode Golan Raz, the Founder & COO of Deeto: Scaling Customer Advocacy.

Deeto Pricing

Deeto doesn’t advertise pricing.

Capitalizing on demand with Warmly 

If there’s one goal that all effective demand generation strategies share, it's building up enough demand for your product to produce quality leads that your sales team can actually close.

So, what happens when those warm leads come through?

Speed to lead is the name of the game here, so you need a robust solution that can help you jump on hot prospects immediately.

Warmly, our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform can help you deanonymize site traffic, funnel prospects into automated email and social outreach campaigns, and provide third-party buying intent insights to help you understand exactly when a sales rep should get involved.

But unlike other solutions, Warmly doesn’t need months of extensive onboarding, integration, and training sessions to start seeing results.

Many of our users see a positive ROI in a matter of days.

Check out Kandji booked two meetings with qualified leads in just eight minutes using Warmly.

One of the biggest challenges for B2B SaaS sellers is lead generation. Whether you choose to prioritize outbound or inbound leads, you’ll have to dedicate a lot of time and patience to nurturing prospects before they buy. 

Before digital tools transformed the sales funnel, outbound sales was the top dog. You’d build a team of salespeople whose job was cold calling and cold emailing in huge numbers until they hit on the right person who wanted to buy from you. 

Or, you’d send a few of your top salespeople to every annual SaaS conference in the United States, hoping they would contact your ideal customer. 

Today, however, SaaS brands recognize that this isn’t the savviest way to sell. Outbound marketing might get you airtime with potential customers immediately, but when only 5% of your market is ready to buy at any given time, you’re wasting your time more often than not.

Enter inbound sales. 

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Inbound sales focuses on understanding customer needs and consistently building brand awareness. This way, you can get your ICPs to come to you rather than wasting time reaching out to them, resulting in a cost per lead that is considerably cheaper than outbound leads. 

But how do you get the most out of your inbound sales strategy? That’s where an inbound sales representative comes in. 

At Warmly, we distinguish between our sales development representatives (SDRs) and our inbound sales representatives (ISRs). While both focus on identifying potential leads and closing deals, ISRs are uniquely positioned in the sales process. 

Understanding the Traditional Inbound Sales Funnel

In contrast with outbound sales, inbound sales are all about your customer: the pain points, goals, and sticking points they’re experiencing. 

As a result, because inbound is less about outreach, an effective inbound sales strategy relies on the strength of your brand awareness. Your ICP can’t connect with you unless they know you’re out there, providing them with the answer to their problems. 

Essentially, an inbound sales team aims to build an ample supply of ToFu leads—those who learn about you through social media, podcasts, and blogs—so that when they’re ready to buy, they instinctively come to you.

Research into buyer journeys and demographics of your ICP helps you identify the right MQL to pass on to your sales team, who begin converting ToFu prospects into MoFu and BoFu leads and, finally, new customers. 

Of course, if your sales strategy is based on account-based marketing, you’ll want to think of the funnel slightly differently. In both cases, the quality of the lead generation you accomplish is critical. 

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But inbound sales strategy also relies on effective sales reps. Distanced from traditional sales strategies like cold calling, your inbound sales representative must be far more agile.

Research from Gartner shows that B2B buyers spend 27% of their time researching solutions independently online and just 17% meeting with potential suppliers. Your ICPs will likely not reach out until they’re ready—in fact, 41% of B2B buyers view 3-5 pieces of content online before communicating with your sales team. 

With your marketing team focused on increasing brand awareness and your sales team intent on closing deals with those they’ve identified as SQOs, there’s a gap where your inbound prospects may be slipping through the cracks. 

Where Does an Inbound Sales Representative Fit?

Inbound sales representatives are sometimes called business development representatives (BDRs) or sales development representatives (SDRs). However, at Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs to be crucial roles independent of other members of inside sales or marketing.

The traditional inbound sales funnel clearly distinguishes between marketing efforts and sales efforts. Inbound marketing brings leads into the funnel; sales focuses on conversion. 

In the current B2B buyer landscape, the line between marketing and sales is more blurred. With prospects increasingly taking a non-linear path through the sales funnel, marketing and sales teams must work collaboratively to nurture leads and get them ready to buy. 

Your inbound sales representative sits at this cusp between marketing and sales. With extensive product knowledge and traditional sales skills like objection handling, inbound sales representatives are the ideal people to nurture warm leads before passing them on to an AE. 

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At Warmly, inbound sales reps are an intermediary step between an SDR and an AE. ISRs are responsible for a combination of SDR tasks like prospecting and closing smaller deals as an AE would. 

For this reason, introducing ISRs into your sales funnel can speed up the sales path for junior team members, turning them into competent AEs far quicker than if they spent additional time as an SDR. 

Alternatively, the ISR role can be more of an inbound sales development rep: a permanent position that speeds up the process of qualifying leads and passing them onto AEs. 

Whichever strategy you choose for your inbound sales representative, implementing this position in your team accomplishes two things:

• Speeds up the process of identifying SQOs.
• Enables AEs to spend more time on potential customers with a higher ARPA.

The Role of an ISR: Nurturing, Booking, Closing

Inbound sales representatives are responsible for the three main types of lead during the sales process.

Unqualified Inbound

Leads that aren’t likely to fit the definition of an SQO. They may not have the resources to make a purchasing decision or simply aren’t ready to buy. 

Big Inbound

‘Whale’ leads that are usually the responsibility of an AE. 92% of B2B buyers report being likely to schedule meetings with a company they might buy from, so getting whales in front of an AE is critical.

Just Right Inbound (‘Goldilocks’ deals)

Smaller than whales, but still viable opportunities for revenue. These are the optimal leads for an inbound sales representative to cover from prospecting to closing. 

Consequently, we can categorize an inbound sales rep’s role comprising the following three primary responsibilities: 

Nurturing 

For those unqualified inbound leads, ISRs take the lead in asking challenger questions and direct leads to the free product tier if relevant. 

For leads where the SDR has indicated a higher likelihood of conversion, the ISR can conduct more extensive nurturing tasks using a combination of manual communication (emails or live chat) and automated tools. Traditional sales skills like active listening and negotiation skills, plus product knowledge, will come into play here.

Booking

It’s vital that the most lucrative of warm leads actually get in front of a talented AE. The inbound sales representative is responsible for filtering leads to ensure that only the most worthwhile leads are sent to the AE, reducing the likelihood of wasted calls. 

However, inbound sales representatives can also book calls with those ‘goldilocks’ leads, who are too small for AEs but have been qualified as solid prospects by the SDR. 

Closing 

In general, ISRs are only responsible for closing deals with ‘goldilocks’ leads. However, the extent of these more minor yet still viable leads means ISRs quickly get a feel for pitching and general sales strategy. 

Crucially, inbound sales representatives have a broad remit as far as sales development goes. But their role is more than just closing those smaller deals; they also allow SDRs to focus on discovering quality leads and AEs on closing deals.

And when B2B companies face a landing page visitor conversion rate of just 9.5%, it’s even more important to have a sales team in place that can get leads through the funnel as efficiently as possible.

KPIs for an Inbound Sales Representative

The performance of an SDR or an AE hinges on clear sales targets:

• SDR = Total # SQOs generated
• AE = Total # Closed Won deals 

In Warmly’s case, as they sit between the SDR and the AE, we measure inbound sales representative KPIs according to a mix of the above. 

Closed Won deals are worth twice as much as SQOs. So, a typical monthly KPI for an ISR may look like: 

• 6 Closed Won deals
• 6 SQO + 3 Closed Won deals
• 12 SQOs 

As outlined above, ISRs aren’t responsible for the largest ARPA deals. These go straight to AEs. However, an inbound sales representative can cover those all-important goldilocks leads—the prospects we know are in the right mindset at the right time and are just small enough to work as a training ground for ISRs. 

Because inbound sales reps are in-training for senior AE positions, we look for ISRs to be quickly improve their sales metrics. This might look like: 

• Q1: 9-12 SQOs and 1-3 Closed Won deals
• Q2: 3-6 SQOs and 2-4 Closed Won deals

Important Factors Affecting the Success of Inbound Sales Representatives

Quality of MQLs

Unfortunately, if your inbound sales representative isn’t being fed accurate leads from your SDR or marketing team, they’ll find converting much more challenging. 

While identifying MQLs will be the responsibility of the marketing team, to improve the quality of MQLs, your marketing and sales team should be completely aligned on the kinds of prospects you’re primarily seeking. 

This is one reason why many B2B companies are turning to account-based selling and account-based marketing, as it’s a strategy that considerably reduces the risk of imperfect data being passed between marketing and sales teams.  

Robust Understanding of Your ICP

If your inbound sales representative doesn’t understand your ICP, their sales metrics will suffer. 

Any leads that don’t align with your ICP will inevitably be a waste of time, whether that’s through conversations that don’t progress or prospects not bothering to attend booked meetings at all. 

To give inbound sales representatives the best chance of closing deals, they should only spend time with leads that match your ICP. 

Timing of Engagement 

In his observations on a month of working on inbound leads, Ernest Teh notes that “capturing all the demand” was one of his biggest learnings. ISRs must react quickly to every lead that qualifies, requiring integrated CRM software to alert inbound sales reps to opportunities. 

Research shows that sales reps who respond to leads within five minutes are 21x more likely to see conversion. The SQOs driven to your inbound sales representative might match your ICP exactly, but if your inbound sales representative doesn’t have the bandwidth to respond, you’re throwing away good prospects.

The Future of the Inbound Sales Representative 

We predict that inbound sales representative jobs will only grow in an increasingly automated B2B sales landscape. In a world of increasing SaaS competition and an emphasis on personalized experiences, inbound sales representatives are ideal to ensure consistent collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. 

For inbound sales representatives to work at their best, they need the correct data and resources. Intent is an essential factor in B2B buying decisions, and for inbound sales representatives to take advantage of every prospect they’re given, they must have the right tools to track and identify leads.

Conclusion

At Warmly, we consider inbound sales representative jobs pivotal to our inbound sales team. 

An inbound sales representative is an ideal stepping-stone position between an SDR and an AE. It’s a six-month boot camp in inbound sales, priming staff for more senior responsibilities in account management. 

Ultimately, we’re seeing two benefits to implementing ISRs within our inbound sales team: reducing the time between salespeople moving from SDR to AE and optimizing salespeople, so they’re ready for the challenge of account management from day one.