growth hacking | SELLHACK COLD EMAIL & PROSPECTING BLOG

1. Hack Your Industry Conference

Ever go to a conference where they give you a list of attendees but no contact info? Or worse yet, did they give you a list of companies and people’s titles from the companies then try to sell you the contact info for more than you spent on the conference in the first place? If you have a list of attendees, you can upload the list here to automatically find all the valid email addresses.

2. Mine Twitter for Leads

Most people stick to LinkedIn for prospect list building, but our most creative customers are starting to use Twitter as a place to find fresh leads. You can search twitter and build a list of prospects by going here . Pro Tip: Have a conference or event coming up that you may or may not attend? You can search the #hashtag, build a list of people who are using the #hashtag and email them without ever having to set up a booth or scan badges.

3. Automate Your Cold Email Campaigns

Sending emails one-by-one and setting reminders to follow-up with your prospects if they don’t respond to your first attempts to connect is a huge waste of time. You’ll spend hours a week NOT selling. We built Replyify and integrated it with SellHack to automatically send your personalized sequence of emails and follow-ups. ps – if you’re using something like MailChimp to do this now, you’re making a fatal mistake. Here’s why.

4. Clean Up Your CRM

Ever caught yourself saying something like: “the data in our CRM is old”, “this phone number doesn’t work” “the company got acquired” or “I just called someone who’s been retired for a year.” CRM contact data decays somewhere in the vicinity of 2.8% to 5.5% per month. You can upload your CRM contact data to SellHack. We’ll automatically 1) find email addresses if they are missing for a contact and 2) verify all existing email addresses you have on file.

5. Test a New Market

Have a hunch about a new market segment that would be perfect to sell in to but you don’t know where to get started? Go build a new prospect list in List Builder then write an email with a simple/low-commitment Call To Action while we automatically find all the email addresses. Then send individual emails or use a marketing automation tool like Replyify. If you don’t hear back after your first email, keep following up with the prospect every few days.

6. (re)Segment Your Prospect List

Do all of your prospecting emails have the same value proposition or Call To Action? Think about the company where you work for a minute. Does the CEO have the same concerns or motivations as an Account Executive or even a VP of Marketing? Probably not. So why are you emailing the same thing to all of these people. Re-segment your prospect lists to get really granular on the target company and job title profile you are targeting. Figure out what scares each prospect group, create custom emails for each, and watch your response rate increase.

7. Automate Your Email Verification

If your business is expanding and it’s time to step increase the number of prospects or leads you produce on a weekly basis, it’s time to look at List Builder or our Batch Upload. Need more help? Send us a note if you want to learn more about our custom list building service. ps – we even help some clients write, send, optimize and track their emails.

8. Never Pay For SellHack Again

There are SellHackers out there who pay us $0 a month and have over 500 free emails a month. Want more emails for free? Refer your colleagues today!

SellHack started as an internal email finder tool for us to use when prospecting. As a sales professional, I know the value of a warm intro and the opportunity cost of a non-connect. A non-connect happens when you do nothing more but make note of a decision maker’s Social Profiles profile since you don’t have a credible mutual connection for an intro. Sure a cold Social Profile connection request could work, but what happens after you get the notification that Mr. or Mrs. prospect just accepted your request? Do you send them a message through Social Profiles? What happens if they don’t respond? How do you know if they even received the message or if it’s lost in the cluttered Social Profilesinbox? Even worse, what if your request is ignored? Either way, your leverage is gone.

There is a ton of information, a burgeoning conference scene, and many tools in the Biz Dev playbook that help with moving a prospect through the funnel, but getting to the person’s inbox is a challenge. Social Profiles specifically does not opine the email address of their members unless you are connected. Even then, my network profile observations suggest that a lot of emails listed are actually the member’s personal email address they used when registering for Social Profiles.

SellHack is an browser extension (Chrome for now) that uses magic and JavaScript to render a ‘HackIn’ button on a Social Profile’s member’s profile page next to the Connections, Message or InMail buttons below the profile picture (depending on your relationship to that person). The magic happens when you click the ‘HackIn’ button. You’ll notice the page slides down and our system starts checking publicly available data sources to return a confirmation of the person’s email address or our best guesses. I love getting an email verification, but even when we can’t verify the email address, SellHack still saves me a ton of time. I don’t have to manually create the different permutations of what the person’s email address could be (ryan@, ryano@, rodonnell@ etc). There is always an option to copy our best guesses to your clipboard where you are free to check these against Rapportive or send your intro email to the addresses we provide as BCC.

This is a beta version and best yet, it’s FREE. We’d love your feedback on how to make SellHack a more productive tool. Tweet us @sellhack or send a note to Support@sellhack.com.

Think this is cool? Add SellHack to Social Profiles here.

Cheers!

– The SellHack Crew

8 Ways to Hack With SellHack