As a Sales Development Representative, my job is to set our company up for success by sourcing great deals, building relationships, and helping close deals. I was given the task to start booking onsite meetings for a trip into our Atlanta territory 5 weeks in advance. The task of booking these meetings sounds simple, but understanding which specific accounts and contacts to reach out to in a city of 450,000 people is difficult. So, what better place to start than with existing relationships using Sigstr? Sigstr Relationships is able to identify and quantify the entire universe of relationships that your employees have, enabling you to drive better engagement and more business. Here’s a play-by-play of how I used Sigstr Relationships to book 10 meetings in 10 days.
Step 1
First, I was able to use location intelligence to pull a list of every single relationship Sigstr has in the city of Atlanta, regardless of where that individual’s company is headquartered. From there, I narrowed it down to 300+ scored relationships (ranging from moderate to strong) based off of bidirectional email frequency and recency alongside CRM data. The list contained their company, email, title, personal relationship score, and company relationship score.
Step 2
300+ contacts seems like an overwhelming list, but not all of these initial relationships scored are the right persona or fit based on our ideal customer profile. So, the next task was to filter this list by persona, correct territory location, and number of employees. With those filters in place, the list of 300+ contacts shrunk down to 150 ideal relationships that made sense to meet with during our time in Atlanta.
Step 3
Knowing that someone on the Sigstr team has an already existing relationship with every contact on this list, I decided to dig a bit deeper and discover a few details of each relationship within Salesforce. I later realized how crucial it is to take the time to do this – being able to reference a mutual connection or past interaction doubled my response rate during my outreach (compared to the average response rate across our Sales Development team).
Step 4
Although I had an understanding of each relationship, I understood that not all marketers or salespeople care about the same thing (content, account-based marketing, sales and marketing alignment, etc.). Therefore, the next to-do item was to meet with the Sigstr Marketing team and come up with a plan to determine to most relevant content and resources to send to each of these contacts.
Step 5
From there, I had a list of 150 contacts who fit our ideal customer profile, were all located in the same city we’d soon be visiting, have an existing relationships with Sigstr, AND I was equipped with the right content to send each person. Next up? Crafting a personalized message that referenced our connection (relationship, past interaction, warm introduction from a teammate, etc.) and asked for an onsite meeting within a specific time range. Something like this…
“Hi John, it’s been awhile since you and my colleague, Kelly, chatted about account-based marketing goals for your team. The Sigstr team will be in Atlanta in a few weeks so I was wondering if it made sense to stop by your office while we’re in the area? Let me know – thanks!”
Step 6
Rinse and repeat! I continued to build out the rest of my outreach based on existing relationships and personalized messages with a call-to-action for an onsite meeting. The result? 2 weeks before our plane left for Atlanta, we had 10 meetings lined up for our Account Executive and leadership team.
Top Takeaways
From this exercise, I learned the true meaning of something our Founder, Dan Hanrahan, says every day: relationships drive business. The corporate inbox is where all business communications occur and relationships grow. Having the ability to identify and quantify every relationship your company has is a powerful asset – especially for territory trips like this one. As marketers and salespeople, we’re provided with an endless amount of digital engagement data (clicks, impressions, downloads, etc.). Sigstr Relationships allows teams to bring in the human engagement side for a more holistic view in the accounts and contacts that are most important to you.
