In today’s post, we sat down and interviewed Gerard Compte, the CEO of FindThatLead. FindThatLead is a Chrome Plugin that helps you find email addresses for your future customers on LinkedIn or Twitter. We wanted to learn more about why he created his company, and his thoughts on our industry.

Gerard has been a salesman almost all of his life, from the ancient days before social media, to today’s modern world. Before he founded FindThatLead, he was helping companies to build prospect lists. He realized he always had the same problems: finding prospects’ email addresses, confirming their validity, a high bounce rate due to incorrect addresses, and much time lost due to this cyclical process.

So in an effort to solve this problem, after he met his technical Co-Founder Cristian Vitales, together they built FindThatLead. In just a year and a half, they have over 11,000 users of their Chrome extension, and have some impressive clients such as Salesforce and Hubspot.

Why did you create FindThatLead?

As a salesperson who wasn’t working for a huge company with a large sales organization, I really struggled to find tools that could help me out. I wanted to create a company that provides resources for entrepreneurs or companies that don’t necessarily have a huge budget for for fancy tools. Our reasonable pricing options make it easy for the independent salesperson to use it for free, and a larger company to pay $90/month, with multiple user options and more email addresses.

What’s the biggest benefit of using FindThatLead?

Speed and efficiency. With just two clicks you can find your prospects’ email address. To be efficient, we will give you the percentage of correctness for the email address. So there’s no guessing if it’s the right email or not. You’ll know right away if it’s the correct email, or if there’s a possibility that it’s incorrect.

What else can you do with FindThatLead?

In addition to finding prospects’ email addresses on LinkedIn and Twitter, we have recently added a new functionality of finding email addresses on Google Spreadsheets. So now you can search for email addresses without ever having to leave your Google Spreadsheet database!

We have another feature that allows you to track Twitter followers: if you know someone’s Twitter name, enter it into your FindThatLead dashboard and collect all their followers’ emails with just one click.
For larger customers, we accept CSV imports for a long list of customers. We are always adding new functionalities!

What are some of your favorite tools to use?

Of course I love using Replyapp.io! Anyone who has ever received an email from me knows that I tend to make mistakes in the email body, due to being crazy busy running a startup. A tool that makes it easier for me to respond and manage my corresponse is greatly appreciated.

As a salesperson, any tool that tells you if someone has opened your email or not is extremely helpful. Tools such as Mailtrack and Sidekick are very handy for managing a sales cycle.

What do you think is the future of sales?

  • Less cold calling. We are now in the age of the Digital Natives, whose preferred methods of communication are online. In fact, these days, it’s uncommon for someone to have a home phone! If customers prefer to communicate via the internet and not on the phone, we have to listen to what they want.
  • Social selling. As customers no longer want to receive direct cold calls, we have to adapt to these changes. Social selling is all about developing relationships as a part of the sales process, with the help of social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m a real believer in this, which is why we wanted to create a tool that connects to the social platforms we’re already using. I think all sales tools today should be integrated into the websites that we’re using on a daily basis, to make it faster to close that deal.
  • More personalized. The “Me Generation” has existed for quite some time now, but regardless if we’re becoming more selfish or not, one thing is certain: everyone expects a certain level of personalization. Now it’s easy to find not only your prospects’ names, in addition to email addresses, but more information such as their company, location, age, and interests. We should be using this to our advantage to create personalized content for our prospects. In the end, it makes them feel more special, and helps us to close more deals.

Conclusion? FindThatLead is another great tool out there like Reply that, if used correctly, can help you to save time and close deals faster.