Automate Prospecting and Outreach with Reply.io and LeadFuze

Reply offers some fantastic lead generation tools, including the ability to gather contact data directly from web pages and sites, like LinkedIn.

But you wonder, at times, how nice it would be to also get fresh, quality leads delivered directly into your Reply.io account, automatically. Then, the rest of your account’s features take flight. You and your Sales team are now able to automate the entire sales process:

The question: How do you go about getting these leads imported, automatically?

That’s where LeadFuze comes into play. Throughout this article, we’re going to take a deep dive into finding your favorite leads and automating the initial step of any outbound prospecting process.

In particular, we’ll cover:

• The specific criteria to look for when digging up new leads
• How narrowing down your lead search brings higher response rates
• Improving results over time through testing

Before we begin — It’s still about the inbox

But it’s not entirely about the inbox.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of businesses out there growing through single-channel outreach (i.e. only using one form of communication to get a response from a lead). And if you’re a ‘solopreneur’ or very small team, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se.

• A consultant can find their first 10 clients primarily on LinkedIn
• Small firms get a lot of mileage from word-of-mouth
• Early SaaS companies see fantastic results from cold emails

That said, scaled growth takes a more comprehensive approach. And that approach should always include email outreach — along with other channels.

Here’s a sample outreach cadence, just to give you an idea:

• Day One: Cold email invite to an upcoming webinar
• +1 day: LinkedIn connect with a message about the webinar
• +2 days: Leave a direct-to-voicemail message
• +1 day: Follow up email

You get the idea. Multiple channels, right?

In my experience, sending an email is one of the best ways to start that conversation. But so many do it poorly, don’t see results and then say “cold email doesn’t work”. In all likelihood, it’s due to one of the following reasons:

• sending an email to 10,000 people, with zero qualifications
• buying bad lead data or not doing research on individual leads
• going right in with a high-octane sales pitch in the first email

No. It’s about quality leads who meet certain criteria and are sent a tailored offer. That’s how you get responses.

Now, we’ll hop into LeadFuze and get a firsthand look at finding ideal buyers.

Ideal Leads for Outreach Automation

Think about your favorite customers. You know, the ones who actually enjoy your products/services, pay on time and don’t spend a lot of time with unnecessary communication with your Support team?

It’s time to think about them by looking at your current client roster. Some specific things to look for would be:

• common markets and roles (oftentimes, your favorite customers do something similar to one another and the role of decision-makers are often the same, too)
• size of the business (too big and they may not be interested, too small and they may not be able to afford your solution)
• what they’re currently using (e.g. tech/services similar to what you offer)

Use LeadFuze to Find Those Ideal Buyers

There are two ways to search for contacts using LeadFuze; market-based and account-based. What I’m using for this example is the market-based search. This will lead to a large pool of potential leads you can then export into your Reply.io account.

Our example: An inventory management software. After a search of clients, the company sees two key industries they like as clients — consumer services and education.

1. Finding the Right Industry and Role

You can see (in the gif) I’ve opened up LeadFuze, hit “Search for Leads” in the top left and the market-based search is the default screen.

The first two criteria are the role of the person you’re targeting and the industries you’d like to target. You’re free to choose as many roles and industries as you like, but we recommend creating separate lead lists to keep your prospects organized so you better tailor your sales outreach.

All I’ve done is select an “Operations Role” and the app pulls up all of the common titles. I then remove the ones I don’t want from the list. And for the industry, I choose both “consumer services” and “education”.

2. Size of the Business

Narrowing down the type of company and who to reach out to is a great start. Taking your search to the next level means choosing the right-sized organizations to target. At the inventory management company in our example:

• companies over 500 employees typically have custom software
• organizations fewer than 10 people aren’t profitable enough over time

Both of these factors create the sweet spot of 11-500 employees. To find these leads in LeadFuze, I simply click small and medium businesses in the “Employee Size” category and delete the “1-10” and “501-1000” options.

3. Tech Used (and Other Factors)

The current solutions your target buyers use offers a tremendous amount of insight. The main question — are they currently spending money in similar areas?

If so, you have a better shot at the sale.

Here’s why.

Convincing a company to use inventory software (per our example) when they currently don’t use one is an uphill battle. On the other hand, showing how your inventory software is better than the current solution is a level playing field.

There are a number of other criteria available in the LeadFuze Market-Based Search.

• hiring by role
• excluding technologies (to know if leads are not using certain tools)
• skills associated with your target role (incredible for recruiting and tailoring pitches)

After all the criteria are entered into the app, all you have to do is hit the ‘Search’ button at the bottom and the number of leads will show up on the next screen (see screenshot below).

Now It’s Time to Use the Leads

Ok, you have (potentially) thousands of leads meeting your criteria. That typically includes email addresses, LinkedIn profiles and even quite a few phone numbers. Now, it’s time to kick in the automation.

LeadFuze has a program (we call it Fuzebot) which takes your saved search criteria and pulls a number of leads based on the factors you tell it to follow.

Want 300 leads per day exported to Reply.io and CRM? Done.

Need 50 names and emails (from multiple lead search lists) sent to different accounts? You got it.

Finally, you’ll plug those leads into your Reply pipeline for a virtually “hands-free” prospecting and initial outreach process.

The Job is Easier, but It’s Not Done

You know your automation is working when emails are going out and tasks are being created in Reply.io. And you know the offer you’re sending to leads is working when your sales team begins having actual conversations with those leads.

But please hear this — you don’t know when you’ve optimized your sales funnel.

The good news is that since automation with LeadFuze and Reply is so simple, your organization can easily set up a few pipelines, email sequences and offers to do split tests. And with the excellent analytic capabilities of Reply.io, tracking those results and achieving constant improvements is easier — but never done.