What Happens After You Get A New Lead?

1. HOW STARTUPS GET INTEL ON NEW LEADS drift.com

2. WHEN IT COMES TO GROWING A STARTUP That’s your startup growing, btw. drift.com

3. NEW LEADS AND SIGNUPS ARE YOUR GOLD COINS drift.com

4. SURE. A NEW LEAD COULD BE NOTHING. . . bob@gmail.com alice@hotmail.com tom@dontcallme.com drift.com

5. SURE. A NEW SIGNUP COULD BE NOTHING. . . bob@gmail.com alice@hotmail.com tom@dontcallme.com Probably not good leads. drift.com

6. OR, IT COULD BE YOUR NEXT BIG CUSTOMER, KEY PARTNER, OR INVESTOR drift.com futurecustomer@bigcompany.com keypartner@co-marketing.com investor@icanfundyourbiz.com

7. OR, IT COULD BE YOUR NEXT BIG CUSTOMER, KEY PARTNER, OR INVESTOR drift.com futurecustomer@bigcompany.com keypartner@co-marketing.com investor@icanfundyourbiz.com Probably good leads.

8. BUT HOW DO YOU KNOW FOR SURE? drift.com

9. YOU HAVE TO DO LEAD RESEARCH drift.com

10. AND THAT JUST “SOUNDS LIKE IT TAKES A LOT OF TIME drift.com

11. SO WE ASKED 22 SALES AND MARKETING PROS TO TELL US drift.com

12. drift.com WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU GET A NEW LEAD?

13. AND FROM SIMPLE TO COMPLEX, THIS IS WHAT THEY HAD TO SAY drift.com

14. PS. Join 350 startups who use Drift Daily to automate their lead research for free. Click Here To Learn More Get a daily email and Slack alerts with names, faces and context of your site's new signups.

15. EVERETT HILL “I believe in the old adage ‘companies don't buy, people do.’ That's why my ﬁrst step in qualifying a lead is to research the person on LinkedIn. Only then do I look the company up on InsideView. It's rare that these two sources don't get me what I need. Google is a last resort because it's less efficient. If the lead scores well in that research, I reach out within a few hours of receiving the lead. Striking while the iron is hot has become the norm. It's effective as long as your approach is about them and not about you.” Revenue Growth Expert Catalytic Advisors @EverettHill1 drift.com

16. SEAN PATRICK SI “I'm a startup founder and I'm still doing all the sales in my team (I have 20 people working in house for my company). When I get a new lead, the ﬁrst thing we do is to go to their website URL (they give it to us in the contact form). We do a brief analysis and we send them a proposal from their site. Websites says a lot about the company and the person running the show. If the website is well-made, it's most probably run by a well-to-do founder who cares about their digital identity. If it's not, we usually don't bother reaching out. We want to work with people who care about their online presence.”Co-Founder and CEO SEO Hacker and Qeryz @Qeryz drift.com

17. BUBBA PAGE “Immediate follow up is necessary - if you respond to a lead one hour after it is submitted, the response rate decreases 21x. We use Rapportive or HubSpot Insights or LinkedIn directly - a quick lookup can give you enough information to reach out and have a successful call. A Google search also brings in relevant news articles or published content that the person has been involved with. (There’s) absolutely no reason to wait. If they ﬁlled out a form, they are either on their phone looking you up on mobile, or on their computer, which is next to a phone. If you even wait ﬁve minutes, it could cause them to get sucked into a meeting or leave their office for something that will distract them from your call.” Founder and CEO OUTRO @BubbaPage drift.com

18. CHRIS POST “When a new lead comes in our sales team does what we call "5-minute RECON" where we try and ﬁnd all we can about them and their company utilizing everything from our CRM and LinkedIn to just Googling them and seeing what we can dig up. If its a website client we might run a builtwith.com report on their site to see what technologies and frameworks they are using. If its a marketing client we might research a few keywords and see how they are performing for them. Its little bits of intelligence like this that can help you essential "pre-quality" a lead before you pick up the phone.” President and Founder Post Modern Marketing @thisispost drift.com

19. NICHOLE ELIZABETH DEMERE “I check their Twitter account and then their website. ” SaaS Consultant & Customer Success Evangelist @NikkiElizDemere KENNETH SLIFER Director, Product Marketing Verge Solutions, LLC @kdslifer • LinkedIn (learn history, view common connections) • Company Information Online and Internal • Search Internal User Database To See If Transition From One Organization To Another drift.com

20. NATALIE KAMINSKI “We are getting ready to launch our app and have a sign-up on our site. Whenever a new person signs up, we send them a thank you email, and then I look them up on LinkedIn and Facebook to see who they are (a potential customer, partner, or investor), then I record the information in our database so that I could reach out to them with an appropriate message once our app is ready.” Co-Founder GoBaby @gobabyco drift.com

21. ALI DINANI “CareGuide operates in an environment where a lead is only viable for a short period of time. Our research is mostly an automated process of identifying their name, contact info, vertical, and speciﬁc need and identifying the appropriate time to contact.”Growth Engineer CareGuide @alidinani drift.com

22. CANDICE GALEK “We gather most of our leads (email signups) via the SumoMe app. We have been averaging a 5 percent conversion rate from this amazing pop up and roughly 200 new leads a day. After we get their contact info it is automatically pulled into our GetResponse campaign. And depending on what popup they clicked on we wait a day and then send them a customized message.” CEO and Founder Bikini Luxe @bikiniluxe drift.com

23. MARK ESPINOLA “We have our contact page integrated directly with our CRM. As soon as a request is submitted, it is followed up on immediately via email and a call. It’s easiest to use Google on the email address to ﬁnd a hit. It’s helpful if your contact information has enough demographic information to follow up too. Of course, there’s a huge tradeoff with demographics and conversions as they’re inversely correlated. The more you ask to ﬁll out the less likely someone will submit, so be careful.” CEO and Founder GradeHub @mespi drift.com

24. PHOEBE FARBER “When someone ﬁlls out a form our website they go throw a workﬂow in HubSpot to determine if they're an MQL (with the exception of requests, which automatically MQL). It looks at what information they gave us, namely are they a B2B company and what status they're in - are they new/unengaged or being worked already? We have ZoomInfo, Datanyze and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to lend data assistance if needed.” Sales & Marketing Operations Manager Attend @PhoebeFarber drift.com

25. ANDRE OENTORO “I use Rapportive and ﬁnd the lead's name/ email and who we mutually know.” Owner Bread and Beyond @BreadnBeyond SACHIN AGARWAL Founder Braid @sachinag “First thing I do is look them up on LinkedIn. We want the right mix of people in our early adopter set so that we're getting feedback from people in our exact target markets. The more precise the feedback, the better product decisions we can make.” drift.com

26. HENRY BUTLER "As a startup company that targets private investors and developers of infrastructure projects as our customer base, we utilize LinkedIn for much of our lead generation. When new customers sign up to use our platform, we check the person's LinkedIn account to make sure they are a strong ﬁt. In the end, we need to make sure we are connecting the right people." Investor Relations Manager CAAAPITAL drift.com

27. JD HAMBY “ I use a variety of different strategies including cold emails and calls. LinkedIn is a very useful tool for myself as I can get an idea about person I'm trying to contact beforehand. Also I spend a lot of time on Google ﬁnding our potential clients websites and reading customer reviews (i.e. Yelp, etc.) to see if there is a pain they are dealing with where that we can be a solution.” Sales Specialist Medicom @MedicomHealth drift.com

28. JUNE JEWELL “We use InfusionSoft and put new leads through a campaign nurturing process. They get different emails depending on what they do – download my book, attend a webinar or view pages on our site. We do use LinkedIn and their website to research more about their company. We sometimes reach out to them directly if they have attended more than one event or seem really interested based on all the tags in InfusionSoft.” President AEC Business Solutions @JuneJewell drift.com

29. YVONNE LYNGAAS “When a lead comes in from our website or is a referral we conduct some initial background on the company via Google and person via LinkedIn. All leads are followed up on within 20 minutes via phone. We gather budget, timeline, and decision maker information prior to putting together a proposal that helps us score the lead and schedule a proposal. Our response time has been our greatest asset.”President Monarch & Company @monarchandco drift.com

30. CURTIS BOYD “Our streamlined client acquisition protocol has been a huge part of our success. When we get a new lead capture, we get an appointment for a free demo, free trial, free consultation. You name the CTA and we use it on different landing pages on different advertising mediums. During the demo we have a nice presentation that we developed using Pitch Deck. Before we even meet with them, we do our due diligence about the company to make sure they are qualiﬁed. We have a systematic list that we go through, to score them as potential clients based on compatibility. It helps personalize the experience as well for the client, and helps our sales team prioritize sales leads.” CEO Future Solutions Media @Fut_Solutions drift.com

31. AMOL WAGH “We generate regular leads, who are direct opportunities for our clients to pitch their services, courses or send product quotations. We do a quick background research of a particular person or company, using website or social media proﬁles, mostly LinkedIn and Twitter. We forward that information to our client using our lead manager feedback. And from that info, the client or their representative directly contact the lead, but they have advantage in pitching them considering they know the background. Mostly we reach out a day after a lead is generated in most cases.” Co-Founder DOTLINE INC @amolwagh drift.com

32. ROB BOIRUN “In my business I have clients contacting me for various reasons, and because of this I have multiple sign up processes in place. One may be interested in a brand new website, so after someone signs up for information they ﬁrst get a non salesy message from us with addresses their concerns as well as offering that we are the right solution. Or if someone is looking for advertising signage we will usually follow up with a phone call or email within the next hour. So really it depends on the situation. Regardless we always do some basic research on Google and LinkedIn on the customer or business so that we can be familiar with who they are or what they do. This always makes the conversation easier since we can both be on the same page.” CEO PopNet Media @RobBoirun drift.com

33. TOM BELHUMEUR “I’m a co-founder and head of business development at an early stage AdTech company so the way we handle leads is what works best for us at our current stage. New site leads/sign-ups are routed to my inbox. As soon as it comes in I do a quick Google search and read “just above the fold” on the company site and check linked for individual role and responsibilities. I then respond with a brief personal/template email thanking them for their interest, restate our mission/goal, tell them I’d love to learn more about their company(reference something from “above the fold”) let them know they can reach out to me personally, leave them with a question or call to answer — something speciﬁc they can answer quickly and easily, yes/no, its not about the content I’m looking for the response. If I can do this quick enough I’ll hopefully get an answer and that’s my opportunity to open up the relationship. These ﬁrst steps won’t scale in the future, but our volume of inbound leads isn’t overwhelming at this point either which also lends itself to more “interested” leads.” Co-Founder Libring @LibringEdge drift.com

34. KATIE MCCABE "When I get a new lead I follow up immediately because in sales, time is of the essence. If you aren't selling what you've got, someone else is. When using email to follow up, I ﬁnd that the shorter and more to the point the email is, the more likely the prospect will respond. After three - four work days, it never hurts to follow up with a simple email, asking ‘Any update on this?’ In sales, persistence is key.” Founder Syreni Swimwear www.syreni.com drift.com

35. Want to do lead research without any of the hassle? Check out Drift Daily and automate your lead research for free. Click Here To Learn More Get a daily email and Slack alerts with names, faces and context of your site's new signups.

36. QUESTIONS? Email dg@drift.com Learn more at drift.com