How to Convert Your Inbound Leads Into More Meetings Booked

Hey I’m Ashley Dees, Head of Sales Development at Metadata. 

Someone raised their hand & came inbound. 

Easy to convert them right? Wrong (SDR’s feel me). 

When someone requests a demo, we don’t know their enthusiasm level for your product. 

Maybe they went to 8 different websites & clicked “Book Demo.” Who knows. 

Most people are hard to convert, even if they did raise their hand. 

You have to find a way to stand out! 

But you CAN do it — just takes a little extra effort, personalization & some razzle-dazzle  🎉

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The Playbook

Make sure sales & marketing are aligned on qualification 

• Before you start anything, make sure your marketing & sales teams have discussed / answered “what is a qualified lead?” 
• Everyone needs to be aligned on this. Tech stack, company size, job title etc qualification requirements need to be agreed upon so the SDR knows what to schedule.
• Would suggest keeping track of this in a running doc as companies often shift / update meeting qualification requirements. 

What to do after a lead comes in — CRM research

• First, you’ll want to check your CRM to make sure there aren’t any open opportunities with the lead’s company (or that they’re not a current customer). 
• If there is an opp or they’re a customer, sync with your team on how they want to handle.

Qualify the lead

• Research using Linkedin / company’s website. 
• Depending on your company’s qualification criteria, you’ll want to research the company (website & Linkedin page) & the lead’s (the actual person) Linkedin profile. 
• We do this to make sure both the account & prospect are qualified for an intro call. 

Lead is qualified, let’s give them a call!

• Once you’ve confirmed the lead is qualified — call them.
• We suggest doing this before emailing as its much faster than personalizing an email. 
• If your team hasn’t provided you with a tool like Zoominfo to search phone numbers not to worry. There are free phone number lookup tools floating around the interweb. 
• If / when they answer we start off the call with “Hey NAME, this is Ashley from Metadata {let them respond}. You signed up for our $100 Amazon promo to check out a demo, calling to help you get that scheduled.” ← Make it clear right away THEY took an action & raised their hand. Make it clear it is not a cold call. 
• Leave a voicemail & say your name + company (SLOWLY) at the beginning & the end of the voicemail (if no answer). If you called a cell number no point in leaving your phone number, they have it. 
• If they requested a demo in the morning, try calling them again in the afternoon.
• Tip: Prioritize calling cell / mobile numbers over company lines. 

If they didn’t answer your call, send an email

• Before you write your email, look at the lead source first.
  • Did they convert from one of your ads?
  • Were they offered a gift card?
  • Whatever the conversion was, you’ll want to mention it in your email. 
  • If they converted off of a specific ad, ask your marketing team to give you a screenshot of the ad so you can use that screenshot in your email. 

Email Breakdown:

• Subject Line
  • Use lowercase. Why? Everyone else uses uppercase & we want to stand out. 
  • Don’t use a generic subject line, customize it based on the prospect (look up their Linkedin profile to find out cool / interesting things to mention. 
  • Use EMOJIS. They’re colorful & make the email stand out in the person’s inbox.
• Body
  • Start your email off with personalization. If the first sentence of your email is generic, they’re probably not going to open it. 
  • Your email should have at least a one sentence summary of what your product does or what pain it solves. Imagine your prospect requests a demo on Tuesday. You respond, but they don’t read your email until Friday. Do you think they’re going to remember what your product does? Some will, some won’t. That’s why we need the blurb in there. 
  • Pro tip: Add images / screenshots to add color to the email. Why? May add zero value other than entertainment, but people are visual creatures & it’s more appealing to look at than a generic boring email. 

IMPORTANT: Subsequent email / phone follow up steps can be added to an Outreach / Salesloft cadence. 

Connect on Linkedin

• Add a note in the connection request. 
• In the connection request, you want to mention three things:
  1. Lead Source: You requested a demo, signed up for a free trial, etc 
  2. What your company does 
  3. Your email address (so they can easily copy / paste your email address & search their inbox; sometimes SDR emails get sent to spam)
• Ex) Hi Daniel, thanks for signing up for our $100 Amazon promo to see how we help Zoom, Slack, Drift etc with the only technology to automate ad campaign creation. If you didn’t see my email come through let me know. Sometimes I get caught in spam! Email is from ashley@metadata.io

What to do after they convert / schedule a meeting (Ops)

• Make sure the Outreach / Salesloft cadence has been marked finished after they schedule their intro call / meeting. Sometimes this happens automatically, sometimes it does not. Always good to double check because having an automated “book your demo” email send out after they’ve scheduled looks silly. 
• Make sure to include anything relevant your prospect has mentioned to you when you share meeting notes with the AE. Things like:
  • “I need to buy a demand gen tool by the end of March” 
  • “I’m also looking at (x) competitor” 
  • “I was intrigued by your Facebook feature” 
• Not only are these important notes for your AE, it saves your prospect from having to repeat the same information over and over to people in your company, which can be frustrating. 

Send a welcome email after they convert / schedule

• Send a “thanks for scheduling” welcome email to confirm their intro call. 
• The AE (or person who will be running the meeting) should be cc’d in this intro email.
• After looking at no-show rates for intro calls, we found that if the AE jumps into the email thread & says something like “excited for our meeting,” no show rate dropped drastically.
• In our welcome emails, our SDR’s record a video (personalized) thanking the prospect, introducing the AE & sharing their enthusiasm for the prospect to explore our product. 
• Videos also work really well when inserted into the initial lead response email #1 (worth doing if your SDR’s have the bandwidth).