How we created our own automated lead engine to help companies hiring
At TechStartupJobs.com we help Tech Startup & High growth companies hire everyone from a single intern to a mobile app development team to build that killer App.
Depending on what their budget is we offer various options from listing their job requirements for free to hiring across Europe at our Tech Job Fair series.
The problem
Marketing brought in those inbound leads and direct sales from our website techmeetups.com but outbound Sales was tough. Our teams scanned job listing sites to find out who was hiring. Capture them in different google sheets and then painstakingly work on them one by one. There were a lot of mistakes. Clients were called multiple times. Team members waited for each other a lot. It was chaotic to say the least.
We tried using ready made software like Basecamp’s HighRise but it just didn’t work for us. Here is what we needed to do…
Our needs
We needed to know which company is hiring the moment they make it public and act fast. We noticed that most companies nowadays use tools like social media to announce their hiring intent. The Founder or hiring team will tweet this out to try and attract talent organically.
Secondly, one of the first things a tech company does after raising a bunch of money is to hire a team. (the second thing actually after ordering that foosball table).
We needed to somehow capture leads from these two sources and qualify them. Once we have these filtered leads have our Sales team email or call these companies offering our various hiring options and based on interest forward warm leads to our Sales executive.
To do all of this we needed to get a couple of things in place.
- Sense companies hiring on Twitter
- Get alerted of companies that raised a bunch of money
- Find more information about these companies
- Email the right persons at these companies
- Approach them on social media
- Call them to ascertain their level of interest
- If not, store information for periodic approach through email campaigns
As our team is virtual and distributed. HQ in London, Operations run out of E.Europe, Lead generation in Bangladesh and Calling agents in Philipines we needed a system that will help all these team members work seamlessly
The Solution
As we run most parts of our business using the Graphical.IO platform we created a Project to store all these leads and setup some basic processes – lead backlog, lead capture, email, tweet, call, close. We then used Zapier to sense the information we were interested in and flowed it as work items through our platform for our team to act on. Here is how we did it …
Sense companies hiring on Twitter
We used Zapier to sense tweets that have keywords mentioning hiring. We also use keywords in local languages to improve our search reach.
Tweets that match our criteria are pushed into Graphical.IO as work items that the team can review and decide whether they want to move forward or discard.
Get alerted of companies that raised a bunch of money
There are many sources for this information but we chose TechCrunch due to its leadership in the industry and its free. We took in the TechCrunch RSS stream, filter for news in cities of our interest and push that into Graphical again as work items.
Teams can scan these articles and decide if they want to move forward in the lead generation process.
Find more information and create contact information
Once its been decided that a company should be pursued further a dedicated lead generator finds more information about the company and its decision makers – emails, phone nos, contact persons etc. are all searched and stored.
We use sites line Linkedin, Crunchbase or Angel.co and tools like Rapportive to gather as much information as we can.
Email the right persons at these companies
To keep messages consistent and log all emails sent the team use Graphical.IO’s Email Module to send email messages to contacts. This helps maintain email consistency across team members working on different time zones and helps us quickly change the message if needed.
All emails sent are also logged so we have a full trace history of what was done with a lead, who did it and when.
The team also approaches the company on social media and tweets them or messages them on Facebook to try get their attention.
Call them to get understand if their is any interest
If Email and Social media messages fail to generate interest our trained telemarketing agents call these companies and try and have a normal conversation and understand their hiring needs and see if there is anyway we can help. We are very careful not being pushy as we know how annoying this can be.
Leads that are interested are marked and pushed for follow up. For this we created a new ‘Sales’ Project that will hold all warm leads and worked upon by a more experienced sales person.
All these leads are easily managed using Graphical.IO‘s Kanban view. Tasks are automated for team members as leads move through the process and at any time you know exactly how your pipeline is looking.
It has been an interesting journey to setup an automated lead generation system.
Gone are the days of scanning job listing sites and searching through hundreds of excel sheets. We are now able to move leads extremely fast through the system and yet maintain full traceability and complete control. Overall this has increased the performance of our Sales team by a factor of 3! We can now achieve much more with much less effort and time size. We wish you best of luck in creating your own automated lead generation pipeline.
To try out Graphical.IO for FREE you can visit http://graphical.IO
Published on July 15, 2017 by Shantanu ‘Shawn’ Ghosh (Founder TechMeetups & TechStartupJobs)
