How we do sales without Sales Development Reps

In this blogpost we describe our quest to automate our sales process as much as possible, including both our inbound and outbound sales channels. This is not our v.0. and it’s definitely a work in progress but at this stage it already allows us to go through hundreds of leads per month without any SDRs (sales development reps)!

Here’s a diagram of what the process looks like:

Although it might seem complicated it’s actually fairly simple. It all starts with a web request to our website…

1) De-anonymize traffic

First we map the IP address of the request to a domain (we have a dataset that goes beyond reverse DNS lookups). If we find a business domain, we enrich it with more information via our Fetch API (industry, location, number of employees). We use this information to adapt/tweak the website and add/remove value props according to the characteristics of the business browsing amplemarket.com.

2) Leverage lost traffic

There are two possible outcomes, either the information on the website is compelling enough for the person to sign up (~6.4% of the traffic) or they end up bouncing (~93.6% of the traffic). For people that bounce, we set up retargeting with Adroll. On top of retargeting we use the business domains, to find decision makers at that company and send them email cadences saying that someone from their company was browsing our website and see if they want to talk. This might seem like a shot in the dark, since the likelihood that we contact the exact same person that was looking at the website is very small, but we actually get a really good reply rate to these email cadences. Our assumption is that a lot of teams discuss new software internally before starting their search so every member has some context about what others might be researching. We know the decision makers for Amplemarket so it’s a matter of contacting the right team/department and even if they are not the decision maker they are still very likely to point us to the right person. We automate these email cadences (thanks to Amplemarket :) and some of them will result in calls scheduled with our Account Executives. Note that since there’s an enormous percentage of traffic that leaves without converting these email cadences are a crucial way to leverage all the lost traffic and turn it into new customers.

3) Prioritize valuable prospects

For every new signup, the email is immediately enriched to get more information about that person and more importantly about the company the person works for. We then feed that information into a lead scoring function and rank the lead. If the lead scores above a certain threshold the signup form adapts to ask for a phone number which will be sent via email and Slack to an Account Executive who will call that customer as soon as possible.

4) Learn from your customer base

Every time we get a new paying customer the information is fed into a function that is always trying to find lookalike customers based on our existing customer base. When a new potential customer is found we automatically try to find the email addresses of the decision makers and set them in email cadences in order to get a meeting with them.

5) A "No" doesn't last forever

If a prospect seems like a good fit but doesn’t turn into a customer we save their information along with the company’s information in a “Save for Later” folder in our internal CRM. We wait 8 months until we recontact these prospects. In the meantime, we track their LinkedIn profiles, and if one of these gatekeepers leaves the company we will try to reconnect with the new decision maker (e.g. we tried to sell to a VP of Sales who left the company, then in that case we reach out to the new one).  

Ultimately this system only works if we get people going to our website, but at the same time it gives us confidence that all the efforts to get traffic (marketing, SEO, PR) have a maximum utility.

 Amplemarket is your AI-powered sales assistant. Amplemarket takes care of everything from prospecting to outreach, follow-ups, and scheduling of meetings. You tell us who you want to reach out to and wait for meetings to magically appear in your calendar.