Growth Hacking for Salespeople
Growth hacking – what the heck is that? It sort of sounds like something Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies might use to grow his business.
Actually, according to Wikipedia, it’s a “marketing technique developed by technology startups which uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to sell products and gain exposure.”
Basically that translates to meaning “using free or cheap stuff on the web to get more customers”.
Sounds pretty good, right?
3 Growth Hacking Tactics
Growth hacking is being used by marketing departments to generate more leads. Why let them work smarter, while you work harder? You can use the same tactics in your prospecting and client development to achieve better results.
Here are a few examples how:
LinkedIn Ads for Salespeople
Juliana Crispo, Director of Enterprise Sales at Ghostery, shared a great lead generating technique she had success with at her company. To sum it up, she created ads on LinkedIn which targeted specific companies and called them to click through to a landing page. When leads arrived at the landing page, they were offered a free service in exchange for their email. Once the email was sent, she would quickly follow up with them and attempt to close the deal.
This was a great breakthrough for her company, who was running into dead ends trying to reach key contacts at Fortune 500 companies through cold calls, emails, tweets and inMails. LinkedIn ads allows you to target an ad by company, job title, keyword, industry or LinkedIn groups. She found the most success when targeting companies directly and addressing them by name in the ad creative.
Learn more by reading the details in her blog post, and keep in mind that the same tactic can be used on other platforms such as Facebook.
Monkeying Around With MailChimp
Next up is the gem MailChimp. Odds are that you’ve met hundreds of people over the past few years, but only a small fraction of them are qualified prospects, right? The only reason this is the case, is due to those little limitations known as time and space. But, what if you could surpass those with a growth hacking tool?
MailChimp is one such tool that comes in handy because it automates the process of staying in touch, without losing that personal feel. Even better, it’s free to use for up to 2,000 contacts!
Here’s two ideas of how to use MailChimp:
Share your company’s blog with your CRM system contacts via email by downloading the list into Mail Chimp and setting up a RSS-Driven Campaign. Learn how to do this here. Reach a wide audience and gain exposure with minimal effort or cost. Winning!
Another awesome sales hacking idea involves using drip campaigns to help qualify cold prospects. Through 3-5 email sequences, cold leads can be warmed up and converted into customers 50% of the time. That is worth giving it a shot I’d say.
Use IFTTT to help with LinkedIn
Last, let’s assume you are already on LinkedIn and have a network of contacts, if not you have far worse problems than what we are helping with here (no offense, but seriously!). IFTTT is a service that can enhance the connections you already have. It uses conditional statements which are triggered when changes happen on web services including Craigslist, Facebook and Gmail. When that occurs, you will get emailed. Say for example a contact on LinkedIn changes jobs or gets a new position, you will be notified. This will give you the up-to-date information that can help you contact the right person and improve your odds.
Growth hacking is one of the many benefits tech has brought to us sales guys, and the best part is, you don’t need to be a programmer to take advantage of all this stuff. These tools are made with easy user interfaces, which allow for setting up campaigns in no time.
As Austin Powers would say, your increase in leads and sales will be “totally groovy baby!”
