#8-references
Thread
Hi everyone, hope you had a nice weekend 😊 Wanted to share a recruitment win: my goal in Q1 was to build a strong pool of customer references for our new tool, so that when we launch in Q2, the sales reps actually have a number of advocates to partner with on reference calls
I've run two experimental outreach campaigns over the last week, and essentially doubled the number of references we have in our database. This was a slightly manual lift, but resulted in highly curated, small lists — resulting in >30% conversion rates to what I would deem pretty cold (but high propensity) leads
YAY! That's an amazing win! Congrats!!!!
Thank you! The experiment itself is nothing crazy, but I don't have a ton of confidence in our data (🫣), so it was nice to be proven wrong for once by finding that the contact list actually had responsive and engaged customers!
What did you do?
I'll preface this by saying that our internal systems are very patchy in terms of data integrity, so while what I did is not particularly revolutionary, it did yield highly positive results for us within our target personas — which is a win
Context: Our Q1 goal was to build a large pool (~100+) references of happy customers, ideally within our target personas
Challenge: Our target persona is a very small subset of our overall customer base (consider them a "purple squirrel" — very rare 😉 ). Like many sales teams, our is spread thin and we find engaging them for advocate recommendations to be an ongoing, uphill battle
Experiment: I built a Salesforce contact report of recent c/w opps with a boatload of filters (high account health, role titles only containing certain words, specific sectors/industries, have opted into marketing comms, etc.) and vetted it with the Sales Ops team for overall data cleanliness (knowing full well that our systems are, like, 85% accurate most of the time)
Creating this report would be considered going a bit rogue by our organization's standards, which tends to lean towards "more cooks in the approval kitchen" than previous gigs — lots of red tape. However, we have also been told that we need to test things and iterate, and if we get a wrist slap later, that's OK (i.e. fail fast/learn quickly)
I am almost positive if I had spot-checked all of these accounts/contacts with the sales team, they would have told me to not invite any of them. Instead, I whittled down the list to two very small subsets (the first campaign was 79 people, the second was 144) that I had an educated guess would be highly engaged/responsive
Execution: We are using Deeto, so I set up a recruitment campaign in Deeto to invite folks to join the reference program, which launched today. I sent a "head's up" email to the list the Friday before, letting them know they'll be getting an email from me the following week, and there's no pressure to join (but if they're interested, we'd love to have them)
For each of those recruitment campaigns we've seen a 33% and 32% response rate, respectively with the vast majority being in our target personas/role types/industries
My goal was to have ~100 references in our tool by EOQ1, and we are just about on target simply from these two recruitment campaigns
this is great, thank you!
You're welcome! If you'd like the specifics on what filters I applied in SFDC, I'm happy to share, just send me a DM 🙂
This is nice, thank you for sharing this Emily!