9 Tools for Lead Discovery You Probably Haven’t Thought About
This is a guest post by Shannon Byrne, Content & PR Manager for Mention where she crafts words, creates strategies, and recruits loyal brand advocates. She also really likes live music, craft beer, and laughing at her own jokes. She's based in New York.
Finding new leads is time consuming, and can even be daunting at times, but it’s the lifeblood of most sales people.
What if you could simplify and streamline the lead discovery process while generating inbound leads? Sounds like a dream, huh? Fortunately, there are many tools and tactics available to help you do just that, some of which have managed to fly under the mainstream’s radar.
Here are the Mention team’s eight favorite lead discovery tools that you may have not known about, or perhaps never thought about using for sales.
1 - ReachHub
ReachHub is a new tool that allows salespeople and recruiters to source new leads directly from Linkedin. Using ReachHub's Chrome extension on Linkedin, just search for the people you'd like to reach, add them to an email campaign, and ReachHub will do the rest.
In just 1-click → ReachHub will look at the profile, find their personal and/work email from their database, and automatically enroll them in the drip email campaign of your choice.
ReachHub offers a 14-day free trial.
2- Quora
Yes, the Q&A forum. Quora is the perfect place to discover people looking for a solution to a specific problem.
Do a search on a topic relevant to the problem your product or service solves and join the conversation! Don’t blatantly try to sell yourself. Rather, provide value to these conversations. The relationships, and consequential sales will naturally follow.
As a bonus, you’ll quickly gain a better understanding of your competitor landscape and what solutions your potential customers are currently using by reading previous comments.
3 - ProductHunt
Whether or not your product has been hunted on Product Hunt, it can be a valuable lead generation tool. Of course, these two strategies look very different.
If you plan to hunt your own product, or have someone else hunt it, try to be as strategic as possible about it. The same goes for creating or being included in a collection or special offer promoted by PH.
Pro tip: If you’re hunted before planned, just ride the crazy wave that is Product Hunt success.
When planning your Product Hunt strategy, consider the following tactics:
Have a dedicated landing page with a special offer for Hunters.
Ask friends and colleagues to help promote your placement. The goal is to be in the top five hunts of the day so that you make the daily digest email.
Follow up a couple days after Hunters sign up; consider sending a brief survey asking what attracted them.
Follow up and ask about Hunters’ experience after their trial period is up, if you offered one.
Product Hunters are early adopters, trendsetters, and thought leaders. Reach out and build these relationships. If they’re satisfied, they may be potential future brand ambassadors.
Even if you don’t reach Product Hunt fame, it’s a valuable resource for leads. Keep an eye on the daily emails to see what’s hot and trending.
Do a search based on your product offering to see what people are saying about new competitors. Join in the conversation and connect with anyone actively looking to solve the problem you can help with.
4 - Mention
Mention, or your media monitoring tool of choice will help you with lead gen in two ways:
Identify the people talking about your brand, whether or not they’re talking to you. Our data has shown that this (brand mentions without the Twitter handle) actually represents 31% of brand mentions on Twitter.
These are people looking for insights and reviews on your brand, who have an issue with it, or who are singing your praises. In any of these events, you should be present and a part of the conversation. Media monitoring tools allow you to discover and jump in these discussions.
Identify people talking about the pain points your brand solves. Much like the first way, a media tool allows you to track terms that represent the problem your product solves. You can then identify the people who are using these terms, where, and in what context. This provides you with your first touchpoint for building a relationship and qualifying a lead.
Check out how Close used social listening via Mention to close $585 in monthly recurring revenue!
5 - Meetup.com
In addition to finding networking events where you may meet potential leads, you can also use Meetup.com to identify people who will be inetrested in connecting online.
Check out relevant meetups and see who’s attending. Attendees are listed on the side of each event page with a brief bio, and are flagged if they’re a friend of a friend, so you know if you have a common connection. You can simply hover over each attendee or member for a quick snapshot of who they are and what their other interests are.
6 - OAuth
GrowthHackers.com uses Auth to make the signup process super easy by auto completing users’ first and last names for them.
More importantly, OAuth allows them to collect important data on their users, including company, title, industry, social media accounts, LinkedIn connections, and more, without having to lift a thumb. Learn more on how GrowthHackers uses oAuth here (slide 29).
7 - PadiAct or SumoMe
True confession: We haven’t actually used PadiAct, but it sounds great!PadiAct allows you to add an email signup to your website based on a behavioral targeting engine.
You can target people who are new users, have visited at least three pages on your website, have spent more than 30 seconds on your website, and many other scenarios. Test which pop-ups increase your email subscribers and scrap the ones that don’t.
We’re focused on collecting emails to share our content, which then acts as a lead generator by providing added value through education. We use SumoMe’s List Builder to build our email lists and love it. The tool is simple to use, let’s you choose length of visit before popup, desktop and/or mobile options, and which pages the pop-up appears on.
Each time we make a change to our strategy, we see a significant increase in signups, which is also pretty cool.
8 - Twitter Cards
The more social savvy of readers have probably already experimented with Twitter cards. For those unfamiliar, they are the images that accompany a tweet, like this one in Buffer’s update:
Use these cards to create a call to action driving some sort of sign up, whether it’s directly to sign up for your service or to receive your content, such as a newsletter, ebook, academy, class, etc.
The beauty of Twitter cards are that they are very quick and easy to setup, and emails are collected and downloaded from your Twitter account. Go to Twitter Ads → Creatives → Cards → Create Lead Gen Card and follow instructions.
From there, you can create your first tweet promoting your card. We suggest pinning it to the top of your profile for maximum visibility. And of course, if you really want an extra boost, promote said tweet to a relevant, targeted audience based on interests, demographics, or community.
If you want to learn more about what you can do with Twitter Cards, Buffer has a really great guide.
9 - Turnstile
If you’re implementing video marketing, you should give Wistia’s Turnstile a try. Turnstile makes it easy to add calls to action and collect emails at the beginning, middle, or end of your videos. Calls to action might be to sign up for your product, unlock additional content, or even just watch more videos. The tool also integrates with several email marketing platforms including HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, and more.
Conclusion
We at Mention are obviously big fans of tools to help make our lives easier and our workflows more efficient. However, at the end of the day, sales and business development is really about people and personal relationships. Don’t forget that all of these tools are intended to aide you in building a rapport and getting to know your prospects better.
Do you have any quirky lead generation tools that haven’t reached mainstream yet to add?
About the Author
Shannon Byrne is the Content & PR Manager for Mention where she crafts words, creates strategies, and recruits loyal brand advocates. She also really likes live music, craft beer, and laughing at her own jokes. She's based in New York. Say hi @ShannnonB.
