I have deep expertise in enabling B2B sales, marketing & recruiting professionals reach ideal prospects. I love helping them be leaders in their company and their industry. Sold to 100,000+ companies!
eGrabber, the company I founded 15+ years ago, makes Targeted Prospect List-Building Tools for use by Sales & Recruiting professionals.
Spam2Gold – Easy Way for Salespeople to Trade & Book SMB CEO Appointments
Spam2Gold – Easy way for salespeople to trade & book SMB CEO appointments.
This tip will have their employee work as your partner, pitching your service to their CEO.
Always a Win-Win Situation
It works if you sell a product your service providers can use and your CEO gives you a calendar time slot.
The chances are high that your company was bombarded by 100+ vendors pitching services and products last week.
A salesperson can reach all 100+ vendors who pitched, and you can offer a trade.
Your CEO will listen to their pitch if their CEO is willing to listen to your pitch.
I have seen this done right, and it works. Always a win-win for whoever sells or buys.
Leverage your Cold Email & Cold Calling Skills to a Different Level
This leverages your cold email and cold-calling skills at a different level. It gets you to evolve cold calling and create new templates you can use anywhere.
Once this works, you will look forward daily to people pitching their services (spam) to your company. We call this Spam2Gold conversion.
Go to Yellow Pages and start looking to change one of your services. You will get lots of leads.
Work closely with your buyers and purchasing department. You might as well use your company’s leverage to grow sales.
Tool to Find Local Service Providers
ListGrabber is a powerful tool that can help sales people to trade and book SMB CEO appointments in no time.
The tool helps you to instantly get the name, email, phone, address, FAX, and other contact information of SMB contacts from Yellow Pages Directories, Google Maps or any other website.
Sales people can build SMB contact lists 20x faster and book SMB CEO appointments.
Try this Unique redirect, gets 25% more responses from non responders.
Works great for <500 EMP target where people mix with everyone.
Non-Responsive Prospects
CXO-VPs, or popular prospects, are 10 times more careful when devoting time to opening emails from strangers. However, they are less guarded when opening emails sent internally by coworkers.
Find Coworkers of your Prospects
What we do is find coworkers (for Free) in the company whose emails my prospect is likely to open and have them forward the email to your prospects. Usually, my prospect opens emails coming from their sales staff and internal support, sales, and PR departments.
Now, you need to learn a slightly different cold email language where you can get the prospect’s coworkers and these external departments to forward your email to your prospect. With this technique, at least 20% of your non-responsive prospects will get back to you and thank you for being uniquely persistent.
Learn Persuasive Writing
This will require you to find coworkers and two generic departments like sales@, info@, etc., and request them to re-forward with a note. Now, you have to learn the art of writing an email to convince someone to re-forward. Many of your non-responsive work emails that your prospect never saw will now become actionable.
If you become an expert at this, your sales and your department sales will go up dramatically. Imagine your non-responsive prospect getting an internal email internally:
Steve, this email from Chandra to you can increase our lead gen sales by 24% without increasing staff size. Can you have a quick look at this email #experience & comment?
Advocated by Influencers
Even prominent influencers like Jim Stroud are advocating for this innovative technique, which is a testament to its potential and makes it well worth exploring.
Try this Unique Cold Email Technique & Increase Response Rates
Can your sales and marketing people try to get this magic done?
What have you got to lose?
You can ask us for help if needed. It’s a good way to get more bag for your prospect research.
Please share this cold email technique with your team.
It’s been helping us for ages.
4 Reasons LinkedIn Groups have High Conversion Prospects
If you’re in sales, you likely know the importance of finding qualified leads and converting them into customers.
One great source to find high-conversion prospects is LinkedIn Groups.
With over one million groups available to join for free, LinkedIn Groups can be a valuable resource for salespeople looking to connect with qualified prospects in their industry.
Members of these groups are often looking to solve problems that align with the solutions you offer, making it a prime opportunity to position yourself as an expert in your field.
In this blog post, we’ll explore 4 reasons why LinkedIn Groups have high conversion prospects and how you can leverage them effectively to drive sales.
Why LinkedIn Groups have High Conversion Prospects
Members want to Solve Problem you Sell – Li Groups have similar minded people that discuss how to solve problems in their industry, problems you already solve. There are 1 M+ groups you can search for problems you solve and join them for free.
Decision Makers ask Juniors to get Insights on Specific Problems/Topics – Li Groups are where decision makers send juniors to find if problems they plan to solve are being discussed. Do research and write around problems you solve.
Domain Experts Hang Out on Li Groups – Li Groups are where experts in a domain hang out to answer questions on how to solve a problem hoping to get a consulting contract. Find where experts are hanging out.
Li Groups are where Savvy Sales People Hang Out – Sales people use Li Groups to find companies that are tackling problems they solve and approach them via email. You can do the same.
How to Leverage LinkedIn Groups
Connect with the CXO-VP levels on LinkedIn and nurture via email. Think of people belonging to a Li Group as those representing your prospect companies and connect with them.
Look at experts in your industry and join groups they belong to. You will get closer to more prospects.
Find competitors and join groups their sales people belong to. They might have found the right groups where your ready-made prospects are.
Join appropriate LinkedIn Groups in your solution domain. You can get a constant channel of prospects for free. You can’t get these leads on ZoomInfo or any other database.
If you are in sales, why would you not belong to a LinkedIn Group where your prospects are?
It’s free to join!
If you need help finding a LinkedIn group that is appropriate for what you sell, contact [email protected]. He can get you an expert on LinkedIn Groups.
LinkedIn Prospecting Tool to Find High-Conversion Prospects
Prospecting on LinkedIn can take a lot of your time and effort. This is where LeadGrabber Pro comes in handy.
LeadGrabber Pro is a LinkedIn prospecting tool that helps sales people to make the most of LinkedIn Groups. The software helps you to quickly build CXO lists along with their verified business email address and phone.
Sales people can reach decision makers in no time, improve sales conversion rates and increase revenue.
Fill in the form below to download LeadGrabber Pro
COVID Layoffs are obsoleting existing B2B lists & draining sales energy
By Chandra Bodapati, CEO, eGrabber Inc., May 2020.
Why DiscoverOrg lists are losing value – and what you could do about it
Did you know with COVID layoffs, pre-built lists from DiscoverOrg and others are losing value?
35 Million jobs in America have been wiped off as of May. Massive COVID related management layoffs have left pre-built lists from DiscoverORG and others being vastly outdated week after week.
For companies who are currently driving their sales and marketing thru COVID, prospecting to outdated lists drains morale like nothing else. Marketing to lists & people who don’t exist, getting email bounces and dropped phone calls drain the precious energy which sales and marketing teams badly need at this point in time.
5 Things you can do Now to accelerate sales success during this Pandemic
1. Scrub your existing email list for deliverability – Protects from being labelled as Spammer
2. Get LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Best ROI for B2B prospecting
3. Find & flag those who changed jobs in your existing lists – they might be customers you have being counting on!
5. Build targeted lists in-house from LinkedIn – Use tools to expedite (eGrabber has several)
1. Scrub your existing email list for deliverability
If you already have a huge eMail list, but not sure if those emails are deliverable, we recommend you use an email verification service to clean up your list. You are better off cleaning your lists every month during COVID, so your lists are current and you maintain good ISP deliverability rating.
eGrabber Tip! You can use email verifying option in eGrabber’s LeadGrabber Pro to scrub your lists for deliverability
2. Get LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Best ROI for B2B prospecting
With LinkedIn, you will find more people tell the truth about their current employment status – mostly because of peer/family visibility.
So when you shortlist prospects this week on LinkedIn, who are likely to be working there – your lists are current
With LinkedIn, you can shortlist people not only based on title/company, but also with ideal keywords & interests your past customers had – leading to lists with higher close rate
eGrabber provides a Just-In-Time List Building Automation Tool. You build your list around the same time you will be prospecting. This will get you the most accurate possible list
eGrabber Tip! LinkedIn doesn’t give you the contact information of the prospect. This is where eGrabber can help. eGrabber’s LeadGrabber Pro will help you build targeted lists with LinkedIn. eGrabber will find the prospect’s direct work email & company phone. You will end up with the most accurate list of ideal prospects, better than you can get from any list vendor
3. Find & flag those who changed jobs in your existing lists
If you already have a highly targeted list of prospects that you purchased or built from trade shows, we recommend you update them. Hire Interns to go through each of these prospects and update their existing employment status.
Your interns can leverage LinkedIn to find each prospect’s current employment status and update your lists. This will help your sales & marketing people to sell more efficiently.
eGrabber Tip! eGrabber has a Job-Change Finder tool. It can help the process of updating employment status of all your existing prospects, users and customers. Job-Change Finder will flag people who quit & update the list with the person’s new title and company. Job-Change Finder can help your sales people target past users who moved to new companies. They can be great referral prospects!
4. Target companies hiring & expanding in Pandemic
If you target companies that are expanding, get eGrabber’s list of 100K+ Companies that are Hiring and Expanding during COVID. There are Millions of US companies, but many have frozen their spending budgets. With outside databases, your sales people will only get frustrated, for they might be either trying to contact those who are no longer working there or reaching companies, only to find that they don’t have budgets to buy now because of COVID.
eGrabber has built a list of 100,000+ US Companies that are hiring and growing now. They are companies that have the money to hire people and have budgets to buy services, infrastructure & training. . You can have these companies filtered by demographics as well. You can then find the C-Level/VP-Level prospects for these compnaies using eGrabber’s Management- Finder
5. Build targeted lists in-house from LinkedIn
If you are considering building lists in-house, we recommend that your team use LeadGrabber. Your team can build custom lists from LinkedIn and any other web source, 20x faster than they can manually, and with incredible high email/phone finding accuracy.
Takes care of COVID Layoffs – LeadGrabber double-verifies emails for deliverability, even after a person’s email ID has been found on the web. This is one extra way by which we are protecting our users from avoidable email bounces.
Handles newly hired decision makers – The toughest email ID to find is of a decision maker who joined a company recently and has no web or blog footprint. We have good news. For such decision makers, eGrabber just deployed new advanced research algorithms that result in our product giving you more higher-deliverable emails than ever.
Contact eGrabber for free consulting on lead generation & sales list building
Our team of experts can understand your current prospecting & list building strategy and make move-forward recommendations.
We strongly believe that customers should have multiple sources of leads. So we always recommend a combination of what you already have and tools that can maximize your existing structures and investments.
eGrabber has been in the B2B List building tools business since 1996. We developed a list-research automation-tools strategy even before Internet Explorer and Outlook Email were introduced. Our products are developed by the most experienced researchers in the B2B business. That is the reason we have 4 US patents on lead researching.
With the eGrabber on your side, you will find your sales growing faster, regardless of the pandemic or not! Contact [email protected] or 1-866-299-7314
Get 5x More LinkedIn Sales Meetings With These Tips (experts use)!
In this article, I share secrets (experts use) to get high engagement rates with LinkedIn prospects! Just by following this, you will be among the top 10% sales performers in your industry.
LinkedIn has the world’s best source of B2B prospects, & it is organized in powerful ways to enable quick identification of highly qualified prospect.
If you are like most B2B sales people, you start with a nice LinkedIn Profile and perhaps have a premium account. You short list ideal prospects and send connect requests and even pay for InMails.
Now here is the problem. You notice that only a very small percentage of prospects connect, and thereafter hardly anyone seems to reply to follow-on messages. You start thinking – Is the sales potential of LinkedIn an illusion?
You notice very few prospects on LinkedIn engaging, and you wonder “Is the sales potential of LinkedIn an illusion?”
No,! LinkedIn remains the world’s best source of B2B prospects. Sales people on LinkedIn fail because they operate as though the best place to do business with a prospect is where they found them (on LinkedIn).
Now for the good news.
Both increasing the rate of connections and rate of replies from prospects can be fixed – if you understand the way your prospect works. By making small changes, sales people can see engagement rates double, triple or even go up ten-fold! They will see an acceleration in the pipeline.
By making small changes, sales people can see engagement rates double, triple or even go up ten-fold. They will see an acceleration in the pipeline.
Tip#1 – Improve Headline
(This tip will get you 5x more prospects connecting!)
C-Level executives get dozens of requests every week. LinkedIn has made it very easy for users to accept a connection. (They can accept 15 people a minute!) LinkedIn compiles a list of people wanting to connect with photo/name/headline & an Accept & Ignore button.
Most executives who are looking to grow their network, review just the name & headline and decide within 1-5 seconds to Accept or Ignore.
Executives decide in less than 5 Seconds to ACCEPT or Ignore a connect request!
Executives just don’t have the time to open & read each profile. (I know this because more than 75% of executives who accept my connection never appear in my who viewed your profile list.)
The easiest way to increase the possibility of accepting your connection request is to change your headline. By default LinkedIn constructs the headline as “title at company-name”.
LinkedIn allows you to edit the default headline. You can click on Edit icon, next to the picture on your profile, and replace the headline with any 120 character message. Just by including in the headline the problem your company solves, appropriate prospects will accept. Because executive level prospects want to be connected with people who they feel are solving problems they currently face & addressing. By just changing your headline to something appropriate you will find your connect rates dramatically improve.
Tip#2 – Reach when they are thinking business
(This tip will get you 10x more prospects to read your email)
Messages don’t reach them when you click send on LinkedIn. There are huge LinkedIn delays.
Most users hardly ever check messages on their LinkedIn. They direct their LinkedIn messages to their Gmail or Hotmail that they read during non-business hours
Users opt to get their messages in batch digested mode – either once a day or week. They may get to it once a month.
Even when users get around to reading email, they transfer messages that look like a sales pitch into a special folder called LinkedIn junk; and they rarely ever get to it. (Sometimes Gmail & Hotmail helps them by automatically moving all LinkedIn messages to junk, which the users never see).
Your prospects are likely getting your LinkedIn message via Gmail on a Weekend, One-week after you sent it
Since most users process their LinkedIn mail during non-office hours … what is the chance your high-value business ROI message is going to ring a bell when they are reading? Do you expect a business executive to be seriously processing your business email at midnight or weekends when they are catching up with friends & getting some personal time?
Your LinkedIn mailbox is a great place to share best practices, ask questions, get mentored and get jobs – but not for trying to get people for a demo or think of serious business.
For all the above reasons, LinkedIn will never be a great place to send B2B sales messages to your prospects!
If you want to optimize your chance of engaging B2B executives, you need to reach them when they are in a business mood. That would typically be during some core hours of a business day, depending on your industry.
The best way to reach a person during a particular business hour is by calling them directly at work or sending them email to their corporate business email address. Most people these days don’t answer phones but are wired to email constantly. So when you send email directly to their work address, they are likely to see the message within a few seconds – and if it is compelling for them at the moment, you might get a positive reply within a couple of minutes. (Our team gets positive responses few times every day, within a couple of minutes of us clicking Send. You can too!).
We routinely get B2B cold-email responses within 2 minutes of clicking send – when we send to prospect’s work address
To summarize, this is how you maximize your chance of prospect engagement:
Leverage LinkedIn to shortlist prospects you want to target,
Change headline & Send connect requests as appropriate
Copy-paste the name-title-company of short listed prospects into Excel. Also, import all your LinkedIn connections into Excel
Find direct work email & phone by researching google and company websites
Send direct email to prospects work email address, referencing you noticed them on LinkedIn and add something about their background.
With practice, you will get better at crafting emails and getting better response rates. As you become an expert, your targeting will get better, and you could get yourself to be engaging with 1 in 10 prospects!
Above changes worked for me and at least 100+ people that I know. I am sure it will work for you too.
Can you share what’s working for you? We all want to hear what prospect engagement strategies are working for you. If any of the above strategies are working, please feel free to share that too.
Here is an easy way to jump start
eGrabber has a tool that will find & append direct work email & phone of your prospect list. eGrabber adds work email & phone that is not found anywhere on the LinkedIn profile. It does not rely on LinkedIn to get any contact information. It gets it through our patented algorithms from the deep web
eGrabber tools are standalone application, not browser plugins. We have been in the B2B Prospecting business for 20+ years (long before LinkedIn was born). Our tools can work with any website or spreadsheet.
Tool Demo – Click Here – To view 1-Minute demo of eGrabber tool finding work email & phone
In this article, I provide step by step instructions to grow your LinkedIn 3rd degree connections to 2+ Million within two weeks. This is especially useful if you are generating leads from LinkedIn. (SDR, Sales, Marketing, Recruiting, coaching…)
Why is growing your 3rd degree LinkedIn network important?
Even though LinkedIn has 400M+ people, you only get access to people that you are connected to by at least 3rd degree. For every person you connect with, LinkedIn will provide you access to that person’s network (2nd degree), as well that person’s connection’s network. (3rd degree). So for every person you connect with, your network can grow by 1K to 100K people depending on how connected that person is. So it is important you develop a strategy to ensure all your prospects are somehow connected to you within 3rd degree – else, they won’t be visible to you. (its relatively easy to get Millions, once you know how – I will show you how later in this article)
For a LinkedIn search of prospects, it is quite possible you get to see less than 100 people, while your competitor gets to see 10,000+ . That’s because your competitor is connected to more relevant people via their 3rd degree network than you. This puts you & your company at a huge disadvantage in generating appointments
Even if you have a premium or Sales Navigator account, you won’t see more names than those in your 3rd degree & Groups. The advantage of those paid accounts are – you get to shortlist the results with more filters. So even with these paid accounts, to see more people, you must increase the size of your 3rd degree network.
This article gives a way to find how big your visible network is in an industry or field. It also shows a quick way to connect with LIONS and other ways to increase your 3rd degree network rapidly. Using these techniques, you can increase your 3rd degree network by several million within 2 weeks.
As a rough rule, your 3rd degree network will grow by 1K — 10K+ for every well connected person you add as a 1st degree connection.
Find size of your 3rd degree network by clicking link below (This is your visible LinkedIn network)
As a first step, get base value of what your current 3rd degree size is by following steps below. Write the number. Check every few days to see how well your network is growing. (You can report the growth to your boss and get brownie points!)
Multiply results by 100, to get estimate of your 3rd degree network size
(Technical – I use the number 100, as an estimate of new people each person in your 2nd degree is connected to, that are new to the network).
As you grow your 1st degree, you will find the above number grow by 1K — 100K+ for every well connected person you connect with.
1 – Connect with LinkedIn LIONS in the Link below (what is a LinkedIn LION)
Click link below to find LIONs that you can connect with to expand your network rapidly. Click on Industry to connect with people in the industry you want to search for prospects or expand your network
As a general rule, people who write LION on their profile are willing to connect with any person that wants to connect with them. So don’t worry about getting rejected. At best they will ignore you
Please note, each LION or any person on LinkedIn is limited to 30,000 connections – so it is best to look for people who have far less than 30K contacts. They are more likely to connect to anyone than those with 25K+ contacts
2 – Connect with people that network with your prospects OR people that know your prospects
When you connect with a person, that person’s entire 1st & 2nd degree network will become your 2nd & 3rd degree contacts. Even though the person connecting with you may not reveal their contacts to you, LinkedIn knows who they are & they will show them in your search results 🙂
Here are types of people I recommend you connect with. As a general rule, you can expect a person with 500 contacts to add 100K+ people to your 3rd degree network! That is worth picking up a phone to call them or getting them a coffee.
Connect with all sales, marketing & executives in your company – this will immediately give you a multiplier effect of several million 3rd degree connections.
Connect with all prospects you get in touch with, regardless of their intent to buy now or never – the chances are, they are hanging around where your prospects are, and they will be visible via a LinkedIn search to you if you are connected.
Look at your customer’s profile, and join groups they have in common – this will get you in front of more people like them
CEO’s (Management) must have a list of internal executives & staff + groups, their new sales & marketing recruits should connect with as part of their on-boarding process. This will be a win-win for everyone in their company. The network of new employees also become part of the network of others in the company!
Joining a LinkedIn group, is just like visiting a industry trade show and getting a list of all attendees. It doesn’t cost anything to join. You can join up to 50 groups for free. There are 2M groups to search and pick from. why wouldn’t you join?
As far as LinkedIn is concerned, it assumes everyone in a group is part of your 3rd degree network (whether you are connected or not) and shows them as prospects in your search results. Join groups that are in the industry you want to target OR have the keywords or technologies your prospects are likely to associate with OR have the title at which you prospect. If you pick groups properly, you can easily add 1M+ people to your network within a week. Again, groups are free to join. You can join up to 50 of them.
Join groups your executives and management have joined – the chances are likely to be fishing in the ponds where the prospects are
Join groups your prospects have joined – chances are they are networking with people who are similar to them, and are your future customers (or customers of your competitors!)
Look at profiles of your competitor’s top sales & marketing pros to see what groups they joined – chances are, they know where your prospects hang out
This is just a starter way to grow your network. There are dozens of other great ways to grow your network – just google and get more ideas.
If you connect with me, your 3rd degree network will instantly grow my 1M+; Because my 2nd degree is 1M+
Was this article useful? can you like share please? That will encourage me to write more articles on B2B lead generation techniques … thanks
What’s the Best Header Image Size for LinkedIn Articles
Quick Summary – Best image size to upload for LinkedIn blog is 600 x 322 pixels (or 2x ). However, for best sharing experience, use only the center 560 x 282 pixel for image. That’s because LinkedIn randomly crops out 11 to 20 pixels on all sides, depending on device it is rendering on.
My frustration – Every time I uploaded an image for posting, I found issues with images being chopped, in what appeared to be random fashion. When I did get the image to look nicely in article such as this, the image seems to be randomly chopped when i view it in my profile or when it is shared in other people’s profile. Also the images appeared different on my iPhone 7 as opposed to my desktop. (see image below of different ways the same image appears on different LinkedIn screens).
I Googled and found a few blogs with Guidelines.. none of the advice seemed to work with the new LinkedIn layout. It looks like LinkedIn changed the way images are being posted & shared, when they changed all other User Interface elements in 2017.
I experimented – I experimented this weekend (Mar 2017) and found a working methodology. I am not a graphic artist, but a fairly methodical experimenter. My findings are for those that just want a quick & easy formula that works. I hope this article saves you time. (let me know if it does.. means you made my time worth more!)
Image size requirements are different for Articles, Posts, devices etc – I found there is a different optimal header image size for posting Articles such as these, and different requirement for doing direct posts. In this post I am addressing image size for LinkedIn blogs & articles, such as the one you see above this article.
Best dimension of image – best overall dimension for LinkedIn Article posting is 600 x 322 pixels or some multiples of it. (I found 2x larger at 1200 x 644 image is better if you are saving as JPG in paint). This ensures all the image is visible when people view this post. You can upload a larger image & use the image navigator to slide and see a section of the image. (Talking technical – on desktop, I found the Aspect ratio for posting is 1.86 )
LinkedIn chops Images when sharing – Just because the image looks great above, doesn’t mean it will look the same when LinkedIn shares on other peoples screens & devivces it…. it turns out, when LinkedIn share your post on your profile, activity log or devices such as iPhone; they display the image at different aspect ratio than it was created in. That is means, anyway you slice things you will end up losing original visual content. There is no way to get around cropping. (Talking technical – aspect ratio for desktop posting of the image seems to be 2.0,but the aspect ratio of the image displayed when creating content for the post is 1.86).
Tip – Add into image a 20 pixel white border – It is easy to ensure your images don’t get chopped, cropped or distorted when LinkedIn shares your post across different types of devices and views. Just Leave a 20 pixel white or border around the image. This ensures, no matter where your blog is marketed by LinkedIn, your post looks professional. (Talking technical – I noticed you only need to remove 11 pixel rows on top and bottom rows for desktop viewing – this gets the 600 x 322 image into 600 x 300; an aspect ration of 2.0 that seems to be what is shown on desktop post sharing.)
Quick step by step process for the graphically challenged
In Paint – create blank image of size 600 x 322
Open image you like to post in another paint window. Select & copy 600×322 size part of image you like
Paste the copied image into the first 600×322 pixel blank image window
Select image you just pasted, and resize to 93% using resize command. Center image & save it. The image is now optimal for posting on LinkedIn blog
If you are constructing image in paint and saving as JPG, start with image 2x larger (1200 x 644). You get a more crisp image on LinkedIn desktop.
If you have links & tips that can help a person adding image to their LinkedIn blog post – can you share in comments below please. I know what I shared is very basic info.
