The Sales Influencer Series Presents: Scott Britton

Welcome to Episode 15 of the Sales Influencer Series, where we interview leaders on the cutting edge of sales and marketing. In today's episode, Ambition Director of Marketing Jeremy Boudinet interviews Troops Co-Founder Scott Britton.

Scott joins us today to discuss his process for developing a lead generation machine. Listen to his full interview below.

Ep 15: Building a Lead Generation Machine

Interview Topics

1. Introduction and Background. 0:00 - 2:25.

Synopsis: Scott Britton has an impressive background in sales and lead generation. He helped scale SinglePlatform into one of the largest SaaS companies in the world, before leaving to start LifeLongLearner.

Scott just launched Troops, enterprise software that automatically reads and writes information from your CRM to Slack.

2. Pre-Selling and Product-Market Fit. 2:25 - 9:26.

Synopsis: When building a scalable lead generation machine, it's important for companies to start by getting in the weeds, getting to know their buyer personas intimiately and fully understanding who to reach out to, how to speak to them and what their best pitch is.

In developing their initial lead generation, a lot of companies focus on automating outreach, spraying and praying, developing SEO and so forth.

That's a mistake. They need to begin by understanding their customers, their product-market fit and their best success stories comprehensively.

3. Use Cases vs Features. 9:26 - 12:24.

Synopsis: Focus less on features and more on use cases. Get product in hands of customers. Then set up a follow-up call where you find out how the customer is using the product.

With Troops, Scott has found customers using the platform to quickly search and query who was calling them in Salesforce. Scott never would have realized that because his own use of the platform has been different.

Scott has also found people searching prospects by address, which again, is not a use case Scott would have anticipated.

4. Account-Based Sales. 12:24 - 14:46.

Synopsis: First, you have to make sure your product makes sense for Account-Based Sales. You start by looking at LTV (Lifetime value of a customer).

With Troops, there's a lot of value in trying to land and expand. You have to look at your unique business model and see what works for you.

5. Scott's New Outbound Hack. 14:46 - 23:00.

Synopsis: Scott has found a new way to scrape data from LinkedIn and get it directly into Salesforce.

The tool is called Profile Hopper. You can do any type of search query and get a really specific search of profiles that meet your buyer persona.

You can then export the list of all the profiles you visited and get every piece of metadata, even those that aren't on the page. Including type of connection, where they went to college and so forth.

And this is the only tool that lets you do that. There's nothing else like it on the market today. From there, you can put in a formula within Google Sheets that cleans up the prospect data.

Then, Scott uses Blockspring to plug Email Hunter and ClearBit into the spreadsheet and automatically generate a strong guess at all of the prospect email addresses.

All of a sudden, Scott has thousands of targeted leads with email addresses. And now that he's been on the phone with thousands of clients and fully understands the product value and uses cases, he's able to automatically do high-scale, targeted outreach very quickly and cheaply.

6. Client Success to Drive Lead Gen. 23:00 - 26:24.

Synopsis: Ambition's lead generation machine relies a lot on customer validation. We've spent years working with customers to find out strong use cases, get awesome reviews and receive third-party validation from the Harvard Business Review and the AA-ISP.

Lincoln Murphy suggests the model: Use client success as the foundation of marketing, lead generation and sales.

The ultimate client success is now having a great product. It's not a million-dollar sales guy flying across country for a golf outing.

7. Creative Outbound Tactics. 26:24 - 34:55.

Synopsis: Scott advocates using a GIF of his product in action in his email cadences. It's never been easier to show someone in 3 seconds exactly what you do.

Scott also uses funny GIFs. When someone's not responding to him, he'll just send a GIF of a tumbleweed to someone who's not responding to him.

Those are quick-hit wins Scott and Jeremy highly recommend.

Scott also recommends having the CEO do follow-up outreach via LinkedIn to communicate that internal stakeholders are putting pressure on the sales rep. Scott sees that as a good way to develop empathy.

At Ambition, we advocate going very high in our outreach, since influence flows downward. All communication should be about value, empathy and personality.

Aim to surprise and delight.

8. Signing Off. 34:55 - 35:58.

Synopsis: If you have an outbound sales team that uses both Slack and a CRM, check out Troops. They have a free plug-in to Slack that will make your sales team's life a lot easier.

Everyone wants to streamline prospect communication and data - Troops helps you by pushing that data from your CRM directly into Slack, where it becomes much more visible to your reps.

The Sales Influencer Series Library

To check out further episodes and see why CloserIQ has ranked the Sales Influencer Series as one of the very best sales podcasts of 2016, just click on the links below.

Episode 1. John Barrows

Episode 2. Lori Richardson

Episode 3. Max Altschuler

Episode 4. Matt Heinz

Episode 5. Mark Leslie

Episode 6. Kyle Porter

Episode 7. Jon Bradford

Episode 8. Eks Anderson

Episode 9. Matt Hottle

Episode 10. Heather Morgan

Episode 11. Ilan Ferdman

Episode 12. Ryan Jenkins