How to follow up with event leads in minutes

Outreach and fullcontact partner to help you tackle your event leads more efficiently

Mark K:                   Lauren Wiper and I are here from Full Contact. I'm Mark Kosoglow I'm from Outreach. We decided we were going to put together a little joint webinar today. We got Dreamforce coming up and we want to talk about our problems. So what's up Lauren? How you doing?

Lauren W:             Hi. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we've got Dreamforce just around the corner now. It feels like it's definitely sneaking up on us. We're ready to solve your problems

Mark K:                   I don't know about you guys but when I'm talking to different people about Sales Force all I hear about is you get this avalanche of leads and it's insane how you have to process through all of these leads. You guys hearing the same sort of things since that's kind of your business?

Lauren W:             Yeah, we definitely hear it all the time. How do we process these leads? How do we know more about these people? How do we get them to interact with us?

Mark K:                   Yeah. Yeah. I don't know about you guys watching, but this is kind of what I found. Lauren and I were talking and we were kind of having the same headaches. Actually, their CEO at Full Contact was having the same headache too, which is you go to these events and you literally get this stack of business cards that's a mile high. I don't know about you guys but it's always been the case that a month later that same stack of business cards is still sitting on my desk and staring at me in the face, making me feel bad every day about all those dollars that are going down the drain. It's even worse because you know that stack was worth X dollars three weeks ago if I would have just gotten on it but now it's only worth X - 1000% dollars, which makes me even less motivated to go after it.

                                    I was going to an event in Chicago, AAISP, we got a stack of cards. I did a horrible job following up on them. I've had these different times in my life I just get pissed about stuff. So I said, "This stinks. Let me create something a little different." So I went out and one of our customers at Outreach is Full Contact. You guys do a great job using our app. I looked around and found that they have this app called Card Reader. I use Card Reader, Sales Force, and Outreach to put together a way for me to attend serious decisions in Nashville that completely changed how I did events.

                                    I got a stack of business cards each day. Literally on the spot I would just take a picture of them using the Card Reader app and it was like magic. The next thing you know I got this great set of leads and everything is followed up on exactly right, exactly how I want to. I was really excited about it. Talked to the guys at Full Contact, they liked it. So hey let's do a little webinar and talk about how that solution works and just kind of give a play by play.

                                    That's what we're going to do. Lauren, why don't I get started. I'll show the app a little bit. This is going to be a quick webinar guys, 15-20 minutes tops. Lauren's going to add in a few little stories. Did you want to tell them a little bit about your CEO? I think it's a relevant situation to how you guys came about creating the app.

Lauren W:             Well, way back when we were even smaller as a start up, our CEO was attending a lot of events. He was getting a lot of cards. A lot of those were really important to him, VC cards, cards of potential customers. He sold, himself, our first 20,000 dollars of revenue. He was really hustling back then. He realized he was getting all these cards but not following up with them well. He turned to our engineering team and said, "Hey, what can we do about this? How can we make this better? How can we make this faster?" He wasn't happy with any of the apps that he had tried that were already out there.

                                    We decided to build something in house. One of the differentiators there is all of the apps that were already out there were using computers to do the transcription, so using OCR. We chose to do a different route. We decided to use people to do the transcription.

                                    He had them build it and started using it himself just as an API. And then we said, "Hey, if we're having this issue there's probably a lot of people out there that are also having this issue." We decided to build it out as an actual app and build it into Sales Force because people use Sales Force and people want to have all of their leads in Sales Force. We built it into Sales Force. Outreach we've also built into Sales Force. We can kind of create a nice little string where Full Contact fits in and then it picks up for Outreach and you guys send out emails.

                                    It's an awesome string of really speed to touch. It makes that months that those business cards might sit on your desk turn into hours.

Mark K:                   Yeah, I know a big thing for me, because I looked at several solutions, was the fact that people were doing it. You have multiple people inputting the same cards. What you guys do ... Why don't you tell us what you do after that?

Lauren W:             Yeah. When we use human transcription, there's also obviously human error. To minimize that human error we actually send it out to multiple people. When the card gets sent to us, the photo of the card gets sent, and we actually give it to two people off the bat. They type it independently, what they see on the card, in the contact fields. We actually match it up and the places where there's the exact same information get pushed back out.

                                    Generally, the card average sees 4.3 people today. Checked this morning. So each of the cards is getting transcribed by around 4 people before sending out any information.

Mark K:                   I know for me guys, that if I'm going to give somebody access to my Sales Force instance, I'm going to make sure that that data is right. That's one reason that I chose Card Reader from Full Contact.

                                    I'm going to share my screen here real quick. Cool. You guys can see my phone, here's the different apps I use for sales stuff. This is Card Reader right here.

                                    The way Card Reader works is very simple. It works like all the other ones. The back end is what's different and the integration is what's different. I just hit the little camera. The camera pops up. I can actually choose a card that I already have taken a picture of. I just select that card. It makes it very simple to get that into their system so that I can get that card read. You can see last night I took pictures of Lauren's, John's, Sean's, and Travis' card.

                                    One thing that's really cool is I can take a picture directly with the card right in my hand and put it into Card Reader. Or I can actually just open up my camera and then use my camera roll to load the card in. Either way works just as well.

                                    Now the card is in Card Reader. If I open up that person, you can see all the data that was taken from that card. Company URL, Twitter, telephone, address. This is what is key is you can see their Sales Force lead field. When you connect your Sales Force to Card Reader, you can actually pick which fields, custom and standard fields, in each object lead and contact that you would like to have available to Card Reader. So for me, lead source is really important. I can do a bunch of stuff if I can save where the lead is from.

                                    Obviously for this we're testing out. This is a lead source of this webinar. There's my four people. That's step one, getting into the Full Contact Card Reader app.

                                    Then, Lauren it takes what, 10 to 20 minutes for you guys to do your magic and make sure the video's right, right?

Lauren W:             Yeah. So it takes ... General turnaround is 20 minutes. The low end is 10 and the high end can be, at peak hours, up to an hour, just for realistic expectation there. We've done some for you as the cooking show magic here.

Mark K:                   Yeah, right. We kind of did these ahead of time. Again for me, I could have it done instantly and have it done half right. Or I could wait 20 minutes and have it done exactly right every time. It's kind of a simple answer for me. Most people I'm not going to follow up with instantaneously anyway. I'm still talking to them after I take a picture of the business card. So what the heck does it matter to me?

                                    You can see here are the same four people that were on my form that are in the lead object now inside of Sales Force. They all came in there. If I were to click on, say Lauren here, all of that information that was put into the Card Reader app is now inside Sales Force and nice and pretty, right? That's the second step is Card Reader then automatically puts it into the lead object or the contact object inside of Sales Force right away.

                                    This is when Outreach takes over. What Outreach does is Outreach actually brings, through our Sales Force connection, that lead into Outreach. You can see, this is a very technical screen, but our Sales Force connection is an extremely advanced connection. It's actually field to field by-directional database sync. Meaning no matter where you make the change or when you make the change, all those platforms are all synced up together so that whatever is in Outreach is in Sales Force and vice versa.

                                    You can see here we used this to bring those leads into Outreach. What outreach does is it actually looks at each individual field and it creates something called a trigger. What a trigger does is a trigger allows you to look for specific field population data. For example, if the first name is Bill or if the lead source is the Full Contact webinar. Or if their lead status is X. It looks at those conditions and I can say, "If the condition is X and this other condition is Y and this other condition is Z, then do this activity with that person." That activity we call a sequence.

                                    What it does, in this specific instance, is it brings in this lead, Lauren. Her lead status when we first bring her in is actually fresh and her lead source is Full Contact webinar. It brings her into the system. As you can see, here's Lauren right here. Then it immediately begins to start working. It creates the mapping so that the leads are mapped. It populates all the data. Then it immediately puts them into a sequence.

                                    In Outreach, sequence is just the series of sales touch points that you string together to get something done. Whether to schedule a meeting, to follow up on a proposal, to get another decision maker in there, to close a deal, there's all these little goals that you're trying to accomplish in your sales process. A sequence is just those series of steps. They can be manual. They can be automated. They can be emails, phone calls, social connects, connecting on blogs, whatever you want to do. It just lays out all those tasks for you. Then the ones that you want done by the system, the system will do for you. The ones that you need to do yourself, the system queues up for you to do.

                                    So I can see all of the things that have happened with Lauren since she's been in the system here. That's what happens when it goes into Outreach.

                                    This is the specific sequence that I created for Lauren. It has three steps. All three of her people went into the sequence. You can see immediately on day one, an email went out. It was one of two emails and the system randomly selects. Three went into B, one went into A. We can see the open and reply rates. One of the guys I sent this email to, didn't open it yet. All the other ones were opened. A few minutes later, just for the sake of this example, I sent out another email. Then a few minutes later, actually a little bit right before the webinar, this one went out. You can see at each level who's connected, what got delivered, how many opens and replies that I got at each individual step. If I click on the little tag, it's going to open up and show me okay who was the person that replied at that step so that I can engage them in a different way. Or I might just be interested to see who opened things at a certain step. That's what a sequence does.

                                    Imagine this, you're at Dreamforce. You get somebody that looks like a great lead and they give you their business card. You take the picture in Full Contact's Card Reader app. Then, because you have that connected to Sales Force, 20 minutes later, 30 minutes later, you have a lead in Sales Force with all that information from that card in that lead object. Then Outreach pulls down that lead and puts it into a sequence automatically without you doing anything, that talks to that person the way that you want them to be talked to, the way that you want them to be followed up to, the cadence that you want to be followed up with. Maybe you want them a day later, or later that evening, you want them to be followed up with. And then three days after the event, or whatever. You can create that entire follow up process with those business cards people with those three tools.

                                    Just to give you a great example, in Nashville with SiriusDecisions, I ended up getting 35-40 cards. Every single one of those people were followed up with within 24 hours of me getting their card. That's something ... I've been in sales 25 years, I have never been able to do that, ever. If I got three cards at an event, I didn't follow up with all of them in 24 hours. It was a complete game changer for me.

                                    Lauren is there anything you want to add to the process or how it works?

Lauren W:             No, I think it's one of those things where I've been in sales much less time, but it's never something that I've accomplished. I've never had a stack of business cards in my hotel room at night, after I had gone to events, and it's 11:00 PM and I'm tired, I've never gotten those in and followed up with people in 24 hours. But snapping a picture when you're talking to them and then uploading them when you're not, it gets it done for you and it gets it done well. And then you're off to the races and you're able to sell to them. I think that it's one of those things where when we came in to do this webinar, we didn't have it set up yet, and we immediately went back to our sales team and the people that are going to be on the ground at Dreamforce and said, "Hey, we need this and we need this set up before Dreamforce."

Mark K:                   Yeah. The beauty of it too guys, because of how Outreach works, it's meant to be a sales tool, a sales helper. You can't have a sales tool unless the emails and the correspondence that you're doing comes from the sales rep. That's what Outreach does, it really allows you to create a template so that no matter who's using this sequence, no matter who's taking the picture, as long as they're the owner of that lead in Sales Force, the email is going to come from them.

                                    You can do funny stuff like this. I did a really interesting one where I had two sequences actually. The one sequence I did was for early in the conference. So on Tuesday it said, "Hey I'd like to get together before we take off." I would use that on people whose business cards I scanned on Tuesday and Wednesday. And then on Thursday and Friday, I used a sequence where the first step said, "Hey, I know we're about to take off and things are busy, why don't we reconnect on Tuesday of next week after you have a day to get your feet back on the ground." Those were received extremely well actually. I'll show you the response to those two, that sequence that I used at SiriusDecisions.

                                    Here you go. So you can see here, this was 12 people that I worked with. 42% of those people replied. You can see the reply rates to the people that replied almost instantly. I got some additional reply rates as things filtered their way through the system. Again, these were all incremental people. I got five great sales opportunities out of that conference by scanning those 12 business cards in at the end of the day one day. That got me five opportunities that I know I would not have gotten without doing this, because I wouldn't have followed up with them.

                                    Just to show you what the emails look like, this right here is an email that we got from Lauren because she replied to my email. So you can see here's the first email that went out. Here's the second email that went out. And then she replied to that second email. You can see it comes from my email address. It looks exactly like I wrote this email. There's no marketing automation stuff put in there. It looks like a hand-written email that a sales person would write. When you're following up like that, then you really have a chance to get excellent results with your follow up. When it's as easy as taking a picture, it makes it almost fun to go get those business cards. Where in the past, I literally would dread these events because it was so horrible getting all of those cards that I wouldn't follow up on.

                                    So Lauren, any kind of last comments for you before we give people a wrap up of where to get more information if you want to know how to get things started?

Lauren W:             Yeah, I think from us, it's really easy just to download the app and test it out. You'll find that email, which is the most important thing for this integration, is 99.9% always correct. Using people, they're able to pull it out even if it's in a logo. They can get the company name. They can get stuff that other people wouldn't get, especially computers. Getting it into Sales Force and into Outreach, I think has made a big difference. And just really driving that point home has been important for us.

Mark K:                   Yeah. Yeah. I set that entire system up. I got the cards read. I created that silly little sequence. And then I got the trigger set up. The Sales Force connection was already made with Outreach and Full Contact. I think it took me a total of 20 minutes to get everything set up and to scan those cards. And then after that it just takes maybe 10 seconds per card to process them. It's literally like magic. If I said, "Hey, I'm going to hire a little assistant that's going to follow behind you at this even with a tablet. Every time somebody gives you a business card you can just hand it to them and they're going to write an email. Not only that, they're going to write the next four emails that you want to go out with that person." Everybody in the world would sign up for that. That's exactly what we've just shown you how to do, except all you have to do is take a picture of the card. If you do that, we'll take care of the rest.

                                    Guys, if you want some more information about how to do the Sales Force configurations, how to make sure you get the app set up correctly, what we need you to do is email Penny Williams. She's our Marketing Director at Outreach. Her email address is penny.williams@outreach.io. She'll send you a little video and also some other resources and materials to kind of help you get set up if you want to do it. Also, she can direct you to the sales person on Outreach's side that can get you set up with the trial so that you can test it out for yourself.

                                    I really appreciate you guys coming. We do have one question here. It says, "What do you recommend doing when you have a booth rush of cards?" So you're standing at your booth. You get a ton of cards. What do you do?

                                    Lauren, do you want to take this one first? Or do you want me to give it a shot.

Lauren W:             Yeah. I think for me, the first thing I think of when I'm standing at a booth at a conference and I get a ton of cards and I get a lot of people that I'm talking to, the first thing I think of is that I probably don't have great cell service and the WiFi that I've gotten with my booth needs to run what we're doing as a demo. So I'm kind of stuck there. That's my first thing. I'm like, "What do I do?"

                                    What you can do is just take those pictures and send the cards and queue them up. Once your phone comes back online they will queue up and actually send through the system when you have service again. It doesn't matter that you're really slammed and that you're probably not in great service. You can still just queue up the cards.

                                    I also found that for me, I kind of forget who I talked to when I get those rush of cards. So I actually make notes on the cards like what I talked about with that person. The notes probably won't get transcribed, but what does go through is a photo of the card. I can go in and click on that and see what I talked to exactly about that person with. It helps you when they do reply to the automated sequence, I have a little more context and I can connect with them on a personal level as well.

                                    Those are my two steps. One, I always take notes. Two, I just queue everything up and let it hit the races when it comes back online.

Mark K:                   Yeah. I think that these kind of things always sound good in theory. They always ... A best plan's change, you know fail at first contact, or whatever that cliché is. I think the thing about this is, think about it in terms of realists. When somebody hands you a business card and you're talking to them, you're not going to pull out your phone and take a picture. All of us take our pen out and write on the business card, exactly like you're talking. I think this is a perfect solution for what we already do. All you have to do is, when you get a little downtime in the booth, is start taking pictures on your phone. You don't need to be on WiFi or anything, you just take the pictures. Card Reader will queue up those things so the next time you're on the WiFi, everything just happens for you. It's a really, really cool system that helps you out a ton.

                                    So, got another question here. "What is a good intro email after Dreamforce?" Lauren, why don't you take this one too.

Lauren W:             I think, like you were saying, the two different ones that you have. One is, "Hey, we just got here, we're still on the ground. Would you like to meet for a longer conversation?" I think that that's really big. And then I think that the second that is after you meet, "Hey, I know that you're getting back on probably next week, let's sync up after you've gotten your feet on the ground, probably Tuesday or Thursday."

                                    Personally I like to always add in a little gif, with things like that of, "Hey, we know that you've been crazy." And find a little photo that goes along with that so that people remember. That's it, for me.

Mark K:                   This is what I've found out about these emails, if you actually write them like a real person instead of some weirdo sales machine guy, it works out a lot better. When I was at AAISP, I got a message. I was looking at it right now just to see how it worked. I got a 63% open rate on this subject line, "Boy, was I bad...AAISP was great though." What it did was it then said, "Hey listen, I stink at following up with people. But I actually followed up with you because I remembered our conversation." That email got a ton of replies, it got a ton of opens.

                                    To me, just be honest with people. They're going to get inundated with junk after Sales Force, after Dreamforce. You want to capture a little bit of their time. Why not just be honest and say, "Listen, I have picked you out of the bunch. I am following up with you. I'm doing it quickly. I'm on the ball. I think that's a reflection of how I do everything." I think that kind of honesty and up front-ness, I think people respect. I think you'll get results.

                                    For me, I think the best way to follow up is just to imagine yourself just for a second. "How would I want to be followed up with after Dreamforce?" I know when I was writing that funny email, I stink at follow ups, I knew that would resonate with people because it would resonate with me. Just run it by yourself. Peer review of emails is always the best thing. If the guy next to you won't open it up, then the guy you're sending it to won't either.

Lauren W:             Right. And speed to touch, at least when I'm getting the emails, is the most important thing. If I see an email come in when I'm still at Dreamforce, or on that Monday, asking for my time when I've caught up, makes a lot more sense to me and makes me reply a lot more than the email I get four months down the road from the person that I didn't even talk to at the event who got tasked with going through those business cards and those leads and following up. I think that having it be the person that I talked to and having it be in a timely manner, are the two things that I personally respond to the most.

Mark K:                   Yeah. Something else cool that I did that got a good response too, is I just put a little picture of myself in the email and said, "Hey, I know you probably don't remember who I am. I'm this guy." That helped people to identify with, "Oh yeah, I'm going to put a face to this email. Hopefully they'll remember me enough to have a positive reaction to that." That's another little thing you can do.

                                    Alright guys. Well hey, I think that's all the questions that we have. I just wanted to thank everybody for coming. Lauren, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks for putting together a great app. It's killer. It's magic.

Lauren W:             I’ll take the credit.

Mark K:                   Cool. And hey guys again, penny.williams@outreach.io. We're also going to send out a link to the recording later today but we wanted to thank you for coming. If you got any questions, you can email Penny. She'll help you out, route you in the right direction, whether it's Full Contact or us that you need the help from. Thanks so much for coming. Have a killer week.

Lauren W:             Thank you!

Mark K:                   Goodbye.