The Secret Sauce: Facet's B2B Sales Prospecting Stack

This article is going to serve as a catch-all explainer for how Facet prospects: our technology stack, and how we manage our outreach.

Time after time I encounter companies who are starting their journey with a cold lead engine, and they're swimming through the vast sea of sales and marketing SaaS tools that all promise growth—with no clear strategy as to how to qualify, quantify, and connect the technology stack.

Unfortunately, until you've managed the full pipeline from account research to email outreach—it's hard to tell what will work.

Hopefully this article serves as a blueprint for how you can segment your process, introduce the right automation into the technology stack, and ensure that you're consistently controlling your quality output and throughput.

Facet's Prospecting History

We've worked on our prospecting pipeline extensively in our own agency. No matter who you're talking to, if they're experienced with cold lead generation they'll tell you mostly the same thing: you get out of it what you put into it. There isn't a trick to it. There's no magic. It's a drawn and (mostly) boring slog to learn how to build relationships with your prospects.

Our key learning early on was that there is a major difference between empowering outside sales consultants to run your cold outreach and running it yourselves. That difference stems from translating your experience into communications.

In order to drive the right customer insight and establish the right relationship proposition with a prospect — you have to be as close to it as possible.

Facet's Relationship Engine

Your sales are still going to be driven by relationships, unless you have a specific product that is an easy buy and doesn't require the agency-advisor trust factor.

Building relationships boil down to which channel / medium will give you a network effect and allow you to share an authentic message.

From our experience a great relationship engine requires:

1. Account database with appropriate signals / triggers.

2. Clear value proposition for targeted customer segments.

3. Tooling for collecting hyper-personalization and the Virtual Assistant team or SDR in order to power that cold lead engine.

4. Appropriate email tooling for sending hyper personalization. Image personalization and email personalization. If you want to get into the really fancy stuff, automated video personalization is great but costs a pretty penny.

Facet's Prospecting Stack

Finally, here is a quick peak at what we use in our prospecting stack. This stack constantly changes as we evolve our practices, but as of now it has been our go to for 12+ months.

• Leadreaper.io - our internal tool and database for scraping web technologies and metadata. We crawl 1.7M+ domains and quantitatively analyze opportunities.

• Apollo.io - We upload our domain list for account match by domain (which is free to enrich). Then we start contact grooming based on targeted persona search.

• VA team - Manages the contact grooming process, downloads the CSV of groomed contacts, uploads to Google Drive, and researches each contact for personalization to be injected into outreach.

• Google Sheets - We have a Contact Ops sheet we use to stage contacts for outreach, and our VAs review each contact, their company, and personalize some properties before sorting them into a specific segmented outreach campaign in Lemlist.

• Integromat.io - We automate various components of our sales process pipeline, ensuring that the contacts continue to flow from our qualification process into Lemlist (and between other places) for outreach. It's important to automate the sync of outreach between HubSpot CRM, Lemlist, and Growthlead to make sure you don't accidentally follow up after connecting on a specific channel.

• Lemlist.com - All of our cold outreach is managed with Lemlist. We sparingly use their image personalization feature with whiteboards and hand-written notes on paper to drive engagement.

• growthlead.io - To automate LinkedIn connections and follow ups.

• HubSpot CRM - To keep track of lead statuses centrally.

• Mautic - For marketing automation / email marketing nurturing post-initial cold touch point.

• Loom.com - For a personalized follow up video to share a friendly face.

Here's our process / technical stack for cold leadgen pipeline:

• Leadreaper (our internal app built with Serverless Framework on AWS Lambda) crawls ~100k websites per day. We have a variety of technology detections, metatag detection, and other scrapers where we pull our own data and detections cost us fractions of a penny.

• We use dbt as a data transformation pipeline to segment, quantitatively analyze, and score prospective accounts based on each campaign's discrete scoring metrics.

• Based on the most highly qualified accounts (we're crawling ~2M domains at current scale), we prioritize personas for account-based cold email outreach.

• We upload a list of domains to Apollo and find matches (up to 10k domains at a time) and build targeted, prioritized persona lists based on segmented searches. The matches don't cost anything for Account-based matches, so you can pull more account-based data for free without using your credits.

• We export our lead lists to Google Sheets. We focus on 50-100 contacts per day as a reasonable scale of outreach per SDR. Virtual Assistants are tasked with manually reviewing the contacts, assigning them to 1 of 10 different segmented outreach campaigns we're running, and all collected Apollo data is pushed back to our data warehouse for long-term storage / analytics.

• Once a lead is sorted into their segment, we use integromat to programmatically push via API to lemlist where all tokenized / personalized data is inserted to our email outreach sequences. You can optionally route your campaigns based on different SDRs so you spread out your usage across multiple accounts. We prefer lemlist for their auto-email warming and image personalization capabilities.

• VAs are trained to manage emails responses, but SDRs would be more ideal at this stage.

• We use loom.com to send personalized video messages to highly engage segments in a manual follow up. This is usually achieved with a quick name scrawled on a whiteboard and powering out 30 to 50 loom videos in a brief period. Personalized video platforms are a thing, too — but quite expensive. I recommend loom for the comparable authenticity.

All of this is achieved with relatively low-cost besides our initial development of Leadreaper platform. You don't have to detect or scrape websites, either — it just happens to be the best way we can quantify our account-based opportunities and personalize our outreach.I wouldn't be surprised if there are many, many other stories / stacks like this in the community here. People usually use SaaS tools until they find out they need to get the data in a different way.

Reach out on our Sales services page to find out more about how we use these tools, or to engage us on building you a custom cold lead pipeline, or to discuss how we can help you source the right data for your sales team.