Every year the tech stack available for agency new business pros changes exponentially it seems. The image above is the Martech 5000 and I think it is safe to say that navigating that thing is a nightmare! There’s always a new CRM, data source, or automation software that is promising a shortcut to immediately generating more meetings and winning more business. In my experience, technology doesn’t provide a shortcut, but more a roadmap of exactly where you should go.
At Catapult, we believe in intelligent, timely, and personalized communications in order to best drive the right types of conversations for new business development. This means we don’t believe in mass blasts, but an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach. For an ABM approach, technology and research are massively important because it means that we know more about our prospects, we can pick the right times to do outreach, and we can use the right type of language for each individual. All this adds up to better meetings and, in turn, more wins.
Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the main parts of our tech stack:
Winmo – Now we here at Catapult are a little biased (Winmo is our sister company), but in our opinion, there is no better collection of information about marketing decision makers than what you get from Winmo. The contact information is the cleanest in the industry. They also have all the contextual information you would want around those people to understand their agency relationships, media spend habits, personalities, and more. Most importantly though, for any business agency person, is that they have a host of alerts that will let you know when information changes that may be important to be acted upon. Those alerts are a game-changer for ensuring that your timing is better than your competitors.
WinmoEdge – Where there’s smoke there’s fire, right? WinmoEdge is the key to finding that smoke super early in order to help you get in front of a new business opportunity before that opportunity has even had a chance to build up. Edge’s proprietary scoring system takes a brand’s behavior and performance and translates that into a score that predicts the likelihood of going into an agency review. Let us fill you in on a little secret though, most companies that use Edge start at the highest scoring (most likely to review) companies and then work their way down…but not us at Catapult. We understand that new business is a long game and we want to get on the radar of those brands that are just beginning to run into issues that may call for a review. This way, we dictate the RFP, rather than it being dictated to us.
Salesloft – Gone are the days of one size fits all mass emails. Or at least those days SHOULD be gone. In today’s environment, it’s all about putting the right message in front of the individual, which means the mass email campaigns of yesteryear are gone. At Catapult, we have stopped using Marketing Automation and solely use Sales Automation with Salesloft now. This allows us to send customized emails, to individuals, at scale. If you’re a sole new business person and you are still trying to send prospecting emails or networking emails through your gmail alone, then you need to investigate the switch to Salesloft. This will help you automate and manage each touchpoint in your prospecting efforts and sales funnel in a way that will make you 50x faster than trying to just use Gmail alone. It also has the added benefit of using your email server for each send, so the likelihood of getting caught up in a spam filter because of a Marketing Automation’s bad IP address is reduced greatly. More sends, better sends, what’s not to love?
Bombora – What if you knew when a prospect was looking for your exact service before they ever reached out? That’s exactly what Bombora does. They track a company’s interest level in specific services or keywords. So if you’re a creative agency, you can track all company URLs within whatever industry you love and see which company is “surging” in interest around the keyword “Creative Agency”. If they are reading content about creative agencies, searching creative agencies, then that’s probably a pretty good indication that you should reach out and say hello. You don’t have to tell them you’ve been stalking their content consumption behavior, but don’t be surprised when you start seeing responses like “wow, crazy timing, I was just beginning a search…”.
Crystal – People are all different. Obvious right? Then why, oh why, do we see companies sending out messaging that is the same for 1,000 people? Some people like humor in an email, some like detail, some want it to be short and sweet (me for instance). The point is, Crystal evaluates the attitudes and personalities of each prospect and gives you suggestions on how to best approach them based on those personalities. Throw in an emoji for Jim, but make sure you use bullet points for Jill. It’s not perfrect, but damn if it isn’t close to perfect. If nothing else, it gives you a great playbook for how to approach and navigate a sales or discovery call with one or more personalities. It attaches directly to your Google Chrome or LinkedIn and gives you that info in real time. Super powerful stuff.
Kantar – Media spend info can be grabbed from different places, but here at Catapult we have used Kantar for years. The way that we use it is to simply have additional criteria when we are looking at what makes a good sized prospect for our agency client. Many times it’s easiest to purely build backwards from your best performing client and find other prospects that have a similar spend track to them.
Pathmatics – Similar to how we use Kantar, we use Pathmatics to get deeper information about digital advertising performance for any brand that we are interested in approaching. We use it both at the beginning of the process to narrow down companies that spend more or less in certain areas, and we also use it when we are doing a deeper dive into a specific prospect. Often this may come around a 4th or 5th touchpoint when we are looking for something that may help us stand out in our outreach efforts and pull an insight that potentially no other competitors have thought about talking to them about.
Statsocial – Understanding the social audience of a brand can give you another quick opportunity to connect on a different level with your prospect. Statsocial is our go-to tool to understand the audience demographics of the companies and brands that we are prospecting. It also helps in comparing your prospect with another company. Very often it’s good to show how a challenger brand stacks up against the leader in the space. This isn’t information that the prospective brand doesn’t have, of course, but it does show that YOU understand their brand and their space, allowing for more trust and better conversations.
There are a host of other tech and research tools we use from DRTV info, online publications, and simple Google alerts, but these are the ones that we lean on the most. Business Development is never simple, but if you want to truly do a comprehensive job of Account Based Marketing it’s our recommendation that your tech stack looks similar to the one above.