Back in November we featured SalesLoft as a great tool for content marketing. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been using the tool extensively to generate sales and marketing outreach lists.
SalesLoft is a sales and marketing prospecting tool that works in concert with LinkedIn to generate contact email and phone lists.
Pros
- You can target one of your audience persona groups and find all the members of that group with a certain title. Let’s say you are targeting healthcare CIOs at regional hospitals. You pick LinkedIn groups they probably belong to, such as a regional health IT group, and add all members of a group to that list.
This is especially helpful for companies prospecting in a niche category with well-defined audience personas. I ran a test for a prospect after a sales call and they loved it.
- When using the tool, you tend to look at a bunch of LinkedIn profiles. Those individuals, of course, get an alert from LinkedIn that you scanned their profile. A few prospects actually requested to link to me and one reached out asking about our services. I didn’t expect this advantage!
- The price is attractive. Although there are rumors that SalesLoft is going to switch to an annual subscription model, currently you can cancel at the end of end of each month. I signed up for the $650 plan, which gets you 1,000 VERIFIED email addresses. It’s important to note that SalesLoft doesn’t charge you for the email addresses it can’t verify.
- They have an extensive and easy-to-follow knowledge base with FAQs.
Cons
- It took me 5+ hours to prospect 500 contacts because the system and LinkedIn don’t filter with as much granularity as I’d like. For example, I wanted to filter out my competitors and folks I knew wouldn’t be a fit in order to produce a list with high quality.
- SalesLoft was only able to verify about 50% of the emails I wanted at the server level of the companies. So only about 50% of my emails are verified as 99% accurate. This can be problematic for email campaigns, because you can get blacklisted if you send to too many incorrect addresses.
- About 5-10% of contacts had missing information in the SalesLoft system so I had to manually update a profile or add a website address in order for the system to make a guess at the correct email address.
- The onboarding training session was weak, but the online knowledge base is quite good (see above).
We’ll be running campaigns for our healthcare marketing agency using SalesLoft lists over the next month. Check back to our blog for an update on how the lists performed at the end of Q1.
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