Every month, we like to feature a SaaS company that’s working on an interesting product or making unique use of technology. This month we talked to Justin McGill, CEO and Founder of LeadFuze, a lead generation company that is working to automate the sales prospecting process. Lead gen can be a tricky area, with customers who get annoyed when they can’t convert the leads that you’re sending them. LeadFuze is doing a great job recognizing and confronting this fundamental industry challenge. If you’re looking for inspiration for how to help your customers better engage with your product and truly get the value you deliver, check out how they approach it. And, if you’re looking for a great lead gen solution, give them a go. Here’s Getting SaaS-y: 5 Questions for LeadFuze’s Justin McGill.
5 Questions for LeadFuze’s Justin McGill
So, what is LeadFuze working on?
Essentially, LeadFuze automates the sales prospecting effort for salespeople. A lot of our customers have small sales teams. So, instead of them having to spend hours trying to find contact information for their ideal customers, we surface that information for them automatically, and we help them filter those results down to find exactly what they need.For example, maybe you’re targeting CMOs at companies that have more than 10 employees, have hired recently for marketing help, spend $1,000 a month or more on AdWords, etc. With LeadFuze you can filter by all of those criteria (and more) to give you a list of potential leads that you can pull into your sales process.
How much data are you providing?
We can provide email addresses, LinkedIn URLs, phone numbers, and physical mailing addresses (coming soon) as well. That’s the information that salespeople really need. It’s really a multichannel approach – however you like to sell, we have you covered.We also integrate with cold email tools and LinkedIn, so you can set up automations based on the data you gather. Anything from connection requests, to LinkedIn messages, to email campaigns and more. You can actually trigger a message that’s based on a native integration that sends out, let’s say, a four-part email sequence over seven days. You can literally automate your entire sales process, that’s our goal. To take all of the mundane work out of it.
So, this takes over the part of prospecting that sucks the most?
Not only does it suck, but it takes a ton of time. And it’s not something that any salesperson can do every day. Weekends, holidays, sometimes we just need a day to do something other than prospecting. But with this sort of automation you’re not doing the legwork anymore and instead you’re just waiting on people to be responsive and show interest in your outreach. Then you can spend your time working with those folks.
How scalable is this?
It’s effectively infinite, it just depends on the size of the market you’re going after. If your audience is small – like those CMOs I talked about earlier – then you might not get a lot of results. But that changes when you start going after full industries in larger verticals. For example, everyone working in sales in real estate or everyone in the software industry. That can get pretty big.And the nice thing is, even when you’re working with a massive list of contacts, the third party tools we integrate with can measure their responsiveness and only notify the salesperson for follow-up when a lead pokes their head up by interacting with a message or otherwise engaging. That’s when a real human gets involved and takes it from there. Up until that point the automation is entirely in control. It’s a huge time saver.
Who are you hoping to help?
We’re evolving the sales profession. We’re not getting rid of salespeople, not by a longshot. But what LeadFuze is doing is actually helping advance the sales skillset. Sales is no longer about finding leads and digging for their contact information. Now, salespeople can actually spend their time having sales conversations. And that’s more fruitful for everyone. Ultimately, we feel like salespeople should be spending their time selling, and we’re here to help them do that.
