How we generate 500+ leads per month

👋 Today, we're going behind the scenes on the boring data (that I find extremely sext) that generates 500+ ad sales leads per month.

Nerdy database exposés aside, let's dive in! 🚀

Our system that generates 500+ leads a month 

I've been head down in data for a few months, so I missed the last edition, sorry. I have had a firm word with myself in the mirror.

What I've been building is deeply unglamorous, but gets my juices flowing. Rebuilding the internal database that feeds every piece of outreach we do. 

As an apology, I’ve done a detailed walkthrough of (one of) our company-level databases.

It felt good to fully type this email with bare naked hands, and I recorded a video walkthrough if you’d prefer that here.

Before a single brand hits an outreach list, we enrich the **** out of it. In a way that would’ve made 2023-me get inappropriately excited.

🎬 Company Enrichment

LinkedIn URLs

• Apollo, which has the best company coverage in my opinion, still isn’t perfect. One or two LinkedIn URLs were incorrect and from the wrong company.

• To solve this, I made a custom agent workflow that finds and verifies LinkedIn URLs with a 3000 out of 3000 level accuracy.

• Bad data early in the workflow can **** everything up.

LinkedIn Scraping

• Nothing complicated. We scrape the About and the Industry here.

Company Website Scraping

Two website scrapings:

1. One scrapes very broadly what they do and who their customers are in the very specific ways that are different for consumer or B2B companies.

2. Only scraping the website to define in more detail who their customers are. The reason we do this twice is that the more specific the task and the fewer facets to the task we give AI, the more detailed and accurate its output. We rely on both, but when analysing a brand's target audience, give more weight to this scraping output.

🛫 Categorisation

Then we categorise EVERY company depending on 5 key datapoints:

🔎 B2B or B2C (or both).

🔎 Business model. Software, services, etc. How they actually make money and deliver their product.

🔎 Target company size. B2B only. Some sell to solo founders, some only talk to enterprise. Most are size-agnostic, but the ones that aren't will ignore you forever if you're the wrong fit.

🔎 Target industry. Again B2B. A fintech infrastructure brand wants finance and SaaS readers. A broad HR tool wants everyone.

🔎 Product Category. What does the product do? Who does it serve? Who's the buyer? B2B - marketing, B2C - health and wellness, etc.

Smush these all together, and you get a really accurate, data-backed, scalable way of sorting companies for the ad sales context. One example is:

• I want “B2B HR SaaS targeting enterprise technology and financial service companies”

Historically, that extremely niche statement is just a really tough mission. Now it's a couple of clicks for us. Obviously, this can work for any category or vertical, including the broader ones.

 🧮 Data, data, data

After running Ad Sales as a service for a few years, the biggest learnings for me is:

For us, and modern businesses in general, structured data is a superpower.

All our databases have a copious amount of lookups, conditional pushes, API calls, etc. This means that you have the right up-to-date data point at the right time being pushed into the right place.

Without these, they become stale and unusable very quickly.

There are simply too many for us to go through them all, but the most common ones are:

• Pulling company-level data into a contact database

• Pulling qualification data into a client-specific outreach table, and so on.

Our setup for an individual publisher would maybe be overkill, but the core concepts would be a weapon for any media property, no matter how small.

Once it's set up, it takes a lot of work off your plate. Yes, it requires maintenance, but much less maintenance time than the time saved by the system itself.

Again, if you want the prompt for our main company scrape to use in your workflow, visit my latest LinkedIn post and comment ‘ad sales enrichment’, and I'll send it over to you. Sorry, not sorry.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps new media companies do just that.