New leads, no cold outreach: How to grow from the data you already have
We see it time and time again with our Account-Based Marketing clients: Everyone asks us how they can get new leads. They want contacts they’ve never talked with before, hoping that we’re going to come in and suddenly find all these shiny new leads that they’ve never even thought of.
The reality is even better: They likely already have connections to people who can turn into leads and, eventually, new customers.
They just don’t know where to look.
They (and you!) are already getting in front of great potential customers. There are simple ways to examine your current impact and reach to find leads without launching new marketing initiatives.
We’re going to show you what (pleasantly) surprises our clients the most when we start working with them. We have a method that will unearth qualified leads you’ve been marketing to all along.
You don’t have to start from scratch. You just need to look at data you already have.
The goldmine sitting under your nose: Your email list
Let’s get practical. I want you to be able to open a new tab and get started on this process as you read. Here’s how to uncover hidden insights in the information right in front of you.
Build out contact info from your email list
Start with your list of email subscribers. Open up your database, whether that’s on Mailchimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, or GoHighLevel (that’s what we use).
We want to start here because you already know these contacts are familiar with and invested in your company. Plus, email addresses are hard to get — and you already have a batch of them here!
Download your database and put them into a spreadsheet, either on Notion, Google Sheets, or Excel.
Create columns for first and last name, company, and role. Find this information on LinkedIn or ZoomInfo. This builds a bigger picture of who is already subscribed to your email list.
Organize by company
Then, organize your list by company. You will hopefully start to see patterns emerge.
From an Account-Based Marketing perspective, we’re looking to have a volume of customers and a high amount of touch points within a specific company. So if you see that you already have 50 contacts from the same company, that shows you that you already have a depth of connection into that company. Start there.
This is where the surprise kicks in for our clients — they have no idea that they already have multiple contacts from a prospective customer.
Mini case study: Clicks turning into a customer
One of our clients sent out an email to a targeted list of prospective customers about products they have. There were 50 clicks on the email. We went through our process above and learned that about 20 of them were from the same company.
We looked into each one and found their job titles, which ranged all the way from the executive level to middle management level. That told us that this company has a need internally and they're already talking about this product type. Since so many folks there interacted with this product email, it was a major clue that they had an immediate need for this product.
One email campaign, one hour of research, and one high-value, high-intent lead secured.
Look at how they’re interacting with you
So you have names, you have roles, and you have at least one target company. The next step is to see how these folks are interacting with your emails and what’s landing with them overtime.
Look at their open rates and click-through rates. What are they clicking on? Which messages have resonated? This can tell us what level of brand recognition we have with this potential customer. When we send an email, do people recognize the brand name or the sender’s name easily? Is the subject line interesting to them? Are they clicking through and showing interest in the content?
This will inform your outreach. Once you know what they’re into, you can email them with confidence that you’re meeting them where they’re at.
Find sister companies or partners
Another source to guide your outreach? Sister companies of your current customers. These are the perfect target companies because you already have a way in.
Here’s how to find partner companies or sister companies related to your existing customers:
Scrub their site: Look at your existing customer’s website and scan or any mentions of a parent company or sister company within that portfolio group.
Look at press releases: Examine case studies and press releases for mention of partner companies or maybe even customers of theirs.
Build profiles: Compile all the company names you can find and build as much of a profile as you can on each one.
Look at ICP fit: Not every company is a good customer for you. Look at your ideal client profile, which is an outline of who needs your product and who benefits from it the most, and score these potential leads against it.
Scour other sites for more information: To determine ICP fit, look at the sister/partner companies on other sites. Look at their LinkedIn posts, look at employee profiles on LinkedIn and ZoomInfo, go through press releases or blog posts, watch YouTube videos to get behind-the-scenes information. For our industrial clients, we can often find YouTube videos inside their facilities to get a clear picture of their operations.
Ask for an introduction: Once you have potential customers that fit your ICP, you can ask your client to introduce you. We’ll get into that next.
How to ask for an introduction: A template
Tap into your relationship with your client and ask them to make the connection between you and their partner/sister company. But have a compelling reason prepared first! You want to ask for a specific introduction to a specific person within the company.
Here’s an example:
Let's say that your company provides automation technology for manufacturing lines. You see that your customer has a sister company with a really old facility. They have a new Director of Innovation who is thinking about modernizing their facility.
When you’re talking to your client, you can have a conversation like this:
You: Hey, I saw that the other company in your portfolio is working on modernizing their facility. Do you happen to know their team? I was curious to know more about what they're doing over there.
Your customer: Oh, yeah — I was just in a meeting with Jess recently, their Director of Innovation.
You: Nice! I really think Jess could benefit from some similar projects that we've done together. Would you be willing to make an introduction and share a little bit about what we've been able to accomplish within this project in your facility?
This works because you didn’t just ask your contact to introduce you to someone, anyone at the sister company. You named a specific person and gave them a personal angle to use when making the intro. Your contact is more likely to follow through, because you’ve made it easy.
Another goldmine: LinkedIn
Our final tip on where to look for leads is LinkedIn. You don’t have to search for names and companies and roles, because they’re already there on the profiles of people liking and commenting on your posts and engaging with your ads.
And while the email method above shows you engagement history, LinkedIn shows you real-time intent and pain points. You can see what they’ve been posting about and commenting on. You can see what’s happening internally at that company or what problems, challenges, and needs a specific person has.
A primary way we see this is as a result of a LinkedIn campaign where we’re putting a specific message in front of the companies we’ve identified as ideal clients. You can see if there’s a volume of contacts within a specific company who have been interacting with the same message. This suggests that an internal conversation is already happening, and you can address it in your outreach.
You can pass this info off to your sales team — add them into the CRM as a marketing qualified lead and notify sales. The team can customize their outreach message based off the hypothesis you’ve formed from their ad interactions.
“We don’t have time for this!”
If you’re reading this and wondering who has the time to do such granular outreach, we get it! It’s a significant shift from doing broad outreach and hoping something lands.
The truth is that you’re already spending the time doing some level of outreach. But are you getting results? Any time spent on this type of targeted outreach will help you do better and more informed outreach that will ultimately be more effective.
One customer signed is better than 10 conversations with cold leads that go nowhere.
And there are certainly ways you can automate a lot of these steps. Use Claude or ChatGPT to build out your database info:
Ask it to go through your list of email subscribers and pull the first and last names, company names, and job titles of each one.
Ask AI to organize your list and make it more easily filterable.
Put the list back into an AI tool and ask it to highlight which companies have the most contacts.
Ask AI which contacts are aligned with your ideal client profile.
Ask it to help you prioritize your outreach.
Ask it to write emails customized to each contact. (And then edit them! AI can provide a first draft, but the final touches should be from you.)
These are the kind of tactics that take 30 minutes a day that help you prioritize your outreach and ultimately make it a lot more effective.
And if 30 minutes a day is more than you can spare, or if you're ready for a full-team effort, we can help you build and manage an Account-Based Marketing program to generate high-quality leads, consistently.
The results of this method
If you follow these steps, you’re reaching out to contacts who are much more likely to respond. Cold outreach targets people who have never heard of your company before and are unaware of your service offerings. They might be far outside of your ICP.
Our method helps you hone in on contacts and companies that are most likely to convert to new business. These might not be brand-new leads, but they’re better: They’re the right leads.
If you want an expert on the job, we’d be happy to help. Read more about our Account-Based Marketing services and reach out to Towers Growth if you’re ready to get started.