Step-by-Step Guide to Running a Warm Outbound Play with Quality Scoring

Is your sales team struggling to pinpoint the most valuable leads among your website visitors? Many sales teams face the challenge of “spray and pray” outbound efforts that lack precision and focus. And in this market, efficiency and focus are top priorities for growth leaders.

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That’s why a warm outbound approach that also includes quality filtering is the best way to make sure sales teams are spending their time engaging in high intent opportunities. In this blog post, we'll guide you through the steps to establish a strategic warm outbound play that emphasizes quality over quantity. Let’s dive in.

5 Steps to Run a Warm Outbound Play

Depending on your tool stack, your warm outbound play might be set up a bit differently. The key ingredients of your warm outbound play, however, should be to deanonmyize your website traffic, add quality filtering, and organize the data into an outbound sequence. Let’s walk through each step and why it’s important. 

Step 1: Track and Deanonymize Website Visits

If you’re not already deanonymizing your website traffic, that’s step #1. Why? You need to pull back the curtain to figure out who these people are first if you’re going to be able to decide if they’re quality leads. This step is crucial for identifying the accounts showing intent without overwhelming your SDRs. It’ll go something like this:

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• Utilize a tool like Clearbit that will do the heavy lifting to deanonymize site visitors. Clearbit will tell you what domains (or company names) these people are coming from. You should expect to get information for about 80% of visitors. 
• Create a rule to exclude users with your company domains, ensuring employees don't receive emails from their own company.

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For this example, let’s say we went through these steps and discovered one of our visitor’s account names is Good Paper Co. 

Step 2: Check if Visitors Are Existing Customers

Next, you’ll want to make sure you’re running only prospects through your play. You don’t want to send unnecessary outreach to folks who are existing customers, partners, investors, or others you don’t want to email. You’ll need to:

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• Cross-reference visitor domains with your CRM like Salesforce to check if they are already customers, partners, or investors.
• Create a rule that only allows accounts that either don’t exist (aka they haven’t interacted with your brand before) OR accounts that don’t have an active opportunity.

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After going through these steps, you know the account visiting your website is not an existing customer and is not an active opportunity. The account can move forward through the play.

Step 3: Give the Lead a Quality Score

This is the most important step. Now that you can see the accounts visiting your site, it’s time to run them through a quality check. Without quality scoring, running an automated warm outbound play is like aiming blindly. Quality filtering is what sets your sales team up for success. This way they’re only prospecting visitors who are the right fit for the business. Try this:

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• Create a quality filter that only sends through leads that are a good fit for your business. At MadKudu we use our own platform to classify leads as either “Good” or “Very Good” fits. We use a range of firmographic & technologic data to give them a quality rating.

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In our example, after going through a quality check, the account visiting your website received a “very good” fit score. They can continue moving forward.

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Step 4: Get Specific Data on Your Leads

Now that you’ve got quality filtering in place and you know the account’s domain, it’s time to get contact data for that account to send over to your sales team. You need the right data, such as name, email and job title. You can add a phone number too if your reps are following up via phone (we recommend this). This contact data should be pushed to your CRM so that the accounts are properly updated. 

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• Use data tools (e.g., ZoomInfo, Apollo, Cognism) to retrieve contact data based on deanonymized domains. Pull contact data for the job title(s) that fit best your ideal customer profile.
• This is also where you should figure out if this is an account already in your CRM. Use another rule to determine whether the record exists in your CRM. If it does exist, go ahead and update that account with any new contact information coming from the data you just pulled. If it doesn’t exist, create a new account in your CRM for that domain. 

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After pulling “Head of Marketing” titles at Good Paper Co, you now know that their Head of Marketing is Jody Smith, her email is jsmith@goodpaperco.com, and her phone number is 1-800-857-5309.

Step 5: Tag and Outreach

This last step is necessary to help you accurately tag the lead with its lead source in your CRM so you can send it to whatever tool you’re using for outbound emails. Depending on your tech stack, you might need to use multiple tools to accomplish this step. You may also be able to conduct it all via Zapier. 

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• Give your lead a lead source source such as “Warm Outbound” because that’s where you sourced this lead. You could alternatively create a different field in your CRM that updates to tag these leads as sourced via “Warm Outbound” if you don’t want to update lead sources.
• Once your lead has the “Warm Outbound” lead source connected to it, you can set up a trigger either via your CRM or outbound program so that leads with lead source = “Warm Outbound” are entered into a sequence for your SDR team to use.

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Tip: Your outreach copy should be personalized in order to really captivate the attention of your reader. Learn how Outsystems used MadKudu’s Sales Intelligence to personalize their outreach with information such as job openings, tech stack, and recent activities.

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Good Paper Co, your website visitor, has run through the entire process and their Head of Marketing, Jody Smith, has a personalized email in her inbox. It’s time to sit back and watch your play run. 

For the first few weeks of running this play, be sure to keep a close eye on the rules and flow to see if there are any errors or faulty data. Eventually, you’ll be able to iron the process out so it can just do its thing and send your team qualified contacts to reach out to.

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In a world where sales teams are relying on spray and pray for their outbound (warm or cold), this provides a path forward. An automated warm outbound strategy with quality layering can help automate manual work and give your sales team a target for their outbound efforts. 

Ready to revamp your outbound strategy and start reaping the benefits of layering quality into your outbound? If you’re ready to build something like this for your business, let us help! We’re more than happy to walk you through how we built this here at MadKudu (and share the learnings we had along the way.)

Schedule a demo with us today!