Automate Your Sales Prospecting & Account Scoring

I've worked with a few companies recently that both had a large sales team and both of them had the same problem reps with a book of business of 150 accounts to 200 accounts, whether that's sent to them at the beginning of the quarter, the month or bimonthly, and they're manually checking LinkedIn, scanning job boards, reading the news and trying to figure out which accounts are worth reaching out to.

This week one team had reps spending, each rep spending around five to six hours a week just on the research before they even picked up the phone or sent an email or enrolled the prospect into a sequence.

So I built a dashboard that does this automatically for the reps.

It scans for signals, it qualifies against the ICP criteria and then lets a rep draft an email and start prospecting directly from the dashboard.

I also worked with a different type of company who are a bit smaller, but they have a very finite icp.

So they have a small list of accounts that they can work with.

And what they wanted to know is how to prioritize these accounts, who to reach out to and what to say.

And it's exactly the same system behind the scenes.

So I'm going to show you how this account scoring and prioritization works for a fictional company called Clarion.

Clarion is a B2B customer Onboarding software company.

I've made it up so I can use it for demos because of course I can't share and won't share my client dashboard and data.

So the first thing I'm going to do is just explain a little bit behind the context, behind the actual Playbook and account dashboard and you'll see the full system end to end.

I'm not going to go in and show you a tutorial of how to build it, but I will walk through the steps that the steps that have been built in order for this to work.

So let's get into the first part which is looking at the Playbook.

On the screen you'll see the interactive Playbook that I've built for Clarion and it's very similar to the Playbooks I build for my clients.

What this is essentially is the context layer for everything that a sales team needs and all of the systems that run through the Playbook.

So for example, you've got the company product overview, product positioning, details about the ideal client profiles, the Personas and which Personas for which icp.

Lots of rich context here.

It also has disqualification criteria and the account scoring and prioritization.

So the methodology, the logic, the must have criteria, the disqualification criteria, all lives in one place.

Which is of course great for reps when they're being onboarded, great for reps to refer back to.

And this Playbook is updated on an ongoing basis.

But where this becomes even more useful is when you start to use tools like Claude or you want to build more agentic automations for your outbound.

This build came directly from a pattern that I kept seeing in the audits and the engagements I had with clients reps manually doing research that a system could be handling.

And once you've seen it enough times, you just simply build the solution.

Before I go in to show you the step by steps, I want to just point out what the end to end workflow looks like.

So we have account data in this demo.

It's coming from Prospio.

We have the scoring criteria so the qualifications and the signals that belongs and lives in the playbook.

We also have enrichment scoring.

So Prospio doesn't have all the data that these particular reps need.

So we're using deepline to run enrichments to find that additional data and then also help with the score scoring logic.

Then we have a dashboard which prioritizes which accounts to reach out to what signals they're showing and what to say.

We have a prospect search so a rep can just simply search for prospects within that account.

and then in addition to this, for my clients we actually integrated with their CRM data.

So deal history and past interactions as well as intent data from G2 and Clearbit, I believe it was, no, it wasn't clear, but it was RB2B.

Anyway, website visitor identification.

So that's the overall process.

Now again, I just want to dive deeper into what problem it solves.

So reps are often told to just simply work their patch.

They're given a list of prospects, but they're not necessarily given a system to help them figure out which accounts have active signals right now.

So they either spray or prey, across everything or default to the ones they already know.

It's not uncommon to see reps just sort a spreadsheet by A to Z and then just start reaching out to all the accounts with A, B, C not scoring but in terms of the company name.

And this is one of the biggest time sinks as well because one, we're missing out on opportunities of signals that are happening almost in real time.

But also there's a lot of manual research that needs to go into it.

If a rep just sees a company name and they have to go and search in Google, look at LinkedIn, look at job boards, this can take hours and these hours stack up every day.

So the question I ask throughout my diagnostics is how does a rep decide which accounts to prioritize on a Monday morning?

And if the answer involves opening up a bunch of tabs and starting through their list in a static way, then the system is broken.

And it's not enabling the reps to be, be the best, it's not enabling the reps to spend more time actually having conversations and crafting relevant messaging.

So I'm going to now go through all of the different data points and the different steps here, starting with the account data.

Eventually I'll be showing the dashboard and what that looks like too.

So account data.

I mentioned we're using Prospio for the purpose of this demo.

It's just Prospio that we're using.

Prospio actually has around 120 different columns when you export the data from a company level.

But just to give you an idea, this is what you typically see in the platform.

We've got the Description, we've got 30 thermographic data, we've got keyword tags, types of business, the products that they sell, really rich data.

but when you, again, when a rep is going through this one by one, they still would have to go through 10 companies before they work out which one is the best company to start with.

At least, we also can see technologies, funding rounds.

There's Hiring data on the back of this as well.

So when you export from Prospio you get rich data and that's what I call the seed list.

To start with the account scoring in the dashboard, then we have the scoring criteria.

So this lives in the playbook.

And of course the playbook can be updated, but this is the step where most people get wrong or skip it entirely.

Before you build anything, before you try and build out a prioritization system, you need to define what you're actually scoring for, what makes an account a high priority for your specific business.

And the scoring criteria directly comes from that playbook, which is why the playbook wrapped around everything is the context layer that you need.

For Clarion, for example, I've defined five or six must have criteria.

So they have to be a B2B SaaS company for this particular ICP they have to be 50 to 500 employees, UK US headquarters.

They have to already have a customer success function.

If they don't have a customer success function, we don't work with them.

So that the purpose of outbound, we don't reach out to them.

If an inbound lead came in, it was good opportunity, then potentially we would.

By the way, it's a fictional company but very typical of the conversations I have with my clients.

They need to use Salesforce or HubSpot because that's what our tool integrates with.

Again another must have, and they must have 30 active customers.

And that's a great example of a data point which is often not.

It doesn't exist in other databases.

Prospio does have some of this data, but usually a rep would need to go and have a look at the website and look at our customers page and then see how many customers they have, if any at all.

So it's really important that you're clear on the scoring criteria, the positive signals that you look for.

Hiring new head of CS recent funding, customer base, growing use notion, Asana or Trello again internal documentation or internal project management tools, really hard to find.

And one thing that we have to realize is not all of this data will always be found as well.

And we have to understand that when we are building signal tracking, we are going to miss some signals as well just because there's no perfect world that we operate in with the data, and then currently using a broad customer success platform like Gainsight or Churn zero, then we have the account tiering.

So that's important because we want to make sure that we are focusing on tier one accounts.

Rather than tier two.

and then there's obviously information about the TAM and account universe.

So that's the account data and the scoring, but we haven't got the prioritization yet.

That's where Deepline comes in.

So Deepline is a I think they call themselves an agent native GTM function.

It's amazing what it can do.

what's happening in the background is the CSV from Prospio gets loaded in with the Playbook context about the scoring.

It then runs a waterfall, enrichment pipeline to find the additional data points and it gives us a score based on what it finds.

And as you can see here, you can see that this company, so this company here, they have a customer success function.

The LinkedIn profile shows multiple catchpoint csm roles.

list out the roles here.

the blog Salesforce is a CRM platform.

So it's all the data.

This again is not useful to a rep because it's a lot of data.

This is in a JSON, and it's not very possible for a human.

And that's why we build the dashboard.

So that gets added to the Prospio data so they get merged and then it gets scored using claude.

In this case again it doesn't have to be claude, but in this particular demo it's claude.

So I'll go through and show you what the demo looks like, but just before I do.

This, build came directly from a diagnostic I ran with a client.

It was one of the core recommendations that I made and then they brought me in to build this out.

Their reps were spending hours on manual research every week, but nobody had built the system around it to enable and fix that process.

So that's the kind of thing the diagnostic could surface.

so if you want to talk about running one for your team, there's a link in the description to book a call.

now let me jump into the dashboard and show you what the finished dashboard actually looks like.

So if we look here we can see that we've got 101 accounts loaded.

Just imagine this is for one of your BDRS or one of your SDRs.

of those 101 accounts we can see that there's one is a, is a number, one is a priority account, 17 active, 60 are watch and 23 not now.

So when your rep logs in on a Monday morning, this is what they work through and this is the order that they go into because there is one priority, 17 active, 60 watch, 23 not now that you can view the not now if you want to, you can just skip and only focus on the priority.

just for example, this is just 100 accounts.

the book of business would of course be much larger.

So what do we see for each company?

Well, let's dive into a tier one, count here.

So did they pass the must have gates?

They're a B2B SaaS company.

There are 145 employees, they're based in the United States, they have a CS function, and they are using Salesforce.

Great.

Those are our must have.

We should work on this account.

I see time and time again reps working on accounts that aren't even an account fit in the first place.

Then we look at signals.

The reason why this scores so highly is because it has four out of five signals.

So they're actually hiring four roles in cs.

This is amazing.

This is a great trigger.

It's a great signal for us at Clarion to be able to sell our onboarding tool into them.

They were funded in the last 12 months.

Again, great timing.

they have 400 leading mid market enterprise companies.

Perfect.

we couldn't detect which project management platform they use, but that's okay.

We've got enough signals to work with.

and also they are using Gainsight but they don't have a dedicated onboarding tool which is what Clarion fills in.

So there's an addition.

There's a bit more context here for the for the rep to read.

But what's really important is that it's actually given a brief to the rep of what to do.

And I see it so much that reps are given a list of accounts with a signal but they're then failed at that last moment where they're not sure what to do with that data.

So they have gained sight for CS but have no onboarding tool lead with the gap Clarion fields and it actually links through to the playbook.

So the rep can click here and have a look at the playbook Playbook that they need to follow.

So this is a pain point, onboarding at scale.

And this is the steps that they should follow to enroll that prospect, into the right sequence.

Now this sequence will be built in the sales engagement platform.

So the, the execution step is simply to enroll the prospect and maybe add some personalization.

but just wanted to show how that playbook doesn't just live to give the context, it also helps the rep execute, execute as well.

So if we come down a little bit more We've got next step.

So find the CS leader on LinkedIn.

one thing that I added as well was some, some ways to search for the actual contacts within these companies.

Again a rep would go to LinkedIn, type this in, then click on the profile.

Whereas just with one click of a button we can see that we're searching for Head of Customer Success.

So that's the job title and Campfire, Campfire is the name of the company in this case.

So now they just can click here and usually the first few results are the most accurate results and we can see that Jim, James Kim is head of Customer Success and technical support.

This is one I checked before.

It is and he works at Campfire.

So now the, the rep can do a bit of research on the profile and enroll them into a sequence or we can go one step better.

So let me just come down to another example here.

So we have Kanji, this is a tier 2, so, so this is an active account that we should be working because we do know that they have six thousand companies and they use project management for their CS and that's something that we can help with or improve for them now as well.

So we can see that their CS team runs onboarding on a project management tool positioned Clarion as the purpose built alternative.

This links through to the messaging map here we can see and the rep can find what messaging angle to take which is very helpful for not only emails but also their cold calls.

Now you've got some talking points here as well.

So very, these are very rudimental and quite basic for just this demo purpose.

But if you click here now this automatically uses Get Leads Get Leads IO to search for the prospects in the back end.

What it's doing is it's running a search based on all of the job titles based on the Personas in the playbook who are present in the Get Leads database at this particular company.

So we can see that we've got Christina.

If I Click on her LinkedIn profile it will open and we can see that Christina is the global head of cs, the perfect Persona that the rep needs to reach out to.

Now in the real world, not this demo environment, we could potentially integrate the account dashboard in with the sales engagement platform.

So there could be a button here that enrolls this prospect into a, into a sequence.

So just a couple of things to wrap up.

What I've shown you here is just a collection of external signals that are being searched.

You could, and we did for One of my clients add in the first party data from the CRM.

So deal history, previous engagement, open opportunities.

So the dashboard doesn't just tell you this company has signals.

It also tells you we spoke to them six times months ago and they went dark.

Here's the reason why it's closed, lost.

Or there's an open opportunity that's gone cold.

the intent Data from sources like G2 from Clearbit website visitor identification.

When you combine these external signals with that first party CRM and intent, the prioritization gets significantly sharper.

You're not just guessing which accounts to work.

You've got three layers of evidence and also context as well.

And it's the combination of all three that turns this from a nice to have into something a rep actually trusts and uses every day.

Which is another big issue, that there's a lot of distrust between the individual BDRs and Rev Ops or whoever is the person feeding them with the account data.

So if you have reps and their rep and your reps are spending five hours a week each rep on manual research and you have 10 reps, that's 50 hours a week or 2,500 hours a year.

A year spent on something a system can do in minutes and proactively.

But it's not just the time saved, it's also the quality of that prioritisation.

A rep manually scanning LinkedIn is going to miss signals.

a rep who has assigned an account three months ago but isn't tracking any new signals that are happening right now has missed that account.

And you'll lose to your competitor if they reach out at the right time by capitalizing on that signal.

So the dashboard removes all of the buyers and, and it actually helps reps execute.

What I've shown you in this video is the process, not necessarily a tutorial of how to build it.

It's the thinking behind the build, defining that scoring criteria, piloting the enrichment workflow providers check out Deepline I 100% recommend it get leads has been fantastic as well.

And then also layering in the external signals with CRM data and intent, that's the work that's the hard graph.

But once it's set up, it runs on an ongoing basis.

The tools Deepline Prospio is great from an account sourcing point of view, but I'm sure you already have your own databases.

If you're coming up for renewal and you're using some of the larger databases and you're not quite happy with the data.

Very common questions that I get all the time.

Definitely worth checking out prospio.

But the approach works regardless of what stack as long as you have that data or, or you're filling in those gaps by enriching that data with tools like Clay.

If you're running a team where reps are doing this manually, you already know that it's a problem and they shouldn't be spending their time doing this.

The outbound diagnostics is a paid engagement that I offer.

It starts with me going through your entire outbound process.

I've covered this in another video and it's how I identify whether to build a system like this, buy a system or Actually this isn't where you need to focus your energy and time.

It's perhaps on the messaging or somewhere else.

There's a link in the description to book a call and if you have any questions please feel free to reach out.

Cheers.