Change the Game With Conversations

For sales and marketing teams, conversations are gold.

The more convos you can have, the better you understand your customers, and ultimately win more of their trust & business. Even if your product has a 7-figure price tag or is a $10/month subscription, conversations with people provide rapport, feedback, and trust.

The difficulty with conversations is that until recently, conversations haven’t been scalable! It takes a lot of time to chase prospects, engage and follow up, set meetings, and chat. Replicate this across thousands of people, add in the complexity of managing these contacts, and you have a whirlwind of a mess!

Fortunately, there are now tools like ScaleRep that harness the power of conversations into your marketing and sales funnels. In working with our users, we’ve surfaced 4 guidelines in leveraging the power of conversations to further enhance your prospecting pipeline:

1. Multi-Channel Conversations

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Of course, you know you should be reaching your target market across several channels, but take that a step further to initiate conversations across multiple channels. It’s one thing for people to see a dozen ads on the web, and another for someone from your company to reach out directly and ask if they need assistance.

Our data shows outreach that initiates conversation and includes 1 more channel in addition to a direct email yields an average 2.5X larger response rate that cold email outreach. ScaleRep does this through utilizing voicemail and text (when appropriate) to augment email outreach and to and ask them if they need help.

Outreach that initiates conversation and includes at least 1 more channel in addition to a direct email yields an average 2.5X larger response rate.

2. Following Up With Referrals and Auto-Replies

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If you’re in sales, your inbox is probably filled with leads that have auto-replied or responded saying they’re not the right person to engage with.

The vast majority of orgs don’t follow up with these messages, but they frequently present the best opportunities to engage with prospects.


Engaging with leads that left an auto-reply and leads that were referred yield a reply rate of 26%–40%. That’s a 6–10x better reply rate than a standard cold outreach campaign.

We’ve found that welcoming back people after they’re out-of-office as well as asking for referrals (and reaching out to those referred leads!) is a great way to converse and engage with more people.

Here’s a representation of what ScaleRep’s auto-reply and referral mining looks like — We’ve found these tactics to yield a 6–10X better reply rate than cold outreach.

3. Reply Handling

Most teams miss the best opportunities to engage with prospects when they reply — either because they are busy, it’s not immediately actionable, it’s a negative reply, or it gets lost among the dozens of other sales inquiries.

You should try to reply to as many interactions as possible and follow up with timely responses. As members of the marketing and sales community, we know this is a must, but it falls on the wayside of the list of priorities.

ScaleRep has users define responses to common replies in order to initiate further conversations and to make sure leads don’t fall through the cracks. Each reply is catered to engage prospects in a genuine back-and-forth to bring up opportunities to share your product.

A few examples of replies we’ve generated templates for can be seen below.

A snapshot of a list of common replies ScaleRep is tracking on behalf of one of our users.

4. Timely Re-Engagement

At the end of the day, marketing and sales teams connect with a small number of people, and the majority of teams fail to reach their target market. Most teams forget about these leads and continue with prospecting. Our data shows that leads that have been reached out to and have engaged with your content have a much better chance of becoming a paying customer. In fact, ScaleRep data shows that:

Leads which have been previously engaged and nurtured are 2–5x more likely to engage with material and convert to a sales opportunity


From our experience, timely nurturing increases the likelihood that folks will engage with a company and become a qualified sales opportunity. Other data sources also show that nurtured leads spend more money on product and are more likely to be sales-ready.

The Devil’s in the Details

Some of these insights are straightforward and obvious, yet the number of firms that successfully do this is quite small. The amount of time and effort for teams to nurture leads, reply to every potential customer, and mine auto-replies and referrals is huge, even if you know there is real ROI there.

Thankfully, that’s where ScaleRep comes in — if this is something that we can help your company with, we’d love to connect!



We’re being bombarded.




First, how we got here

The way we engage with potential customers has quickly evolved.






Enter Conversational Marketing



Why It Matters









Beat 2% – Increase Your Sales Opportunities


That’s the number of Marketing Qualified Leads that result in a sale.

It’s really no surprise – marketing teams funnel as many leads as possible into the top of the funnel. These are then handed off to sales teams, who are focused on closing new business, but end up spending most of their time chasing these prospects instead of selling.

Enter lead nurturing, one of the best methods for educating potential buyers at scale. From a marketing and sales perspective, it’s difficult to consistently nurture thousands of leads. The process typically takes a lot of time, numerous touchpoints, and requires timeliness and personalization in the communication process. Most organizations either pass on the burden to a large team of sales representatives to nurture leads at limited scalability or end up using marketing to engage at scale with the downside of blasting generic content.

The result? 98% of leads don’t result in a sale. These are missed opportunities with interested leads that just fall through the cracks. In fact, up to 40% of inbound leads never receive any follow-up. The majority end up sitting in CRMs that are untouched, but could amount to a huge increase in sales volume.

What if you could intelligently nurture at scale? Effective lead nurturing can yield a huge increase in sales volume and profit.

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Figure 1: Why invest in lead nurturing


ScaleRep is your sales assistant that’s continually nurturing and qualifying leads, resulting in sales opportunities that otherwise would not have occurred. Your assistant engages with these leads in 1:1 conversation until they’re ready to book a meeting or speak to a sales rep.


Figure 2: An example conversation of your sales assistant


Your ScaleRep assistant interfaces with marketing and sales, as well as your CRM, to nurture and qualify leads. She uses email and voicemail touchpoints to engage with the most ready leads, works behind the scenes to manage these conversations, respond within minutes, and makes sure no leads fall through the cracks.

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Figure 3: ScaleRep interfaces with marketing, sales, and your CRM


After implementing ScaleRep, our clients have massively increased their qualified lead intake, and have reduced the amount of time it takes for their sales reps to chase leads. Leads are now followed up promptly and persistently until sales meetings are set, or leads opt out.

ScaleRep’s assistant also identifies new sales opportunities by managing objection handling. ScaleRep’s assistant takes advantage of replies such as “I’m not the right person, but you should speak with my boss” or “Reach out to me in 6 months”, and engages with the right folks at the right time.



We love helping businesses make connections that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. We believe lead nurturing is the hidden gem that ties your marketing and sales team together – a great lead nurturing process can be the key to great customer interactions and increased revenue. 😉

Interested? Have more questions? Visit our website to read more or book a demo, or e-mail us with any questions:

Building a Successful Prospecting Engine

In this ScaleRep blog, we’ll share new B2B lead prospecting tools and techniques that brought the most success to the teams ScaleRep worked with. Our goal is to enable you with ways to build a sustainable prospecting process that plugs into your nurturing and engagement efforts.
ScaleRep works with sales and marketing teams to continually nurture and qualify leads at scale. Because of our knowledge set, we’re continually asked how companies can put together a prospecting engine that can drive predictable revenue.

After all, it can feel like a daunting task to find people that will be interested in your product.

The good news is that contact data is becoming commoditized; that is, it’s becoming easier and less expensive to find contact information of potential customers. There are more contact databases and more tools than ever before to help. This movement has fundamentally changed the way businesses can lead prospect – they’re moving away from repetitive manual prospecting to technologies and automation tools that can prospect at scale. We’ve leveraged these higher-level trends in creating the following workflow in lead prospecting, as described below.

Step 1- Define Ideal Customer Profile

It’s imperative that you Identify your ideal customer profile(s) – or at least who you think your ideal customers are. Doing so provides a framework around prospecting, measuring results, and improving performance.

What are the personas of the people you are looking to engage with? What titles do they have? Where are they located? What industry are they in?

  1. Come up with a name for each ideal customer profile (ICP) so you can easily refer to it

  2. Define them based on common search fields (their title, industry type, company size etc.)

  3. Find a LinkedIn profile that fits each profile and run a Crystal Knows profile search — this will provide general insight on how each customer profile will generally like to engage, which will provide insight on how to craft messaging for them.

Figure 1: A snapshot from Crystal Knows of our CEO’s profile

Step 2 – Use Contact Databases to Get Started

Depending on your target market, you can easily source a wide range of contacts in your target profile using contact databases. Below are a few options for B2B lead lists that ScaleRep used.

ZoomInfo and Discover Org

Use email verifiers with contact databases!

ScaleRep highly encourages you to pair contact databases with an additional email verifier tool. Each provider updates emails in different cadences, and it is important that you do not send outreach to contacts that are no longer valid, yet still in these databases. Doing so will damage your email deliverability rates and your ability to connect with people!

Snovio and are our go-to email verifier tools. Note that oftentimes, it’s expected that only 20-50% of contacts that are generally pulled from contact databases will be verified emails.

Figure 2: A snapshot of verified emails from a contact database; 53% were deemed deliverable

Step 3 – Other Means for Data – Public Sites

Along with contact databases, there are a few other methods you can use to build a healthy set of contacts by utilizing sources around the internet.

    • Job posting information
      If your product is more appealing to companies that are hiring for a role, you can scrape job postings to find such companies that need that role and reach out.
    • Yellow Pages
      If your ICP includes businesses or services that have local presences (therapists, real estate agents, dentists, retail shops), you can scrape public posts from places like Yellow Pages or Yelp to surface businesses.
    • Crunchbase
      Crunchbase has a plethora of information about companies and different queries that may be useful. It’s a go-to place to surface accounts that have recently raised money, find accounts that are competitors of current clients, etc. Their Crunchbase Pro offering allows you to export company data for such queries.

As an example of the above methods, ScaleRep built an internal tool called GetPostings to scrape public job posts from a few sites, as well as listings off of Yellow Pages.

Figure 3: A snapshot of GetPostings, an internal job posting and Yellow Page scraper.

These methods would yield a list of locations and domains of specific accounts, or companies, that we’re in our target market. Once we had this info, we would use tools like’s email finder and to source contact information from these domains. You’ll be able to pull leads based on different verticals within these companies (contacts in sales, marketing, etc).

Figure 4: A snapshot of’s “Email Finder” option that surfaces emails from specific departments given a domain name

Step 4 – Other Means for Data – Affinity Data

The one source of data we have yet to cover is LinkedIn. LinkedIn most likely holds the largest contact graph, but does not include an abundance of contact information. Nonetheless, there are a few methods to surface contact information given a LinkedIn account that proves helpful in pulling data.

Perhaps the most effective engagement technique we’ve found is to reach out is what we call ‘Affinity Data’. Every company has a unique set of networks that their employees are members of. Largely, marketing and sales teams do not take advantage of these networks. In many cases, there are people who are part of the same networks as you and your coworkers that are also members of your ICP. ScaleRep calls these “affinity groups.” Our data shows that outreach to affinity groups yield on average 6.3x more conversations than cold conversations. Furthermore, this knowledge graph is generally captured on LinkedIn.

A few examples of affinity groups include people in your ICPs that are alumni of the same schools as you/your coworkers, ex-employees of companies you used to work with, people in the same geographic location (if that location is not San Francisco or New York), and people of the same ethnicity. We also found that the more technical a product was and the higher seniority level the ICP (VPs, CXOs), the more effective affinity data was than cold outreach.

Figure 5: An example of a few Affinity Groups ScaleRep has used before

Figure 6: Internal ScaleRep data that shows how much more effective affinity prospects was than cold outreach prospects

ScaleRep would frequently source contact information within key affinity groups and reach out to folks from people in your company also part of that affinity group with a subject line of ‘Fellow X – Y intro’. In short, we found manufacturing connections through affinity groups lead to significantly better results in creating conversations.

To source affinity data, we utilized LinkedIn Sales Navigator and a tool called AnyLeads to find prospects that matched specific affinities.

In Conclusion

Between contact databases, utilizing tools like our GetPostings scraper and Crunchbase, and sourcing affinity data, ScaleRep sourced 3K – 20K verified contacts per month per client.

As you start to build a sizeable database of contacts, your challenges will shift to lead nurturing and qualification. That’s where ScaleRep helps – we’re great at nurturing and qualifying sales opportunities that are sitting in your CRM and are falling through the cracks. As companies focus on key customer personas and leads, we work with them to ensure that their contacts are intelligently being engaged and qualified.


Have questions? Need help? E-mail us and

Happy Prospecting!

Don’t Outsource Your Sales – Outsource the “Busy” Work!

We believe that most companies should not outsource sales.

That is, the core ‘selling’ aspect of how you build relationships and consult people on your product — it’s your proprietary knowledge and secret sauce. There is no one who knows your customer personas better than you, your product better than you, your brand better than you, and how to handle objections better than you.

Doing this sales work effectively is very time-consuming and something’s got to give. This work, after all, is why salespeople are paid! Unfortunately, most sales teams are quick to de-prioritize key top-of-the-funnel workflows in exchange on focusing on the bottom of the funnel. This leads to a dry sales pipeline and money left on the table.

This is where ScaleRep comes in — we create engaging conversations with prospects at the top of the sales funnel. ScaleRep automates the “busy work” behind prospecting and outreaching to your ideal customers with the goal of surfacing opportunities for your sales team to focus on. This allows you and your team to double down on your sales processes and high-value accounts.

What does working with ScaleRep look like?

1. Automatically Engage Leads and Surface Opportunities

ScaleRep engages with leads on your behalf with the goal of surfacing opportunities. Our AI workflows not only reach out to leads but also capture common replies to further engage them. Once a lead responds positively to an inquiry, ScaleRep hands off that lead to your sales team to pick up and start the selling process.

Imagine automatically engaging with thousands of leads every month with no time spent from your team; that’s the power of ScaleRep.

2. Data Prospecting
Sales reps spend a ton of time finding leads in their target market to engage with. ScaleRep has access to over 320 million leads across the world and can find leads within your target market from a variety of sources to engage with.

ScaleRep ingests data from outbound sources, your stale CRM leads that haven’t been touched the last few months, as well as stagnant inbound leads.

3. Engagement on Auto-Pilot

Users typically engage with anywhere from 2,500 to 20,000 leads a month using ScaleRep. They love having the peace of mind to know that ScaleRep is engaging leads day over day, week over week, while preserving brand appearance and voice, and removing there team from the back-and-forth communications.

4. Inbox Filtering
Our goal is to remove talented sales reps and growth teams from the mundane work of prospecting and living in their email or mail merger. Your time and talent should be spent on more lucrative tasks. Therefore, ScaleRep abstracts as much noise as possible from your teams by handling common objections, auto-replies and referrals, and negative emails. All your team sees are interactions from opportunities interested in learning more about your product.


While you stay focused on closing deals, we’ll stay focused on surfacing your best leads. Interested in learning more? Feel free to email us at, or request a demo today!


Analyzing 500k Touchpoints to Boost Your Sales Engagement

Over the last year, ScaleRep has had the pleasure in working with a variety of B2B users — SAAS businesses, services, large enterprises, Y-Combinator companies, and startups in the pre-release stage.

After analyzing a subset of over a half million touchpoints, we’re excited to share some of the interesting macro-trends and conclusions we found — you might pick up some tips that can work magic!


1. Profile your target market!
Sure, it may seem obvious — but have you really done it?

Touchpoints that took the target profile into account saw an average 70% increase in reply rates. This increase in reply rate was not normally distributed across users — companies that did comprehensive target market profiles beforehand saw a minimal increase in conversion, while other users who didn’t do this yet saw a ~1.5x return.

ScaleRep walks users through understanding the profiles of their target market — how do they interact? Are they forward-looking, skeptical, or optimistic? Do they prefer communication that’s quick-and-to-the-point or a good short story? This information is valuable in crafting outreach content that taps into the style your target market would like to engage in.


2. Retarget Your Past Leads!
Retargeting leads yielded an average 15% increase in meetings.

While most companies tend to discount past leads sitting idle in their CRMs, ScaleRep users have integrated ScaleRep with their CRM to automate retargeting. We find most users see success in retargeting leads who never replied to previous outreach, or retargeting leads with lukewarm responses.


3. Cross-Channel Targeting
Campaigns including at least 1 more channel of interaction in addition to email yielded an average 2.5X increase in response rate.

In general, it’s 2x more effective to send 2 emails and leave a voicemail/LinkedIn message than it is to send 4 emails to a lead.


4. Auto-Replies and Referrals

The ScaleRep platform captures auto-replies and engages with leads to surface referrals within the same organization. As you start engaging with your target market, you’ll see a ton of auto-replies and referrals. Replies are a data mine of information — they share when someone will be back in the office, whom else to reach out to while they’re out, and oftentimes connect you with the right person. Ironically, sales development teams don’t place an emphasis on auto-replies and referrals.


5. The Hidden Gold in Affinity Campaigns
On average, affinity campaigns yield a 3.5x better response rate than an average cold outreach email.

ScaleRep walks users through determining (1) who is the right person at a company to outreach with, and (2) what networks they can leverage at scale. We help manufacture connections within these networks to yield better interactions. We call these affinity campaigns — how can you connect with people in your target market who are pre-disposed to interact with you?

Everyone is part of networks, and we find that people frequently do not leverage them to engage with prospects. This includes alumni of the same university, alumni of previous companies, companies in the same geographic region as you, people with the same ethnicity, people with the same title, etc.

And there you have it! We would love to hear your feedback, or any tips that you’ve found effective as well!

Want more information? Have questions?

Contact Us:

A Long-Tail Sales Tale!

We see the same sales tale.

You’ve got a list of dream clients — the “golden accounts” for your firm.

You’re navigating deep into their org charts, building relationships with the right people, and generating meetings with the right stakeholders and decision makers.

But, it isn’t long before these golden accounts start taking a large chunk of you and your sales team’s time. You’re finally seeing success, but at the opportunity cost of missed follow-ups and engagements with other potential clients. Retargeting and outreach dwindle, and lead sourcing begins to diminish.

The result: money‘s left on the table!

The Long-Tail

Most sales teams rightfully prioritize navigating key accounts and working with qualified opportunities. That’s where a sales team’s strengths lie — relationship building with the right people and guiding people through the value proposition of your product.

But, they usually have a much larger addressable market to tackle, what we call the “long-tail”. This is the idea that the vast majority of business opportunities lie outside of the golden accounts your sales team is focusing on. Maybe you have 200 golden accounts that your sales team is focused on, and maybe you have an addressable market of 20K, 200K, or 2 million other accounts your team could target.

It’s difficult to cover 200K accounts effectively; there’s a lot of coordination and work involved here. And at a certain point, hiring more sales folks to tackle this market doesn’t yield healthy ROI. Additionally, each additional sales rep on average produces diminishing results, meaning that at some point it really doesn’t make sense to hire more reps!

How Do You Tackle the Long-Tail?

  1. Prioritize — Are you currently focusing sales resources effectively? Are there more lucrative tools and tactics that you could be using?
  2. Analyze — What’s your perceived ROI per salesperson? How does ROI diminish per sales head?
  3. Assembly-Line — How can you engage with the long-tail effectively? What’s the best way to engage with this market at scale? How can you build your own assembly-line to set up your team with qualified opportunities?

ScaleRep and the Long-Tail Sales Tale

ScaleRep empowers clients by surfacing opportunities and set meetings from the long-tail of accounts firms work with. We do this by managing and automating smart outreach across multiple channels on your team’s behalf.

Our clients love working with us because ScaleRep effectively sets up conversations with interested customers while freeing up 20+ hours for teams to focus on golden accounts and building relationships with the right people.

Want to be part of the smart-sales movement?
E-mail us at, or book a demo today!

The New Assembly Line in Sales and Marketing

A 2013 Harvard Business Review study found that knowledge workers (individual contributors) spend an average of 41% of their time on discretionary or menial tasks that could be handled by other parties.

41% is an understatement for sales, marketing, and growth teams! After observing and interviewing more than 3 dozen sales and marketing people across different company sizes and industries, we’ve found that ~70% of time spent by entry-level salespersons (SDRs/BDRs) was on managing email responses and mail merge software, CRM work, and social media outreach. Additionally, this is by-and-large work that no salesperson (or anyone!) wants to do; it’s mundane! in other words, firms pay $100–150K net per SDR/BDR per year to largely perform administrative work. Only ~30–40% of an SDR/BDR’s time was spent on targeted outreach and qualifying/selling to potential clientele.

Sales/Marketing is Currently an Artisanal Activity

Through our work, ScaleRep has witnessed how teams still largely take an artisanal approach to their sales/marketing outreach. That is, the same individual is responsible for crafting messaging to leads, outreaching to them across multiple mediums, managing responses and outreach campaigns, and trying to set meetings and qualify potential clients. This is akin to a lone craftsman building an entire automobile — it’s hard for teams to focus on a specific task, focus on the most important work, and consistently execute.

ScaleRep and your Assembly Line

ScaleRep helps sales and marketing firms take a more assembly-line approach to sales and marketing, where ScaleRep serves as the top layer in the assembly line as the engagement engine for your team. This approach yields a more scalable processes, better focus for companies’ workforce, significant cost savings, and more importantly, better results in lead quantity and quality!

ScaleRep manages the entire top-of-the-funnel on behalf of your SDR/BDR, marketing, and growth teams. Our service uses software automation, AI, and human input to source data, outreach to folks across multiple touchpoints on your behalf, execute re-engagement campaigns, and send set meetings and high-signal leads to your sales and marketing teams. It’s as-if your sales/marketing team had a CRM and mail-merging sales software tool without ever having to spend time using and managing the software — the work is done on their behalf.

Companies who work with ScaleRep have essentially completely removed themselves from the lead sourcing and engagement process; ScaleRep can engage more effectively with leads at better scale. Now, our clients have shifted their teams’ focus to qualifying, selling, and engaging the highest signal leads and key accounts. This, after all, should be the core contribution of your SDR/BDR and sales team — actually selling and qualifying folks, not sourcing data, managing emails, and updating Salesforce.

Interested in finding out more?

Writing emails is an art! 5 tips that’ll increase your reply rates & avoid spam

We’re bombarded with emails,

and yet it remains as the most effective tool to connect with people. At ScaleRep, we’ve studied the methodology of sending effective emails?—?not only is email very effective in reaching thousands of people a day, but it gives us data to determine next steps in connecting with clients.

In essence, the key is to write brief and concise emails that provide value. Here are 5 quick tips to help you towards the path of great email writing!

1. Value is everything

Community is the new brand. And people join communities because it brings them value! 2 questions to ask yourself as you write your emails:

· Does every sentence contribute a point? Reduce clutter to prevent the value you bring from being diluted or even worst, completely missed.

· What information can you provide to the person you are reaching out that they would find interesting? What are their competitors doing, or what are general trends may they not know about? What are some examples or case studies of your work?

2. Send plain-text emails over html/css emails

We’ve noticed that companies use html/css templates in their email marketing and sales campaigns. There’s a great deal of information about this on the web (great example here), but in short, html emails had up to a 37% decrease in open rates.

In most cases, html/css templated emails can easily be converted to plain text emails. We always advise to do so, and to include some level of personalization to your messages, even if it’s simply the person’s name. (‘Hi {FirstName},”).

3. Short, relevant subject lines

You need a hook! Without an intriguing subject line, there is a very low chance that anyone will give your email the time of day. According to ContactMonkey, subject lines with more than 2 words were opened 15% less. Additionally, Email Institute has found subject lines that evoke a sense of urgency and exclusivity get up to 22% higher open rates.

Here’s a fun exercise: go to your SPAM folder in your personal email?—?see what those subject lines look like? Now go to your inbox. What’s the difference? In general, subject lines are shorter in your inbox and are spot-on with the value that they deliver to you. Mimic those subject lines! Avoid emojis, questions, and offers/selling phrasing in your subject line.

4. Micro-Target

The marketing world tends to throw thousands of contacts into a list and send those folks the same email. ScaleRep has seen all of its success from precisely not doing that!

Instead, we preach what we call ‘micro-targeting.’
Look, there’s little chance that everyone in a list of 2,000 emails has the same needs and background; it’s likely that within such a list there are 3–10 subgroups where the value your services provide are nuanced. ScaleRep aims to create campaigns with no more than 300 people?—?this allows us to cater messaging specifically to those 300 folks. This yields a significant difference in open rates and reply rates.

For instance, we don’t create a campaign with 3,000 lawyers across the United States. Instead, we’ll create 10 campaigns of 300 lawyers, each of which is in the same jurisdiction and in the same field of law. That way, our message can be more catered for the litigators in San Francisco vs. the family lawyers in San Antonio.

5. Don’t continually pester

No one enjoys being pestered?—?that’s when users hit the spam button. ScaleRep believes in balance and have found it is very effective to follow up with our prospects, but to not pester them.

· Limit email sequences to 3–4 touch points over 9–14 days. If they don’t respond, simply reach out to them next quarter.

· Use other mediums to reach out to folks if they signal any interest. Use LinkedIn, leave voicemails, target them on social media, or follow up with a phone call! It’s more effective to send someone 4 emails and reach them on LinkedIn afterwards if they’ve opened the email than it is to send them a 5th email.

Questions? Comments? Would love to hear your thoughts!

The Hourglass?—?and 3 Keys to Mastering Sales/Marketing Engage

As we approach 2019, forces are shifting the way companies market themselves and execute sales. And as always, it’s those that embrace change, adapt, and learn quickly that put their companies ahead of the curve.

What’s Driving Change in Sales + Marketing?

Subscriptions and Value-Experiencing Trials

The SAAS, subscription-based model allows companies to better service clients throughout the lifecycle of the relationship?—?it’s not a new concept, but it is becoming more prevalent. With it comes a new strategy where firms look to funnel in potential customers into their platforms quickly via free/discounted trials and pilots. This allows prospective clients to to get a sense of the value of the product and more easily create fans.

The rise of growth hackers

Businesses now collect and analyze their own sales and marketing data to constantly improve the way they engage with people. This has led to leaner sales and marketing orgs with an emphasis on scaling the right engagement channels instead of employing a series of ‘spray-and-pray’ sales tactics. Marketing and sales leaders are now more akin to ‘growth hackers’, looking for new channels and guerrilla-like tactics to grow their teams’ effectiveness and engagement.

Engagement at higher frequency.

Whereas teams relied on sales reps to repetitively prospect, outreach, and engage with leads, technology has proven more effective at these tasks. Automation tools now exist in reaching out to the right folks at the right time with personalized content, with humans intervening only at the necessary steps?—?this is what ScaleRep deems the ‘growth assembly line’.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

So, how can teams utilize these forces for their benefit? What principles can we keep top-of-mind to best grow our companies?

The New Sales Funnel

Subscription-based models coupled with trials/pilots have changed what the typical ‘sales funnel’ looks like. It used to be that the classic funnel marketing/sales teams tracked include steps starting at awareness/initial engagement and ended with the purchase of a good.

That’s changed. Sales funnels today are actually hourglasses:

There are now 2 parts to the new hourglass model: (1) providing direct value to someone through a ‘soft-sell’ and initial purchase, and (2) constantly engaging and retaining current customers to become loyal users.

Trials and Pilots are the soft-sells to easier route prospects into your world and have them directly experience your value, but it’s now half the battle. Marketing and sales teams need to shift resources towards the second part of this funnel?—?the engagement that occurs during the soft-sell process. Truth-be-told, this post-soft-sell engagement doesn’t stop once someone goes from trial to customer?—?it’s an ongoing venture. In our subscription-based world where customers pay periodically, companies need to focus on providing value as well and winning their clients over every month, every quarter.

Consistent Marketing, Growth, and Sales Stories

A frequent trap we see in organizations is the siloing of each of these 3 departments. In the new hourglass engagement funnel, these perceived different departments are more closely intertwined and need to interact effectively! And because technology makes it a lot easier to reach more people at scale with personalized messaging, the lines between marketing and sales becomes even more blurred.

It’s so important that your marketing and sales teams are in complete sync and are aligned with your growth strategies. Do your teams know when the other is interacting with leads? Are handoffs happening such that no lead is falling through the cracks? Is the messaging between teams consistent? How are client success managers engaging with clients once a lead becomes a customer?

Test, Test, Test!

There is no guaranteed path in successful customer engagement and conversion from prospects to clients and lifelong brands. But the best way to increase your odds at finding successful ways to do so is through testing different tactics and different outreach channels. You will get unexpected results, you will come across strategies that are counter-intuitive, and you will come across a few strategies that work?—?and definitely don’t work! So long as you improve your metrics through calculated tests, you can start to increase and predict conversion in every part of its sales pipeline.

Scale what works!

Good testing will yield good methods of engagement, your target customer personas, and messaging that works! All these varying factors can be tied with analytics to paint a story of what yields the highest returns.

Do more of what works, stop doing things that aren’t as effective. Try new tests. And repeat. In the end, organizations that are made up of the best learners will be those that withstand the tests of time and will best utilize the new hourglass funnel.


ScaleRep helps teams build and automate their engagement machine, which serves as the top layer in the new hourglass sales/marketing funnel. Our platform manages all activity at the top of this funnel with essentially zero time needed on the part of our clients.

Our clients love working with us because we replace anywhere from 30%-100% of the top-of-the-funnel workflow and have better results than in-house SDR team, with better ability to test messaging and cadences.

Interested in learning more? E-mail us at, or schedule a demo to learn about the ScaleRep platform!