Creating a new lead generation source.

Company: Series A Startup

Context:

The company offered an open-source tool widely used in amongst software developers, but faced challenges in converting these users into paid customers. With several powerful features available exclusively on the paid tier, there was significant untapped revenue potential.

Painpoints

  • Unidentified Users

    Due to the large open source community using the tool both personally and professionally, the company lacked a methodology for identifying potential commercial leads.

  • Outdated User Information

    The user database was not up-to-date—with no reliable way to track companies that used our open-source tool, leading to missed opportunities.

  • Manual Processes

    Initial attempts to identify potential paid users were time-consuming and lacked the ability to qualify leads for specific companies that showed up in our free user database.

Results

  • New sales leads: successfully generated over 300 new leads per month, leading to increased demos

  • Updated CRM: throughout the process, I was able to update the CRM with new potential champions for our current customers

  • Streamlined lead generation process: through developing targeted boolean searches and using Google Sheets, I created a more efficient method for identifying these leads.

How I Helped

Ideation of possible channels

  • Inbound leads were coming through a sales demo booking link, but there was little traction as far as an outbound sales motion.

  • The open source community surrounding the free product was a testament to the value of the tool, but there was hesitation around over-selling.

  • I discovered companies that had fully integrated our OSS tool into their tech stack (by way of job postings). This created a rich, untapped source of sales leads.

Prototyped & tested methodology

  • While looking through individual job postings was highly manual and time-consuming, I was able to come up with a few targeted boolean strings to scan job descriptions and expedite the process.

  • We also needed a way to cross-reference these identified companies against our current customers. I created a Google Sheet template that could quickly surface the companies we hadn’t yet contacted.

Targeted outreach campaign

  • Through using sales prospecting tools, we identified potential champions at each target company.

  • We adjusted our existing cold email sequence, utilizing hyper-personalization to create a campaign targeted to 1) build connections with users through sharing resources and 2) introduce users to a free trial of our paid tier.

Tools

  • Vitally.io

  • Google Sheets

  • Mailshake

  • Seamless.ai

  • Google Suite

  • Lusha