Video Transcript
Hey, this is Mike from Amplion!
I get to work with a lot of commercial teams in the life science space. And one of the things that I often hear from sales or inside sales team members is “I want to know who I should be reaching out to right now. Give me that list of hot leads that’s really relevant to my products and services that I’m selling – and provide me that list in a timely way, so I can be the first person to reach out to these prospects.”
So I wanted to walk through today how to do really targeted prospecting based on your role as either a sales or inside sales team member.
So let’s start off at the top. We always like to begin with a really clean filter that incorporates all the key criteria for our ideal customer – specifically things like what are all the technical criteria that we care about – specific therapeutic areas, test methods, drug classes, et cetera, all those scientific attributes that help us focus on the right prospects.
Secondarily, what are the firmographic criteria? Am I targeting pharma? Am I targeting academic, or both? Specific territories, for example. Or big pharma versus emerging biopharma organization. So a lot of different ways to slice and dice that firmographic criteria.
And then lastly, the timing signals – which drug development stage, for example, do I care about? Do I want to focus on organizations that are in the clinical phase, preclinical discovery, basic research, et cetera. So these are the types of filters that we like to narrow down so that you have a really targeted focus to build this prospect list around.
Once we’ve applied that filter, we can review that matching contact list, make sure that we refine it more carefully for the titles and jobs that we care about. Finally we can export that list and then execute our outreach campaign accordingly.
So let’s dive in here. In this example, I decided that I am a sales person who’s focused on the east coast U.S. territories. So I’ve applied a list of 14 U.S. states that that are in my territory. And I’m focusing only on the disease areas of oncology and immunology. I can get more narrow if I want to, but I’m going pretty wide here. And then I said, I only care about those programs that I know are either in that preclinical phase or discovery phase.
So I’ve applied a couple of event filters here to get me a narrow window of folks that are working in those phases of drug development. And then lastly, I’ve applied an evidence date filter here of the last 30 days. So the idea here is that once a month or once a week, every couple of weeks, I can very easily come back into Amplion and recreate this list, so I always have a fresh target list of prospects to go after.
So now that we’ve applied this filter on the top here, we’re looking at a list of contacts.
You can see here that we’ve extracted from our various evidence sources like PubMed articles or NIH grants. We’ve extracted the exact matching events that match this criteria.
If I look at this first individual, I can see this individual actually just released some discovery stage results. I can see all the organizations that they worked with on this research. I can see that they did actually match the oncology therapeutic area that I cared about, and I can dive deep into those details if I want to, to learn more.
Let’s say at this point that you’ve qualified this person – looks good enough for you or this group, these types of events look good enough. How do I further refine this?
I’m already focusing on the territory that I care about. Perhaps in my role, the titles that I care about, the roles that I care about are translational or molecular biology, or just scientists in general, you have the ability to come into this view and add a string for any one of those criteria. So if you want to look for translational folks, simply put in a string like that and hit apply. Let’s say in this case, I want to just go after everybody who’s a scientist – those are my ideal customers to go after. I can apply scientists to this list, reduce that down to folks that have that scientific role. We’ve created a group of titles that essentially matched that.
And now I’ve narrowed my list down further. What you’ll see in this final list is that we have an email address for each person. So you have the ability to directly email those individuals. If those individuals have actually published their email, you’ll see it listed here with the little green icon. If they never published an email, however, we predict what their likely email is based on other email conventions that we’ve seen at this organization. You always have the option to choose if you want to include the only the event based emails or the predicted emails as well.
The last thing that I’ll show you is that we’ve also identified this individual on LinkedIn. That’s actually how we get their title and location. So as a sales person, you have the ability now to both use email and LinkedIn messaging as a channel to reach out to these folks.
I’ll pull up an example here of Janine Buonato at this organization. I have a direct link to their profile. I can review that and I can confirm, yes, this person still is working at this organization.
What I love about this is that this profile here, there was very little in the way of information that’s going to help you identify whether this person’s relevant to you.
So, for example, there’s nothing here standing out that shows that this person works in oncology or preclinical phase. So using LinkedIn or Sales Navigator is not really going to get you to that target list of folks that you should be reaching out to. But because we’ve applied these filters to the evidence source, I can confirm that Janine actually has worked in the oncology space. I can see that there’s a preclinical results disclosure or any of these other technical criteria.
The last thing I’ll show you here is that now that I have this list that I am ready to act on, I can select that list and add all of these leads to Salesforce – if I’m using Salesforce. Or, I can export these contacts into a spreadsheet. I like to encourage folks to export this with the matching event details. And let me show you why.
When you’re doing outreach to a new prospect, it’s really great to be able to highly personalize that email, but doing that on a manual basis can be very time consuming.
So when you export these contacts from Amplion, what you’re going to see is that we’ve included all the information that you need here to have a highly personalized and relevant outreach. But you can do that at scale using whatever mail merge platform or marketing automation platform that you’re using.
So in this case, I can see I know that these individuals work at AbbVie. I have a direct link to their LinkedIn profile so I can reach out to them. I’ve also have the event title of the last time they published as well as a number of other criteria like diseases, biomarkers, test methods, drug classes, all of these individual fields can be used as personalization tokens.
One really popular approach that I like to recommend to commercial teams is if you’re sending a prospect an email, I like to let them know right away in the subject of that email that I know exactly what they’re working on. So I might use a disease or a drug name, or perhaps a biomarker or a specific test method. Something really concise in that subject that’s going to let them know that I’m really familiar with what they’re working on. And then secondarily in the body of the email, I might say something like… Dear, Dr. so-and-so I recently came across your publication titled XYZ. You can see, we provided the whole title here of that that publication. That really is going to establish a lot of credibility and relevance for this prospect.
Our customers who are following this approach have reported back to me that they’re seeing a two times increase in their open rate of those emails, as well as a two times increase in the reply rate of those emails. So very targeted, personalized approach to doing this outreach. But still doing that at scale and yielding a very positive reply.
I would encourage all of you folks on the sales and inside sales team, anybody who’s involved with lead generation to try this specific approach.
Reach out to us so we can help you design those filters exactly the way you want. We can walk you through these workflows and make sure that you’re off to the races and moving quickly. Hope this helps and happy hunting!