How to Prioritize Your Hottest Leads w/ Philip Schweizer [Episode 455]

Philip Schweizer, CEO of SalesWings, a sales engagement company based in Switzerland. In this episode, we discuss the value of the inbound lead, and what steps leaders should take to ensure they receive the treatment they deserve.

Key Takeaways

• Philip started selling at age 7. He took a shopping cart of items from the cellar to a village yard sale and sold almost all of it. He had fun, and saw he had a talent. After college he sold solar phone charging bags. He enjoyed working with people.
• Philip started SalesWings as a way to help smaller companies make the best use of technology for sales. SalesWings prioritizes strong sales leads for an organization. He wanted to provide a simple alternative to earlier solutions.
• SalesWings looks for buying signals of customers, through their website activity. Philip explains the principles, and application for B2B and B2C.
• SalesWings integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and marketing solutions like MailChimp, Sendloop, etc., to identify leads initially.
• Philip explains some of the tracking methods used to identify level of interest.
• SalesWings has introduced the world’s very first LinkedIn Inmail lead tracking. Philip explores how it works.
• Philip gives an example of tracking Inmail, and how that identifies interest, and improves responsiveness.
• The clients for SalesWings are companies as small as one-person, and as large as 5K employees with an outbound sales team. The sweet spot is companies of 30-300 people who look to get a better view on the strongest leads, for less cost.
• Simplicity makes the system more accessible to sales teams, without spending their time on analysis of leads. Some of the larger platforms take too much time to score leads. SalesWings works in real time, telling who is hot right now.
• The leads from SalesWings are top-of-funnel. Philip discusses other technologies available that provide complementary functions mid-funnel.
• Philip discusses the role of AI in sales. The last mile for AI is to translate data into actionable information for the company.
• SalesWings claims a loyal customer base of people who need to prioritize leads quickly.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul  0:00  

This is Andy. Joining me today is Philip Schweitzer, CEO of Sales Wings. It’s a sales engagement company. It’s based in Switzerland. 

Philip Schweizer  2:20  

Hey Andy, very happy to be here looking forward to it.

Andy Paul  3:07  

So, take a minute, introduce yourself a little bit more, and tell us how you got your start in sales.

Philip Schweizer  3:15  

Yeah, so um, so you’ve already said I’m based in Switzerland here. I spent a year in the United States when I was 17. And I think I was about seven years old when I did my first sale. And we had a bunch of stuff in the cave and in the cellar. And my mom said, there’s this kind of yard sale right going on in the village and if you want, you can go and you can sell that stuff. And I said, okay, well, why not Saturday afternoon or something? So I packed a huge trolley that my mom would use to go shopping and I put all this stuff in, you know, kind of have an old wallet to some kind of a clock for my granddad, you know, that kind of stuff. And I sold practically everything in like three hours, and it was so much fun. So I knew I had a talent, right? But you know, it wasn’t my dream or laughter to get a good salesperson but I think I realized very quickly that if you don’t know how to sell and how to sell yourself and your ideas right and convince what you’re passionate about, you’re not going to go very far. 

Andy Paul  7:38  

Okay, well, I mean, and there are a lot of tracking tools out there in terms of people, opening emails. So, you’re doing something beyond just looking at that though, right? What is your algorithm?

Philip Schweizer  8:02  

That’s right. So yeah, so when we looked at building our lead scoring we obviously started doing research into buying signals of customers and it’s not the sheer quantity of data that you’re putting into the algorithm which will determine how accurate your prediction is. If you need a certain quantity you need a certain historical data about leads buying signals, but you definitely also need a high quality of that data. Is it reliable? So as opposed to bigger predictive analytics suites such as lattice engines or inferring we uniquely focused on website activity? So our customers need to have a website which is informative which can play a role in the buying decision process of the customer which is often the case today. Why why uniquely website activity. So it seems to be from what we found in our research being a frequent point of information for customers. There’s a strong difference between how people search websites over time, especially as they approach a purchase decision. And if you look at your commercial department, marketing and sales, a lot of efforts coming from marketing will end up on the website. Sure, you know, you’re putting Google ads, you’re, you’re active on LinkedIn, you’re doing newsletters, all kinds of stuff. Leads ending up on the website are already to be prioritized in some sorts. And out of those leads, you know, we’re effectively pretty good at filtering out the top 5% leads. So we focus on our website, website activities we monitor leads, website activity around the clock.

Andy Paul  10:01  

And you’re monitoring not just, I presume not just serving loitering time on a page, but you’re also measuring a form that they download, or visiting the site and looking at the pages themselves?

Philip Schweizer  10:15  

No, we look at forms. We look at interaction with pages, we look at trends, you know, how is its frequency? How much time will they spend over time, and then we compare that to the rest of the lead base. And there’s different applications. So, of course, typically, b2b where you have where we have a lot of sales teams. But we see very interesting b2c use cases as well, you know, take executive education on where you get a lot of a lot of inbound leads a lot of inbound requires modern organizations who have sales teams have a lot of revenues using Salesforce using complex marketing automation suites where the sales people still get just lists of contacts they get lists of contacts and they they say okay so make your make your calls they will never be able to reach out to all the all the people you’ve come across those sales winks instead of saying you know, Mister Mister outbound rep, here’s here’s 50 leads from today and yesterday we’re going to say your 50 leads and those are the five hottest ones you should start with. 

Andy Paul  11:29  

So just take a step back just so people understand they’re listening and watching this that I just had to throw. The simplest way to do that is sales wings is to have this or predictive lead scoring because you don’t need to invest in Marketo or HubSpot or any of the other applications you talked about latticework and so on. 

Philip Schweizer  12:03  

So, we use email as a way to identify leads initially. So, we integrate, if we have a company interested in using you know benefiting from lead scoring we look at what they have in place so sales things will simply integrate with Gmail and outlook integrates with any sort of email marketing solution now you know, you name them, MailChimp and loop etc. We integrate with any kind of third party form

Andy Paul  12:54  

Okay, so, just gotta make sure I understand. So, you first are gonna identify through email?

Philip Schweizer  13:13  

Right. So that’s really kind of IP tracking, right? And if we identify you through a newsletter, for example, in a week, we know you’ve been on the website before that. So we’ll be able to say, as opposed to someone who’s just checking in, you’ve been showing strong interest recently. So you should be called first.

Andy Paul  19:55  

So we will be making it better. I think that many people would say that their ROI on Salesforce. depend on these additional applications.

Philip Schweizer  20:03  

Exactly. It’s one of their key selling points. So they have a CRM partner program they’re integrating ready with Salesforce dynamics. They’re planning to do that with NetSuite. So then they’re going that direction. So we very much over will be one of the first ones who are a bit outside of the CRM that can offer something like that. But with LinkedIn agreeing to it. 

Andy Paul  20:39  

So for people listening, want to explain who your ideal client profile is or what your ideal client profile is?

Philip Schweizer  21:09  

Our biggest company today has about 5000 employees. They have an outbound sales team for 30 people who need to prioritize every day and a very large number of leads. So we have a use case there. I’d say our sweet spot is probably companies between 30 and 200 for 300 people, right? Who who looks to get a better view on the strongest leads, who have technology in place. Want to decrease time to implementation of a platform and who does not want or can know for a Marketo or part off for whatever reason.

Andy Paul  22:00  

Well, interesting. Do you have clients that actually have Marketo? 

Philip Schweizer  22:29  

And so yes, the answer is yes, we have customers who do use for example, Salesforce marketing. Cloud and other marketing automation platforms. So they will take hours to calculate lead scores and large large databases salesman says real time, we were proud to say that we can qualify up to 5000 leads in less than 10 milliseconds, which is pretty credible. But we’re able to do that if required. But there’s a real time effect of it. And there is the predictive side to it, which is that sales swings will not just build a score. So if you have 20,000 20,000 leads, let’s say, we’re not giving you the 3000 best leads, because that doesn’t make any sense. We’re telling you who’s hot right now. And then they’ll turn cold. 

Andy Paul  24:26  

Yeah i mean iit’s a sales focused lead scoring if you will so you know on one hand you think normally that will reduce or the finger pointing about a marketing tongue sales gave you all these good leads and sales saying yeah they they weren’t doing good at all.

Philip Schweizer  24:43  

That’s right.

Andy Paul  24:46  

Yeah. So they understand what you’re doing then with sales swings, it’s more really sort of top of funnel, hot, warm cold as opposed to sort of lower level in the funnel, once they’ve engaged once they’re in their buying process, and you’ve engaged with them as a salesperson, then, you know, there are these other platforms, I said, they’re more like, content that you provided, you know, clear slide others like a name, that then measure the engagement based on what you’ve sent them. Yeah. Is that an area that you see folding in at some point or playing with or how’s that fit into your plan?

Philip Schweizer  26:12  

There will be hopefully because there should be and I read this article who automates workflows and they see how bigger organizations have over 2000 apps across the organization and that doesn’t have to be just sales sure, but the trend is definitely having more apps which is some sort of speak to children which are complimentary so you know, to like clear slide or docks and I see fully complimentary in a sales stack to to sales wings, okay. And yes, you’re right. 

Andy Paul  27:20  

I just want to make sure that people listening we’re clear in their own minds, where do you sell wings? Because, you know, that is as you talk about it is a big issue. I mean, you’ve got companies let’s say they are a company where they are actually providing lists to the SDR. So in some cases, the SDR teams have to build their own list, right.It’s sort of the holy grail that a lot of companies are trying to come up with products that use machine learning AI and so on, I think we’ll see a bunch of these in 2017 selling now trying to help people in sales prioritize what they should do next.

Philip Schweizer  28:20  

The role or importance of AI and technology should take an hour in our daily sales. We’ve talked about data that you’re putting into your algorithm, right? I read an article about a data scientist, I can’t remember which company he is working for but one of the marketing analytics companies he called the most difficult task, but he called the last mile is to translate data into actionable meaningful data for the company. So you know, let me let me let me make an example. You don’t need to tell a sales guy that this CEO is a better lead than an intern. But you can come up with a very complicated algorithm, which will actually tell you hey, by the way, this is the CEO with 95% accuracy. He’s a better lead than the intern. You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, don’t get me wrong. Sales wings have a very strong technology in its back end. Sure. But what we’re coming up with is not is it is what it is. It’s pointing the sales guy to the best leads, right? And it helps them take that next decision, but we’re not telling the sales guy you need to call now. This lead. We’re going to tell him out of these hundred, look at these five, maybe these 10 and then you decide who you should be calling back.

Andy Paul  30:21  

Well, that is part of the thing, is if you’re in an environment, as you know, one of the statistics you see out there that the SDR has to reach out up to 18 times to get somebody, that’s something that’s on their list. So yeah, it’s a lot, right. So if you’re gonna give somebody a bit of information to say okay, in this mess of work I have to do and to keep track of and I know I can be automated myself. cadences but nonetheless I still need to be able to say okay, what do I do first today? And exactly and I think having that information to me if I was in that role is hugely valuable.

Philip Schweizer  31:13  

We see it and we see good results from our customers so we have a very loyal customer base as well. I mean, sending very important emails to a very important number of leads and we give him that view on great leads, for example, which before he did not have. So, as you say, I mean, 18 times definitely doesn’t surprise me at all that you know, I have SDRs reach out to me every second week. 

Andy Paul  32:28  

Yeah, I’m gonna try lots lots of different things. 

Philip Schweizer  33:02  

So then you should use our all brand new pipe Drive Integration.

Andy Paul  33:06  

I was reading about that. Yeah. We’ll talk about that.

Philip Schweizer  33:17  

That’s one of my favorite ones. Yeah.

Andy Paul  33:19  

Yeah. So yeah, we use that for you from booking meetings and for booking people to come on the show. So that’s worked out very well for us. 

Andy Paul  38:46  

All right. Well, thank you again and friends. Thank you for spending this time with us. Remember to make it part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success and one easy way to do that. Make sure you join all my conversations with leading business experts like my guests. Philip Schweizer, who gave us expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. So thanks for joining me and until next time this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.