Close your eyes, and imagine you’re in a crowd of thousands of people. Five of those people have $1000 for you. The rest have nothing.
Your job is to find those five people among the thousands.
Where do you even start?
It’s not so different when you’re finding your ideal leads.
You put out a lead magnet, and get a bunch of signups. Cool. What’s next?
The conventional wisdom is that you do a drip campaign and get that lead signed up.
Sure, drip campaigns work – but what if you could identify ideal leads the moment they sign up to your newsletter, or download your ebook?
Enter Machine Learning.
In truth, machines don’t really learn. They just know what you tell them. But, there is some really smart tech available that builds knowledge in the background. It’s easier than ever to apply that to real-world, revenue generating scenarios.
My friend Ari Meisel came up with a way of using machine learning to look at your current ‘best’ customers, and find what makes them unique.
By creating some rules around what to look for, and adding a rich data source to draw from, the machine can screen potential customers to see if they fit in your ‘ideal’.
To get that ‘enriched information’, we use Clearbit – which holds a multitude of data attributes about individuals and companies.
Let’s say you sell widgets, and you can see from your current customer data that your ideal customer:
-has a job title contains specific keywords (e.g. Purchasing Manager)
-lives in the United States
-works at a company with >$1m in revenue
This is where machine learning comes in. We use a tool called Monkeylearn to check the leads as they come in, and match them against the data found in Clearbit to find the datapoints that you’re looking for.
You then get a notification in email or Slack, or Trello (or a bunch of other different options) when you get that one needle-in-a-haystack customer from your marketing efforts.
From there, you can reach out to that lead and start your sales process.
All of this is done with just a few apps, and some automation know-how.
Of course, I’ve turned this into an Automation Hack, which you can add to your marketing arsenal.
It’s not going to work for every industry – it works best with B2B markets, so I encourage you to get in touch with me to let me know your use case and we can work out if it’s the best path for you.
In the meantime, think about what makes your ideal customers unique. Who knows, the data might tell a different story to what you’d expect.