Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly?

Posted by Terpaholic on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @01:59PM
from the ask-hn dept.

I'm at that stage where the product is built, and it's time to reach out to leads. However, it's getting overwhelming quickly.

I was wondering if anyone has a system or process for managing cold email or cold-call leads? Right now I basically have a massive Excel spreadsheet and am considering Boomerang for receipt/click management. I feel there has to be a more methodical and steady way to reach out to hundreds of leads while maintaining each thread & progress state properly.

In my particular case, I'm currently cold-emailing but depending on the larger scale results could switch to cold-call.

( 11 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by ilkkao on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @02:58PM (#7806168)

I once met a guy in Ruby meetup who has built https://www.myphoner.com/ Sounds like it's something you are looking for.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by dennybritz on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @10:52PM (#7808148)

Have you looked at Radius (http://radius.com/)? Never used it, but recently came across it while doing market research.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by robdoherty2 on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @02:35PM (#7806048)

I don't have the task of managing leads, but I think salesforce is the standard certainly beyond a certain size. Not sure if that is too big for your use case.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by Terpaholic on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @08:28PM (#7807736)

I looked at salesforce and my understanding was "it has everything, at scale, and costly". The IBM or Oracle of sales was the impression I got. It seemed a bit too much for one person to use for themselves.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by slgeorge on Thursday May 29, 2014 @08:20AM (#7815830)

If long-term your plan is that company is just going to be _you_ then keeping it simple is the right idea. Using a simple workflow with a Google form feeding into a spreadsheet with status on it will work perfectly well.

If you think that you're going to be dealing with the same customer on multiple occasions so you'll want to record the history of your interactions then you'll need a CRM. If you want to build up a database of people who showed interest that you'll then talk to regularly, then you'll probably want CRM. Finally, if your intention is to scale the company and so have many people talking to prospects and customers then you definitely need CRM.

Salesforce is the most well-known and it's relatively easy to get started with, very Cloudy and has a platform so you can build operations on it. You reference Oracle, they (and Microsoft) have complete enterprise solutions which are at a different level. SF is more at the middle of the pack. It's well-known and many people are familiar with it. But you're right, it's a full CRM so it does far more than just tracking your leads.

There are other light-weight Cloud solutions out there, and SugarCRM is probably a good Open Source option that (as a technologist) you could easily use.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by verganileonardo on Thursday May 29, 2014 @08:12AM (#7815798)

Where I work, we use Podio (now part of Citrix).

It is free (until you reach 5 users) and is fully customizable. I highly recommend.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by vsergiu on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @02:31PM (#7806026)

have you tried pipedrive? (https://www.pipedrive.com/en/home/welcomeback) or you are looking for something open source?

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by Terpaholic on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @08:36PM (#7807766)

Wow! This looks exactly like what I'm looking for. Thanks! Will give it a try and see if it fits.

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by kinj28 on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @05:23AM (#7809057)

pipedrive.com

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by Terpaholic on Wednesday May 28, 2014 @05:35AM (#7809080)

This looks pretty great.

For future visitors to this thread: I've discovered that toutapp and yesware have integrated email receipt + click tracking along with a pseudo pipeline which actually fits my purpose of tracking email leads pretty well.

My only hesitation with toutapp/yesware/boomerang is data gravity - I don't think the information from any of those can be exported, effectively locking you in.

Alphabetical Summary of Results:

* BoomerangGmail - boomeranggmail.com

* ContactMonkey - contactmonkey.com

* MyPhoner - myphoner.com

* PipeDrive - pipedrive.com

* Radius - radius.com

* SalesForce - salesforce.com

* Streak - streak.com

* ToutApp - toutapp.com

* Yesware - yesware.com

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Re:Ask HN: How Do You Manage Leads Properly? by joerich on Thursday May 29, 2014 @04:02AM (#7815226)

* Zoho - http://www.zoho.com/

This one can be useful too.

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