Outsource your work to someone else with these 6 tools

Get someone else to do the monotonous tedium of research and emails!

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment.” — Thomas Edison

There are a variety of tasks that are so easy we take for granted that someone else can do it for us. We pepper our days with activities that are easy and quick, so we don’t seem to mind them. Yet, if you were to add up the amount of time you spend on these small tasks in a given day, you’d be very surprised.

When I did an inventory on my weeks I found that I spent the most time doing the repetitive research. Adding people on linkedin. Cracking email addresses. Adding people to my CRM lists and putting them into drip campaigns. All moving parts of the funnel that drives business, so it remained unquestioned.

…And then I discovered Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing. I discovered that much of the work I did on a daily basis could actually be given to someone else, at a reasonable price of $7-$10/hour (and you can get much cheaper than that if you dig around).

Virtual Assistants have revolutionized the way that I work and have had an incredible impact on my life. I recommend that everyone uses one. While businesses and solopreneurs often leverage outsourcing and Virtual Assistants, I rarely see an individual use a VA to make their life easier and free up their time.

Today I was revising instructions that I send to my VA, when I thought to myself, “this might be helpful for other people who want to use a VA.” So, I decided to turn my instructions into a blog post so that others can do the same.

Below are actual instructions I send to my VA to do research and lead generation. Enjoy 🙂

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Introduction:

Now that you have made the decision to get started you’re probably asking yourself, “What now?!” I know you’re itchy to get started, and I’m here to help.

Before you begin it’s important that you understand the various tools that we use to help make our days a lot easier. In the following sections I’m going to outline a handful of tools to source lists of companies, crack email addresses, and perform general research. Please teach yourself how to use these tools and experiment with them. They will make your life easier.

Tool #1 — Datascraping.co

Before we get started, please download the chrome plugin datascraping.co.

This is a tool that you can use to pull information off of websites. Let’s say you discover a new job board and want to pull all the names of companies from it. You can use this. Let’s say you discover a new event, and on their landing page it lists out the companies attending, you can use this plugin to retrieve the list of names.

For example, let’s go on AIESEC.com and search for companies in Spain (please note that in the images below I am NOT on the AIESEC website, please pay attention to the arrows and red highlights).

1. Click on the Datascraping.co button on your toolbar

1. Click the button “new”

1. Click on the “*” symbol

1. This will make the page “highlightable”. Scroll your cursor over the image that you want to highlight, and then click where you would like to select. (Notice how in the image below the company name is highlighted in blue)

1. Next to “# results” click the word “show”. When you click this, a list of results should pop down and look like this

1. Click on the button that says HTML, and a dropdown menu should appear

1. Select the option “Text”. After you have selected it, the options should look like this:

1. Click “accept”
2. Now it’s time to download the spreadsheet. You will click on the icon to the right of “Save” with three lines. I have highlighted it below

1. To download, click the button that says “CSV”

1. It should now download directly to your computer and you have a list of companies to go after 🙂
2. Here is a video of this process in its entirety

1. NOTE — Every website will be slightly different when it comes to scraping the correct information off of the website, so please play around with the plugin and familiarize yourself with how to use it. This tool will act as a lead generation list and can be used on practically every website I’ve ever discovered.
2. Please also note that different websites allow you to source more information. For example on this above page I could have also scraped the location of the role, duration of the position, title of the role they are hiring for, and more. If you feel that this information is relevant to your search, then please feel free to use it.

Tool #2 — Hunter.io

Hunter.io is a website that will help you to crack email addresses of people who work for a given company. Simply enter in the name of the company, and you will get a list of emails back for you to reach out to.

Let’s take our example from before. One of the companies there was “Everis”.

First, google “Everis” to try and find their website. After a quick search, their URL is https://www.everis.com. You can now type this into hunter.io

Voila! Just like that we have 169 email addresses 🙂

Now, remember datascraping from before? This will come back into play now.

Step 2) Use Datascraping.co to pull the email addresses (Note — same process as above minus the “names” stage)

1. Here is a video of this process in its entirety

1. Clean the spreadsheet so that the names line up with the email addresses we have pulled, and add them to the master spreadsheet with the list of companies you are sourcing for.

Tool #3 — Neverbounce

Neverbounce is a website that will tell you if the emails you have cracked are valid. This will help you to make sure that your emails don’t bounce and don’t get marked as Spam when emailing new leads.

After going through the last two steps, now you have a list of companies, as well as some email addresses for you to email.

From here you’re going to want to head over to https://neverbounce.com/.

Once you’re on this website, upload your list of leads and allow it to do the rest. If they ask you to pay for the list, let me know and we will cover any associated costs.

If all went according to plan you should now have a cleaned list of leads that is ready to be emailed.

Tool #4 — The Granddaddy of them all….Streak

Streak is a CRM that plugs directly into your inbox, allowing you to track the status of your conversations at a glance. It’s a wonderful tool that has a lot of incredible features that will make your life easier in a number of ways.

Now that we have a list of emails and names, we’re going to want to set up a pipeline.

To set up a pipeline, please see the following information: http://support.streak.com/pipelines

Once you have a pipeline set up, you’re going to want to use a “Mail Merge”.

To set up a mail merge, please see the following information: https://www.streak.com/mail-merge-using-gmail

Once the mail merge is set up, we can email the same email we’ve been using from the earlier document.

“ Hey (Insert name),

{Insert pitch email}

Best,”

Once the email has been sent, you will Snooze or Rebump it for later (more on these two below)

Here are some other features that will also help you in your Streak journey…

https://www.streak.com/canned-gmail-snippets

https://www.streak.com/email-snooze-in-gmail

• **I can’t stress enough how important Streak is. It will make your life as a B2B cold emailing machine 100000000x easier and will save you a lot of time and frustration. Please take the necessary time to familiarize yourself with how to use this tool.

Tool #5 — Rebump

Rebump (https://www.rebump.cc) is a tool that will automatically follow up to all of your emails for you, with pre-templated emails. It’s wonderful. After you sent a mail merge, the best thing to do is rebump it so that you don’t have to follow-up yourself.

Tool #6 — Sellhack

Let’s say that you now want to find specific people from each organization and crack their email address. Sellhack is my favorite tool to do it.

This one is pretty straightforward. Find people on linkedin, crack their email address, add them to a spreadsheet, and then once the spreadsheet is complete, mail merge and email everyone at once.

My favorite tool for cracking email addresses is http://sellhack.com/ (Note — I will reimburse you for credits on Sellhack if you want to use this to source candidates)

Here are some others that will be useful for you as well…

http://www.yesware.com/blog/find-email-addresses/

Guidelines on Research:

The standard and must-have fields (columns) are:

• Company Name — The name of the company that you are researching on
• Company URL — Link to company’s official page
• First Name — First name of the person in charge
• Last Name — Last name of the person in charge (If the person has a middle name, it will be inserted under last name field)
• Designation — Position/ title of the person in charge
• Email Address — Email address of the contact person (I will outline some steps to get email addresses below)
• Remarks — For you to leave remarks

Requirements of leads

Now onto the next question after you’ve scaled out the template — who to target on? Please take the following as a standard set of people to target when you carry out this type of research. It can be vary sometimes so always check before you carry out the work. The standard set of people are:

• Three (3) key members or the company. Key members are as following, in the order of importance:
• Founder/ co-founder
• Management
• Head of department
• If no key member is found, key in any team member you can find for the organization to make it a total of 3.
• One (1) hiring manager/ HR head of department/ talent acquisition, etc.
• If no HR managerial role is found, any of the member from HR department will do
• One (1) general email address directing to HR/ Hiring department, for example, jobs@, careers@, talent@, etc.
• Put ‘General — HR’ as the ‘Designation’ for this.
• Put ‘Team (company name)’ as the First Name for this.
• One (1) general email address for the company, for example, info@, team@, hello@, etc.
• Put ‘General’ as the ‘Designation’ for this.
• Put ‘Team (company name)’ as the First Name for this, for example, Team Supahands.

How to Find Person in Charge

• Step 1: Always go onto the “Team” or “People” page of the company first to grab the key contacts and their email addresses.
• For example, go to http://wavemaker.vc/team/, you will see the list of key members stated here. Click on the Managing Partner — Eric and you will see his email address stated there.
• Step 2: If can’t find any info on company’s webpage, grab the company name and search on LinkedIn (use X-ray search when necessary to by-pass LinkedIn restriction).

How to use Sellhack

• Insert the person’s name and company onto SellHack and it will auto-generate a email domain for you (sometimes it doesn’t so you will have to enter it manually).
• Press ‘Run Search’
• Only take email address (the result) with 80% confidence or higher.
• This video shows the process of getting person in charge on LinkedIn and using SellHack to find email address.

Important Tips

• When doing any research that involve finding ‘person’, please always split the First Name and Last Name into separate columns. This will help for Streak
• When looking for contact details for person/ company, email address is the foremost priority, always take this over the ‘Contact Us’ webform when you manage to find both of them at the same time. If unable to find email address, take a further step to check through company’s Facebook page as well (most of the time you will get it on ‘Page Info’ tab under ‘About’ section).

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Overview:

If you have made it this far, bravo! You didn’t pass out from tool overload!

If this all seems overwhelming and confusing, don’t worry, it’s not nearly as crazy as it seems.

Now, you might be wondering….how do I put this into action?!?!

Here is a sample walk through….

Let’s say you’re a B2B cold email marketer. You will 1) Create a list of websites where you can find relevant companies.

• Step 1: Scrape a list of companies
• Step 2: Crack emails using Hunter.io for each company
• Step 3: Once you have a list of 10 companies + contacts from each one, make a neatly organized spreadsheet you can upload to Streak
• Step 4: Upload the spreadsheet into streak to create a pipeline
• Step 5: Mail Merge
• Step 6: Check mail to make sure everything is written properly before sending
• Step 7: Check off the “Rebump” check to make sure that you’re going to followup automatically.
• Step 8: Send!
• Step 9: Repeat as needed

If you want to use Sellhack throughout this process, it’s the same thing. Create a list of leads in a spreadsheet, upload that spreadsheet into streak, mail merge, and then email. It’s as easy as pie!

In reality this should be 90% of your cold outreach strategy. It’s monotonous and tedious, but it works. Using these methods you should be able to have a steady source of companies to reach out to and have conversations with.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. If there’s anything in this document that seems confusing and needs additional clarifications, let me know and I will help out as needed!

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Fin 🙂

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Also published on Medium.