bluegirl

Account Executive

Prospecting without any automation tools

Hey Sales Gurus,

I’m a new Account Executive in the med tech sector, handling full-cycle sales, which means I do all the prospecting myself. My company doesn’t have SDRs or any prospecting tools to help out.

Right now, it takes me about 30 minutes to find just two new contacts to add to my prospect list. My company won’t allow me to use any paid tools. Do you know of any free, more efficient ways to streamline this process?

👫 LEAD GEN

⏱ Time Management

🛠 Tools

31 comment

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jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Free Apollo and free HubSpot.

Be a salesperson and sell your company on paying for SOMETHING, like Sales Nav

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Solid advice! Brining a solid case to my team call Friday.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

They gotta pay for SOMETHING. If no SDR, then they should equip you with the right tools. That doesn't mean they need pay thousands of dollars, but they need to put up some coin to set you up for success.

And if not, then ask how they expect you to hit your numbers.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Absolutely! I’ve already closed three deals in 4 months totaling 150k and opened doors in accounts where we’ve never made progress before.

But I can’t keep doing funnel acceleration, account management, upselling, and prospecting—all without any prospecting tools (especially since this should be automated portion of the process). I’m working 70 plus hours a week, thank god I don’t have kids, but damn this is not sustainable.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

That’s far from sustainable. Leverage your previous success and point out that your time is best served closing business instead of generating pipe. Making the former easier through the use of tools will allow you to spend more time on the latter and bring in more revenue.

You need to make sure it’s all about them and how they benefit, unfortunately. Too many orgs don’t care if you’re working yourself to the bone.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Such awesome advice, I really appreciate it. I have a great manager and he is on my side here, I will work with him to build the business case.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Good luck and keep us updated!

Sunbunny31

Politicker

Sr Sales Executive 🐰

@jefe this is excellent advice and coaching.

jefe

Arsonist

🍁

Thanks Bunny! ☺️

Phillip_J_Fry

Opinionated

Director of Revenue

I've never seen a sales org like this.
I would flat out ask them how they expect you to prospect if you have no way to get their email/phone#

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

Completely agree 💯

Marketing has budget (or at least should) for lead generation. If a lead doesn’t have emails and/or numbers then it is not a lead.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Marketing is like, “Sales build me a list with out any tools and we will send emails and marketing material” even though they have access to SciLeads as a prospecting tool and sales does not……

Revenue_Rambo

Politicker

Director, Revenue Enablement

Wow not surprised that their strategy isn’t very strategic

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

yikes. Im a fan of a lean tech stack but NO tech stack? thats rough! I would be fighting for at least Linked in Sales Navigator.

For free tools i think zoom info and Apollo have free options. I would look into those and use it to make a case for why the company should pay for one of them.

For me I use linked in mainly and then the Apollo plug in to export contacts to the CRM. do you have a CRM?

If not i would look at the free version of hubspot at least.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

So we do have Hubspot and I can pull some leads from there and we also have CRM. Problem is it’s such a mess and all the leads are going to the wrong people right now.

Sales Nav would be awesome & I think I can make a business case for that, I was fronting the cost for bit, but I don’t believe I should have too.

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

HubSpot is a CRM...do you have HubSpot and Salesforce?

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Hub Spot and Microsoft Dynamics

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Oh my sweet summer child. My my that is not a great combo.

Leverage hubspot for all that you can.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

You are telling me 🥹

The data analytics is now a huge part of sales and it’s ridiculous that my current company is expecting A+ results with shitty or zero tools.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

Rolling 20's all day

@TennisandSales what's your "lean tech stack"? I'm curious to hear

TennisandSales

Politicker

Head Of Sales

-Sales Nav -Apollo -SFDC

Gasty

Notable Contributor

War Room Community Manager

Hi blue, welcome to the War Room! Great first post. This is Gasty - WR Community Manager

Before getting to your post, just wanted to highlight a few points.

This is an anonymous platform with one of the best sales people out there. The advice you'll get here is basically gold and comes from a lot of mixed experiences.

This is't like LinkedIn, you can go as deep on the topic as you want. Here you need to show value to be appreciated.

Lastly, have you checked out the commission store yet? If not, I highly recommend. Some amazing goodies there. Getting commission points is fairly easy, you just need to become more active post more, comment more, impart more value - Upvotes get you points.

Now to come back to your post;

If they can't pay for tools when the world is competing in a super competitive market and AI bots then IDK when will they?

Access to LSN and a data enrichment platform isn't too much to ask or to provide for 1 AE. No?

Give them confidence that you'll be making them lot more money than what they'll be spending to procure them.

As you've mentioned that you're building a solid case, make sure you highlight all the necessary points like growing competition, increasing efficiency, competing against bots and AI, increasing TAM, etc.

Best of luck and once again, welcome :)

Justatitle

Big Shot

Account Executive

linkedin company page, free apollo, free lusha

NoToBANT

Catalyst

Senior Account Executive

Blue girl - why are they against paying?

Also - lots of free credits are possible with various services like Appollo etc.

If you want something cheap that you don’t mind paying for for yourself, Lusha can be pretty cheap.

Good luck

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Why does it take you 30 minutes?

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Soooooo long story short it’s really hard to find emails for Biopharma, and pharma companies. Universities are luckily easy.

Or I’m terrible at it. I am going to try Apollo and convince my company to reimburse us for LinkedIn Sales Nav in the meantime

poweredbycaffeine

WR Lieutenant

☕️

Sales Nav isn’t worth it or needed if you use Apollo. People might fight me on that, but it’s a standalone that can integrate with hubspot.

Kosta_Konfucius

Politicker

ERP Sales

Apollo is key

MRK47

Personal Narrative

Head of Growth

Pretty sure ZI have free options (think they also own DiscoverOrg which used to be free too).
Suggest this is the time to get analytical with your boss to sell the concept of investing in a tech stack.....you have a quota, you know what the average order value is....you may hopefully know current lead and current opportunity conversion rates....reverse the math to show how many leads are required to build sufficient pipeline coverage using those numbers and therefore projected closed won values...and compare to current lead generation efforts & numbers (if having to prospect manually etc).....likely will be misaligned and potential for a quota miss.
Then use that to push for green light to at least sign up for a free trial of one the different tools / contact DBs as a proof of concept. Tricky situation if there is no legacy tech stack in place, then clearly the company is a little traditional in its approach and therefore suspicious of sales tools...hence the need to position the argument around factual data.

bluegirl

Contributor

Account Executive

Had this exact conversation with a couple of my sales bro friends last night over beer. One of em suggested the exact same thing.

I am going to trial several different tools and collect data along the way. It is really to build the case for our CEO who is essentially all over the place. He is the founder and Pathologist by trade & struggling with relinquishing the reins to more capable commercial leaders.

Sometimes really really “smart” people forget or tend to not realize they don’t know everything.

cw95

Politicker

Head of SDR

Hunter.io allows you 30 free credits a month I think.

If you are working in tech and need to get some resource for their techstack, use Builtwith (free chrome extension).

Apart from what others have said such as free hubspot and free apollo they are the only other two things I can think of that are free!