We live in a world where interactions between people are increasingly mediated by machines.
In commerce, it seems every sales process has been reduced to a numbers game. Pour enough leads into the top end of your sales funnel, turn the crank, and deals come out the bottom. Profit and loss are just a question of funnel optimization.
The truth is more nuanced. Can every sales process be modeled as a funnel? Sure… but if you think you’re going to sell helicopter gunships with the same click-funnel approach that sells sock puppets on the Internet, you’re in for a disappointment. At some combination of price point and deal complexity, you’re just going to have to build a relationship with an actual human being.
This is where Tribify comes in.
We recognize that some kinds of selling depend critically on a limited, non-renewable resource: YOU. When your very first contact with a Prospect already requires a non-trivial commitment of time, energy, or attention, it doesn’t MATTER how long your list is. Whatever order you take it in, you’ll never reach the bottom.
What matters is who you choose to call next.
What is the Tribify Engine?
The Tribify Engine is like a relationship marketing agency with a single customer: YOU (or maybe your team).
It has two jobs:
- To figure out which prospects are most worth your time and attention.
- To get you as close as possible to those prospects before you make contact.
How does the Tribify Engine work?
The Tribify Engine has three components:
- Smart Automation drives your LinkedIn and other social media accounts in order to gather data about your extended network and connect you with great prospects. It also sends messages and event invitations, follows prospects on Twitter and Facebook, and takes other actions that make sense in your context.
- Machine Learning compares the data we collect against the customer personas you provide and actual Prospect outcomes in order to determine, in order, exactly which Prospects you should be spending your time on NEXT.
- YOU are an essential component! Your job is to start at the top of your Prospect List, make a real effort to create a relationship with every Prospect, and work your way down. Tell the Engine how it works out, and your Prospect List will reshuffle in real time as it integrates the outcome!
How is the Tribify Engine different from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and other lead generation tools?
Think about how you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: you do a search in order to generate a list. The list you generate is unsorted: if you approach the last person on the list, your odds of making a sale are just as good (or bad) as if you started at the top.
If you want to improve your odds, you do a better search—you hope—which produces another unsorted list. If you want to find 80% of the buyers on either list, you have to work through 80% of the list.
The Tribify Engine also creates a list of search results… and then proceeds to sort the list! This concentrates the likely buyers at the top of the list.
Now, in order to reach 80% of the buyers on your list, you only have to work your way through the top 20%! This means you can spend much more time and energy on each Prospect creating the kind of relationship you need to create in order to close a high-ticket sale.
Does this always make sense? No. If you need a weekly list of 10,000 names for your sock-puppet sales funnel, the Tribify Engine is not for you.
But if you sell in a space where you must create a personal connection just to get in the door, then the Tribify Engine is a game-changer… because creating personal connections takes time, and you can’t afford to spend it on Prospects who will NEVER lead you to a sale!
Wait… isn’t this just lead scoring?
Yes. And Michael Jordan was just a basketball player. 🤣
The Tribify Engine’s lead scoring strategy has three unique features. Any one on its own would be incredibly valuable, but together they are a game-changer.
First, within the scope of your extended network, the Tribify Engine has access to data from every relevant social network. At a minimum, the Engine is aware of a prospect’s entire job history, educational history, location, interests, and skills. Tribify searches are HIGHLY nuanced. If you want to meet young manufacturing CEOs with backgrounds in outside sales, professional networks in Southeast Asia, and interests in both military intelligence and endurance sports, the Engine can line them up for you and put the strongest matches first.
Secondly, the Engine is aware of deep connections between members of your extended network. It knows who went to law school together. It knows who worked at the same small startup or served in the military together. And—probably least important—it knows who is connected on LinkedIn and other social media. So a high-scoring prospect doesn’t just meet your search criteria exceptionally well. That prospect is also deeply connected to a bunch of other people who also meet your search criteria very well!
That’s why you must try to create a relationship with every person at the top of your Prospect List: even if they don’t become customers, it is highly likely they can introduce you to somebody who will! And if they aren’t open to a relationship with you, see the next paragraph.
Finally, there is a machine learning component. When we integrate the Tribify Engine into your sales process, it becomes aware of the outcomes associated with every Prospect it suggests. Whether positive or negative, the outcome affects that person’s Profile Score… and, through them, that of everybody they are connected to.
The end result is that, over time, the top of your Prospect List begins to look a lot more like the people who actually engage with you, and a lot less like the ones who don’t.
How much activity will the Tribify Engine create in my LinkedIn account?
A lot… but not TOO much.
The Tribify Engine will perform the following activities in your LinkedIn account:
- Searches, to map the connections inside your extended network and find new Prospects at the edge of it.
- Profile Scrapes, to retrieve the full profiles of high-scoring Prospects and discover work and school connections between them.
- Connection Requests, to extend your network and expose contact data (like emails and phone numbers) that might otherwise be hidden. The Engine will also withdraw requests that have grown stale.
- Event Invitations to drive virtual event registrations. The Engine factors event registration and actual attendance into Profile Scores!
- Invitations to Like your company page.
- Messaging as appropriate.
The Engine has other capabilities that we deploy on an as-needed basis. For example, need to run sentiment analysis on comments in a particular LinkedIn group? The Engine can do that.
Each of these activities is rate-limited on LinkedIn, as is activity in your account as a whole. For example, you can send a maximum of 100 connections per week… so it pays to be choosy!
The Tribify Engine carefully manages your activity in order to keep your account in good standing with LinkedIn. We will coordinate with you to throttle the Engine during periods when you may be producing a lot of activity of your own.