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The Starter Stack: The 3 Tools We Use to Start Billing In 30 Days
It’s good to be back! 7 days on a cruise with 19 family members is lots of fun but also exhausting. All made worth it for this exact moment when my daughter became the star of the ship.
A cool thing that happened on this trip is Christina made a placement for a highly specialized Data Scientist who had experience with generating pricing data for revenue teams in the rental space. She got the role on Presidents Day Weekend and we decided to go back to one of our classic automation tech stacks to prove it still works. We set it up in 20 minutes, let it run and went on a Vegas vacation.
In 24 hours we had the exact candidate we were looking for (which is the one she placed), and in a week she had 4 other candidates in pipeline who came from correlative industries.
I’ve used the Starter Stack in both client and candidate development and it has never disappointed. I know many of you agency subscribers are heavily focused on BD currently, so for this episode of RWD, lets go over how to use it on the client side.
What is the Starter Stack?
The Starter Stack is the stack we recommend to every recruiter who is just starting on the automation journey. Why? It’s fairly easy to set up, its based in 3 tools that bleed into each other and its extremely low cost. We started our business with this stack and has consistently proven to help us generate and close business in 30-90 days. This stack is composed of our two core products that we base almost every stack on, Sales Navigator and Apollo.io.
The third tool is a LinkedIn automation tool. There are many out there, and not all are created equal. Depending on the budget, current and future scale of your company, overall use, and knowledge of these tools, we have different recommendations.
Why SalesNavigator?
Some of you die-hard LinkedIn Recruiter fans are going to kill me for this, but hear me out…
I honestly believe that Sales Navigator has better functionality, filtering and usable datapoints than Recruiter and Recruiter Lite.
There I said it!
I can hear you all now…
“But Will, I can’t see if someone is Open to Work or Likely to Respond!”
Correct! If you know me, you will know that I think those filters are crutches for lazy recruiters. You all are better than that!
With SalesNav you can filter based on activity such as:
People who viewed your profile
Interacted with your posts
Mentioned in the news
Job changes
When they posted
Basically, you get to see if they are actually active on LI. I’d actually rather have all of that than use an InMail or connection request to someone who flipped a switch six months ago, forgot to turn it off, and is never on the platform.
Another hot functionality that it has over Recruiter is the ability to search your connections’ connection (which is huge for when you get a recommendation).
Anyone can see that the social selling capabilities on both the candidate and client side are phenomenal.
The Cost
$79+ / month vs Recruiter which is a yearly commitment of $5-7k.
Why Apollo.io?
To start Apollo.io has one of the best and most accurate LinkedIn to Outreach Campaign extensions on the market. Being able to create a search on SalesNav of prospective clients and with a single click add every prospect to a campaign, all with verified work emails, is a huge time saver.
The Gmail extension features are awesome as well. You get visibility into when someone has viewed your email, can quickly add someone to secondary sequences, and even create templates and snippets for quick responses. A good example of a use case is if you are marketing an MPC and a client wants to see a resume. You can create a quick template of that MPC submission, then with a couple of clicks, respond and add them to a follow-up sequence in seconds without ever leaving Gmail.
One of the most powerful features of the web app is that you can search for prospects based on qualifying filters like funding, revenue, technographics, industry-specific keywords, company descriptions, and even specific job openings posted within a given date range. They also just released a new feature called Buying Intent. This filter can quickly search a persona or prospect type based on if they are searching for your type of services. They say timing is everything, and you can increase your odds of success in prospect outreach by knowing that they are on the market. This kind of data is primarily available on platforms like Crunchbase and ZoomInfo. But the problem is these tools are expensive, the contact data is often incomplete or out of date, and you have to move that data to another outreach platform, which may cause data loss. For a fraction of the cost, Apollo.io can even filter based on when the data was refreshed, you can stay on the platform and start outreach campaigns in seconds.
To top this off, they have a secondary automation tool called “Plays”. This function allows users to set up quick automations around trigger events like a lead moving jobs, buying intent updates, and reengaging after a certain amount of time from the last activity. They are even releasing a library of play automations so you can quickly set up common automations without the technical know-how.
If you want to learn more about this, you can watch the recent webinar that discusses this in detail here.
One warning about using Apollo.io is that you need to set it up properly so your email doesn’t get flagged or spammed. If you want some help, ping me.
The Cost
Unfortunately, time has run out to get their extra special $150 a year pricing! But the good news is that they are still priced 70-90% below Seamless and ZoomInfo. Their free plan is pretty powerful, and most of you won’t need more than the Basic plan ($39+/ month) starting off. But if you really want those Plays, you gotta go for the Pro plan ($79+/month).
LinkedIn Automation
This is where this stack has its variables. I have a completely separate newsletter for this coming out. But if you don’t want to wait, we go over this part in detail in our Outreach Optimizer program. The only reason is that depending on the type of outreach you do, there are certain tools that work better than others. Also, these tools, if used and set up improperly, can get you banned from LinkedIn. I’d hate to suggest a tool and without the proper setup you get banned from our key revenue maker.
The Cost
Cost $15 - $400 a month depending on the product.
The total monthly costs of the Starter Stack that Christina uses today is about $160/ month with the current pricing. That kind of pricing leaves lots of room for recruiters to add on additional tools for the candidate side like Loxo and SignalHire.
If you're a recruiter looking to optimize your outreach efforts, we highly recommend exploring the Starter Stack. By implementing Sales Navigator, Apollo.io, and a LinkedIn Automation tool, you can streamline your recruitment processes and achieve better results. However, it's essential to learn how to use these tools correctly to avoid getting put in the spam box and banned from LinkedIn. To top it off, none of these tools matter if you have 💩💩💩💩 copy. This is where I can help.
If you're interested in learning more about the Starter Stack and LinkedIn automation tools, schedule a call with me today. Let's turn you into a lead generation superstar.
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