Morning Brew, a publisher of business-focused newsletters and podcasts, spoke with us about two onerous processes their sales team currently performs—Sponsorship and Competitive Outreach. These processes involve lots of manual searches, data entry, and non-templated emails, similar to the kind that many sales teams use to follow up with leads.

So the Makerpad team created a few systems to automate the rote processes to allow them to spend their time acting on the information gathered from the process—instead of running the process itself. As you’ll see, this new system saves their team 10's of hours per week, and makes it easier to codify how their sales funnel works.

Source leads with dashdash

Morning Brew’s old, manual process: The team identifies companies they want to work with and manually searches for contacts via LinkedIn, Media Radar, Clearbit, etc. Once they’ve pulled the info into a spreadsheet, the sales team does physical outreach via email, and manually keeps track of each conversation until they receive a response.

Makerpad upgrade: As Amie shows in the tutorial below, we use dashdash to eliminate manual searches and data entry entirely from the process with a few integrations.

1. Google integration allows us to specify the info (like company and job title) to get us leads.
2. Hunter integration pulls in the info we need (like lead’s name, title, linkedin profile link, and most importantly for our purpose, the email address.) Note: there are a few different integrations that can do this within dashdash
3. Slack integration allows us to share the info we pulled directly to Slack.

Key Takeaways:

• Spreadsheets can be overwhelming but they remain the MVP of productivity, which makes them worth mastering.
• Integrations between your tech stacks can be more powerful because they fit into your already existing processes.

Tutorial: Source leads from a spreadsheet with Dashdash

Sequence Outreach Emails with Gmail or Reply.io

Morning Brew’s old, manual process: The sales team does manual outreach via email, and continues to send an email until they receive a response in 3-5 day intervals. If no response is received, they move on to a new contact.

Makerpad upgrade: Amie shows two options in the tutorial below

1. Gmail templates allow you to create cold email and follow up templates and Google tasks help you organize and keep track of your outreach with individual lists by company. If a response is received, success! If a response is not received then you send to a new contact (which is now simple because of lesson 1!).
2. Reply.io with Gmail Integration enables you to sequence the entire outreach relationship from emails to calls to LinkedIn messages.

Key Takeaways:

• You don't need a fancy CRM to organize outreach—templates and tasks in Gmail work just as well!
• Templates don’t mean depersonalizing the sales relationship! Use the time saved on copying and pasting lazy emails to take the time to write engaging emails that really detail your company’s value proposition.

Tutorial: Email outreach sequencing with reply.io & Gmail

Capture Email Metadata and Save it

Morning Brew’s old, manual process: create a list of competitors’ email newsletters to subscribe to, open the emails every day to see who’s sponsoring, and add the info (name of newsletter, date, and brand) to a spreadsheet.

Email newsletters can be a valuable source of lead generation but consuming them in email form isn't ideal all of the time. With Zapier, HTMLCSS to Image, and Cloudconvert you're able to grab the HTML, turn that into an Image then upload it into a shared folder in Google Drive. This makes it easy for your team to add this into a workflow if you wanted to see who is sponsoring a competitors email newsletter for instance.

Makerpad upgrade: Tom shows you how you can easily get valuable information for lead generation instead of having to manually check each newsletter everyday.

1. Zapier, HTMLCSS to Image and Cloudconvert allow you to grab the HTML, turn that into an image and create a form to be able to get the info you need about the exact sponsor for lead generation
2. Google Drive and Slack integration enable you to upload the image into a shared folder and/or Slack channel to add it to your team’s workflow.

Key Takeaways:

• Competitors' newsletters can be valuable, but only when you’re able to seamlessly pull the relevant info into your team’s existing workflows.
• Zapier helps you build workflows and automations that combine to make your life easier.

Tutorial: Capture email metadata and save as an image with Zapier

Find & save competitor info and emails with Hunter

Morning Brew’s old, manual process: The team creates a list of brands advertising in competitors’ newsletters and finds their contact info (name, email, job title, etc), then does manual outreach. (An alternative way of doing Lesson 1.)

Makerpad upgrade: Tom shows how to create a simple workflow to discover info about your competitors and pull the emails you need to contact them. All without leaving your browser!

1. Owler has the info you need to find your competitors or target companies
2. Hunter Chrome extension will surface the relevant email addresses
3. Push by Zapier enables you to create triggers to pull custom data fields into an organizational workflow—we use a Google sheet as an example.

Key Takeaways:

• Chrome Extensions can work together to quickly pull the info you need.
• Push by Zapier will create triggers to pull custom data into whatever organizational workflow works best for you and your team.

Tutorial: Find and save competitor info and emails with Hunter

We hope these systems help you improve your current sales workflows and bring a level of efficiency to your already existing processes. The time you save in manual processes alone should be enough to make you curious to explore the possibilities of no-code. Let us know if you set up these systems at your company and how they work out!