Prospect ghosting isn't all wasted time.
If it's really a concern for you, it can mean a couple of things depending on how far down in your sales pipelines the ghosting starts to happen:
- At the top of the funnel, this can mean your ebook/outreach was nice but that they were never really interested in your products at large. You can reduce no shows simply by doing more targeted content.
- In the middle of the funnel, maybe your first demo didn't really fit the needs of your prospect and they didn't have the heart to tell you
- at the end of the funnel : it gets more complicated to infer anything since a ton of things can go wrong like perceived value, company timing ...
The idea is to simply to optimize the no shows stemming from everything else : sick days, double bookings or just oversights (like i often do 🥺).
In an ideal world, every follow up would be custom to each and every prospect.
However the world isn't perfect, and if you're missing resources, then it REALLY isn't perfect.
The truth is following up like that on these can take a lot of time and lead to straight up lost other opportunities.
That's where I come in !
A way to lower that no show is to increase proximity and direct voicemail does exactly that.
The direct voicemail has a real effect on prospects that have already heard your voice, especially when it's an oversight, they're usually eager to ping you back when they hear it.
And there's a way to automate it !
I already wrote about something similar in the past with Streak CRM but it got trickier with Hubspot which we use at Quable.
I'll add something new this time, I'll also show how I handle answers so the SDRs can be notified with the prospect data when they're contacted.
The process I use to reduce is as follows:
- A sales person flags a prospect as a no show in Hubspot and fills out their mobile phone number
- I set a webhook to catch the change
- I send them a targeted direct voicemail previously uploaded on Mailingvox with their API
- On prospect call/SMS, I lookup my campaigns and forward the call and the data from there
Let's get into it !
Using Hubspot webhook API
To get started, I need to some king of trigger to start the process.
So I created a "No show" property that our SDRs would point to "Yes".
Next I followed the hellish Hubspot Oauth flow to setup my webhook with a lambda.
You have to sign up to get a Developer account, create an app, authorize it (i did it with a lambda also), and THEN sign up to the webhook events.
Only then you can start start receiving your first events:
Once it's done I can start implementing the voicemail flow.
The direct voicemail API flow
I use MailingVox's API for this (no affiliation) part since it's very efficient in France.
Slybroadcast also works well !
Before i give you the code, I'll explain briefly what is going on in the triggered `noshow` function:
When I get a no show event like shown above, Ito fetch the prospect's data with Hubspot's API, with the `objectId` key.
I then get the prospect's phone number, send the voicemail, store the data and we're gone !
Storing the prospect's data will help us handle their answer with Twilio.
Quick note : Hubspot sends arrays as events because it batches as many events as it can (for performance issues), that is why i loop through the events.
Handling the inbound prospect answers with Twilio
One of the feedback I got when I first setup this flow was the handling of the prospects callbacks:
Cool stuff bro but I get calls from prospects without knowing who they are ...
Thankfully Twilio solves most of the problem !
We can route prospect data and the call easily if the prospect call from the number used in the campaign. (sometimes they don't and there's nothing you can do about it)
I commented directly on the gist below for details provided you stored your SDR Twilio and work numbers somewhere.
This only explains how you can forward calls, but forwarding SMS is basically a copy paste of this code.
Once this lambda deployed, I simply set the call webhook to my output URL in the Twilio numbers dashboard:
Closing words
This setup was fun to setup because of the Twilio technologies, playing around with phones make me giggle for some reason.
Setting up a Hubspot app was definetly the worst part of it since it took time and added no virtual value to what I was trying to do.
In terms of sales efficiency, it saves around half a day per week per SDR ! Pretty neat, right ?
That's all for today !
Talk soon,
Anas
