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The information that BirdDog produces can be super valuable, but it’s useless if you don’t make an effort to leverage it within your sales process.

We’ve outlined some ways that different sellers are using the tool to rapidly select & approach the accounts with the highest conversion rates to SQLs & then continue to leverage the data to accelerate the sales cycle and win deals.

Some challenges & questions that BirdDog to helps answer are:

  • Account Prioritization: Which account do I focus on?
  • Buyer Targeting: Who do I reach out to at that account?
  • Relevant, Timely Outreach: What do I say to get a meeting?
  • Strategic Communication: What do I say in the meeting?
  • SQL Follow Up: What do I say after the first meeting?
  • Nurturing & Reviving Closed Lost: When should I reach back out to a dead or stalled deal?

Using BirdDog to answer any single one of these questions can give you a positive ROI on your investment, but using all of them together creates unmatched value for your sales org.

Account Prioritization

Which account do I focus on?

BirdDog takes the guesswork out of which account a seller should focus on by prioritizing them the same way a human would—-with explainable & traceable real world data. This way, sellers focus on accounts with the highest probability of becoming an SQL.

Rather than having your sellers go in circles on the internet & jump from tool to tool trying to determine which account to focus on, BirdDog makes it simple by ranking the prospects based on the answers to the Signals that the user inputs.

Checking Rankings

As a default, BirdDog stack ranks your accounts on the dashboard. So, the highest ranking account will be the first one you see.

Throughout the platform, you will often see the score reported as a Percentile next to an account. This tells you what percent of other accounts on that list that an account is better than. So, a 99th percentile account is one of the best accounts on the list, and a 1st percentile account is one of the least good accounts.

Adjusting Rankings

Each BirdDog instance has a custom ranking algorithm based off the questions you input into the system. Each question has a different "rank" that tells the algorithm how important it is.

When your BirdDog instance is implemented, we help you select appropriate weightings for each question. To learn more about changing these weightings, view the scoring section in the user docs.

Buyer Targeting

Who do I reach out to at that account?

BirdDog makes it super easy for a seller to connect with as many relevant personas at an account as possible. That way, when the first messages hit, the seller is already likely to be 2nd or 1st connected with the recipient, increasing the chance of a positive response.

After you’ve selected an account, you can go to the key people page for that account.

Key People Page

Here, you’ll see a number of people at the account who are related to the target personas you defined in your signals. You can click the “connect” button for each person, which will take you to their LinkedIn Profile, where you can quickly connect and make note of any particularly promising individual.

Should I send a note with linkedin connection requests?

Studies show that connection requests with no note have a much higher acceptance rate, so we prefer to wait to send a note until after the individual connects back with us.

If the person does not have a connection button, you can click the find button, which will open a new tab with a google search that should have them near the top of the results if they have a LinkedIn.

Sometimes, BirdDog only has a few people or no people in our system that match your target persona for a given account. This is because our people data comes from info that is publicly available on company websites or in news articles or is made publicly available by LinkedIn for search engines to index. We respect LinkedIn’s Terms of Service.

Note: It is easy to find contact data for a contact that BirdDog surfaces by clicking the get email button that will take you to Apollo. With a free account, you can leverage their platform to get contact data. If you do not want to leverage Apollo, since contact data is so commoditized, there are many other tools to easily and inexpensively find it.

Relevant, Timely Outreach

BirdDog provides real time news alerts to your sellers both on our platform, with daily emails, and in slack.

These alerts are based on signals you’ve already told the platform are important to you. On top of that, the article summary comes with critical facts and quotes extracted—these points give you a lot of ways to connect your value proposition to what’s going on in the prospect’s business NOW.

Multi Channel & Multi Threaded

After you see an alert and decide that you want to use it, there are a few different ways to action the information:

  • Cold call & mention the alert
  • Send a LinkedIn Dm mentioning the alert
  • Send a targeted email mentioning the alert

We always encourage our users to leverage multiple channels and contact multiple individuals in their sales process. As an example, if you’ve already used BirdDog to connect with many people at the account on LinkedIn, it should be easy to find one or two people to shoot a LinkedIn dm to.

Then, after that, you can use BirdDog’s one click email generation feature to turn any news alert into an email draft based on templates that you already know work.

One Click Email Gen

Sellers & admins can easily add email templates to BirdDog. If you attach these templates to signals, you can use one click email generation on a specific article for that signals. This will use your template, the article, and context BirdDog has on the account to create a relevant email draft.

To add a template, sellers can simply go to their profile page & copy in an email that they know works. Then, they can mark the variables they want BirdDog to rewrite with context by using "<<" and ">>".

Strategic Communication

What do I say in the meeting?

When it finally comes time for a meeting, sellers can visit BirdDog beforehand to check out the target account they are meeting with.

Sellers can efficiently find answers to some discovery questions and mark any business or executive level initiatives that will be useful to mention in the call. The seller leverages BirdDog’s thousands of documents per account to preemptively know as much as possible so they have time to go deeper on the first call.

This information is made available to the seller in a number of ways:

  • Custom Summary: Each account the user uploads has a custom summary based on all of the most recent signals BirdDog found for the account.
  • Signals & Top Articles: BirdDog lays out all of the signals it found as well as their associated top articles. Top Articles are summaries of some of the most important articles found for that signal.
  • Raw Article Feed: Users can see a raw chronological flow of the articles in the BirdDog system for each account.
  • Keyword Search: Users can keywords search our entire database for any documents that could be relevant.

In 95% of situations, the Custom Summary, Signals, and Top Articles are more than enough context for users to build out their own POV on an account before a meeting. The Raw Article Feed and Keyword Search are always there just in case the user wants to go a step further.

SQL Follow Up

What do I say after the first meeting?

Once the prospect has been marked as a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), the deal still isn’t done & neither is BirdDog.

As long as you keep the account actively tracked in BirdDog, the system will continue to send real time news alerts that let sellers stay on top of developments at the prospect’s firm and give fuel for informed touch points and follow up.

These alerts will be available in multiple channels:

  • On the platform
  • With email alerts
  • In your BirdDog slack channel

When a deal is stalled, BirdDog makes it easy to rekindle it with informed follow up about real world events at the firm.

Nuturing & Reviving Closed Lost

When should I reach back out to a dead or stalled deal?

The constant flow of news from BirdDog provides a great way to both nuture & revive closed lost deals.

As a result, many users will keep some accounts they are nuturing as well as accounts they feel they could've won active in BirdDog.

Then, they can just wait for a signal that makes it very easy and relevant to reach back out to the prospect.

Nuturing

BirdDog can help you keep track of leads you are nuturing.

By leaving the account active, not only will BirdDog keep sending you news alerts, it will also periodically bump you when you haven't actioned any information on the account in a while.

Reviving Closed Lost

Just like you can use BirdDog to keep SQLs warm & nuture leads, you can also use the info to revive closed lost deals.

As an example directly from the BirdDog team, we saw that a closed lost prospect had hired a new head of partnerships. Then, we sent the following email & booked a meeting with the prospect:

Our Revive Email

Cool that you guys bought on [NEW HEAD OF PARTNERSHIPS]--will that sort of thing bring any pipeline your way?

Would love to catch up & show you what's new with BirdDog... if we call week of mar 24, will literally be an entirely new platform since you saw it last.

Let me know when you are free.

His Repsonse

whats up man, yeah im down to catchup.

thats the hope that boone will help bring us some pipe through cloud alliances. ill throw some time on your cal