

So before we even thought about what we wanted our startup to do, we knew there was one thing none of us wanted to do.



None of us wanted to spend any time prospecting for leads. We simply didn't have it.



Anyway, that's the first chapter of how we founded Lead-Engines, a Prospecting Automation Company.



Our first sales funnel was really just an extension of the popular cold-email platform Reply.io - today we call that extension Lead-Engines.



Here are the tools:

and a quick break down:





Lead-Engines is a prospecting tool that you set up once and it finds you more target customers forever. It puts their contact data straight into Reply.





Reply is a cold email management tool that lets you schedule personalized cold emails and follow up sequences. It also can read responses to figure out who is interested. (If you already have a cold email automation tool, we probably integrate with it.





Zapier is the glue of the Internet. It lets you use reply’s automatic interest detection and then lets you do anything... such as add them to your CRM and mailing lists!





And here’s how they work together:





Everyday, Lead-Engines finds a couple more of my target customers and adds them to Reply. Reply puts them into a cold email sequence, pitching my value proposition and asking them to get on the phone. When someone says yes it detects that and adds them to my CRM via Zapier. Then before we get on the phone they get the full education of what I do because my CRM is synced with an inbound mailing list.









So if you're trying to scale your sales but you're spending too much time prospecting, I can also use scheduling links as opposed to asking for responses in the original email, making this a 100% automatic direct-to-calendar lead gen technique.So if you're trying to scale your sales but you're spending too much time prospecting, set up a lead generation engine for yourself so you can spend less time cold calling gate keepers and more time in meetings with customers.

The average sales person spends most of their time prospecting. Sometimes as much as 90%.