The July 11th Telarus Tuesday call brought Ensable founder Justin Chugg and Telarus co-founder Patrick Oborn to talk about new tools for customer prospecting. The entire recording can be found here.
Who is Ensable?
One of the things that was revealed but not launched at Partner Summit this year was lead generation. For those of you who may be new to Telarus, you might not know that we were a search engine optimization and software company before we became a Master Agent. Telarus because a master agent so that we could commoditize online leads, and we loved doing it. We created websites that ranked really well in Google. Unfortunately, Google changed algorithms over time and things got more competitive making agent websites look more like an ATM machine in the desert. Since then, Telarus has taken its focus and put into GeoQuote® and the Telarus app. We also acquired VXSuite which gave us the capability to monitor circuits for free, but none of these things were related to lead generation although that was in our DNA from day one. A few years ago, a Telarus employee by the name of Justin Chugg decided that he wanted to build a system that could go out and harvest information from various data sources, and that could also create lists of prospective people our partners could reach out to. This industry is becoming more about proactive lead generation and about talking to the customers that are a good fit for the products that you sell. Because of this change in the industry we are excited to announce that Telarus has entered into an agreement with Justin’s company, Ensable. Justin started Ensable a couple of months ago, and he is currently in the process of building a team to help him support and expand the software that he’s already developed. Telarus is very proud to partner with Justin.
Q&A
Q: Ensable was created with a few different things in mind. Can you just tell us about what the nature of Ensable is and what it’s meant to do for our partners in terms of lead generation?
A: Ensable is trying to identify shortcuts for acquiring new customer or for growing our revenue within our existing customers. There are two ways we are accomplishing this. The first way is by looking at leads, this is not your traditional lead generation where we’re bringing an inbound customer. What Ensable does is it identifies which companies are entering the buying cycle. Basically, we have kind of like a Google technology that’s spidering different websites and looking for electronic smoke signals that are letting us figure out when companies are moving, changing or growing. The second piece is prospecting data, like it was mentioned before, it is getting a little bit more competitive in the sales market but having the right data in front of you when you talk to your customers will put you ahead of your competition. Ensable is designed to help Telarus partners lower their customer acquisition costs. To summarize, we are trying to help you identify when companies are in the buying cycle and how to achieve more success with these companies.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the websites that you’ve set up to do these various activities which can help our partners pull these lists and understand where these selling opportunities exist.
A: We set up a few public domains just to make it easy to access. The three domains are:
www.AddressListReport.com
www.UpsellReport.com
www.FiberAddresses.com
The Address List Report website holds a tenant list for you. What this website does is it goes into every known tenant database on the web, grabs all of the data and compiles it into a single list. Chances are that half of the data is inaccurate so what we do is we then add another filter to the data which is spidering the end-users websites and looking for that physical address. It also uses that set of verification tools to determine which data is good in that kind of list and which data is bad. At that point we go to different social sites and pull the most relevant contacts including phone numbers and email addresses for each of the tenants, so now by just submitting a physical address to this website you would then have an accurate tenant list to work with. Although anybody can go out and build these lists on their own it would take dozens of hours to do, which is why we’ve automated this process to make that a lot easier for you.
Another tool that we’ve put together is the Up-Sell website. This is probably one of the more popular tools. This pulls together all of the relevant data on a specific company. It is designed to give you that cutting edge. It gives you more information about your prospects by taking a deep dive into their locations, the history of natural disasters in each of these locations, the type of technology they’re using, the key contacts, all the low-hanging fruit that we’re seeing. Go to this website to see an example of the report. When you are getting ready for your sales call or getting ready to talk to somebody for the first time, you really need to know about company and you need to create a perspective. You do not want to go into those calls blindly. This website tries to make the process of preparing for those conversations easier.
The other website we put together is Fiber Addresses. A lot of us have come across multi-site opportunities and know the process of researching this can be very time-consuming So much so that we might even walk away from these opportunities. This website gives you a new perspective. Not only does it research all of the on-net opportunities for a multi-site deal it can also research the near-net opportunities in one shot. Using this website will give you a perspective that nobody else has and it increases the chances of you winning those opportunities.
Q: Let’s talk about the actionable intelligence piece. Justin, you mentioned earlier that we can build lists and find creative ways to make calls, you said that when the customer enters the buying cycle they set off certain smoke signals. Can you tell us about what those smoke signals are and how agents would get an alert from your system?
Justin: This is really one of the core functionalities of Ensable. We want to keep you in the know. When we talk about selling opportunities we mean existing customers as well as potential customers. We will help you in siloing a specific type of customer niche and identifying sales opportunities with them.
Some of the smoke signals are:
When these smoke signals come in what we’re going to do is we’re going to send you a single email in real time and let you know all about the company, what we know about the opportunity and any details that we have available.
Q: Justin, there’s been a few questions about how you source your data, where it’s being pulled from and how you know it’s not stale. Can you talk about how that active intelligence and the social media aspect of the data kind of interact to help you not only figure out that there is a buying opportunity but to figure out what your best way into the account is so you’re not calling in cold?
A: One of the things that everyone should realize is there’s no monopoly on good data, and there’s not a single source of good data. There’s definitely some sources that are better than others, but it’s the combination of data that makes it valuable. So what Ensable does is a lot like what we do with the Address List Report website where we take multiple sources of data and cross-reference them in real-time, we then use that to aggregate the data correctly. It always takes a few hours if not a day for us to get that data back to you because what we’re doing is we’re building everything so it actually comes in a validated format. We use multiple sources to cross-reference in order to validate that data along with a lot of different social media tools. The key advantage here is that it’s all built in real time and designed to come to you in a format that’s easy to work with.
Q: Justin, walk us through the pricing plans. We know that there’s been significant expenses that have gone into the machines and the software licenses for the last three years into this program.
A: We played around a lot with the pricing trying to come up with the right price, and the price that we set is really to allow us to invest in the future of Ensable, and to make sure that we have the data and the quality that you’re looking for. There are three different packages offered:
We offer a free package because we want to make sure that partners can test-drive it and understand how it would fit into their business model. We also have the starter package which is $250 per month, and this package comes with basically everything. Then we have the advanced research package which costs $500 per month, this package is more beneficial for a team. If you have something that doesn’t quite fit what we have available I am happy to have a conversation with you about other options.
Questions about Ensable?
If you have any questions about Ensable please feel free to contact Justin Chugg.
