Mayori Huang, the lead gen executive, and Lauren Simmonett, the lead generation manager of Minut.com, sat down with our CEO Relja Denic and had a lovely chat about their experience with Skylead. Here is what they had to say.
Can you tell us a little bit about Minut and your ICP?
Lauren: “At Minut, we’re on a mission to make sharing work for everyone because we believe sharing – spaces, stories, mutual understanding, and respect – is what makes us human. That’s why we created a monitoring product geared towards Airbnb hosting, and hotels that prevents issues with noise, temperature and crowding while providing guests with a better experience.”
Mayori: “Yeah, that’s what we essentially do. Minut believes in being good neighbors wherever we are. So, we offer products and services for the short-term rental market that help guests, hosts, and neighbors get along.”
Lauren: “As for our ICP, they belong to a short-term rental market, including individual renters, property managers, Airbnb managers who have multiple properties managing, and larger property management companies from around the world. But for now, we are focusing on the UK, USA, Spain, and France and plan to scale up.”
What goals did you try to achieve before Skylead but couldn’t?
Lauren: “Initially, we wanted to find ways to have a closer relationship with our prospects on LinkedIn. Also, our goals were to reach a larger audience, understand which prospects would benefit from our product the most, and how to build professional relationships to offer it to them.
However, as a company in a niche market, finding ways to understand our customers and new trends in the market is always a challenge.
So, with Skylead, we were able to gather new insights and information about our existing target markets on a large scale and connect with our prospects and users on a whole other level in a short time.
Before Skylead, our team was reaching out manually to any contacts we had. This was before I joined the company. Then, they were using a similar solution but liked Skylead better. So when I started, we kinda transitioned to it. So when I got introduced to it, we started using email through Skylead as well, which was a big plus for why we decided to do that.”
What challenges Skylead solved for you?
Mayori: “At Minut, we believe in continuous improvement - in sharing, spaces, stories, and mutual understanding. This notion is reflected in all of our processes. That’s why we also needed a solution to anticipate the needs of our future and existing customer base. So, one thing Skylead allowed us was to reach a bigger audience on autopilot and have a one-on-one conversation with them.
Because we usually use filters and access databases where we target and outreach leads and customers, but at the same time, we don’t really know their pain points or interest. So to be able to reach them, and as I mentioned before, having a conversation with them was really helpful for us. We received a lot of feedback from our customers on why they decided to choose Minut, for example, or why they weren’t a party at that time, so it was good for gathering user insights, and how we can communicate with them better, I guess.
So, to sum up, we could finally understand current and future customers, their pain points and priorities, and how to communicate better on a large scale. And it also helps us fine-tune our sales and marketing efforts.”
How do you use Skylead now, and what are the results?
Lauren: “Once we started using Skylead, we used it for LinkedIn and email outreach. And we still do. To find and target our leads, we use Sales Navigator.
Since we are lead generation managers, we do the targeting and outreach for our sales members. It comes down to the time they want to be on a call, and this was just an easy way to kinda help them out. So, at the moment, one of the ways we are using Skylead to book calls, and then the sales team takes over.”
Mayori: “And we have another platform where we do most of our CRM, so we can just as easily transport notes for the salespeople, and I think it also has helped them share a better perspective of their prospects.”
So you are using Skylead to book calls and also, at the same time, trying to get feedback and understand what your users are doing?
Lauren: “I think we are always trying to book a demo. But if we have someone uninterested, we use that opportunity to understand why.”
Mayori: “What we usually do if they are not interested, we send them a retargeting campaign as well to ask the leads why they are not interested or if they want to hop on a call with us and talk about their experiences and any concerns they have. Or, if the leads are not interested but say Keep in touch, we also send them a webinar link so they can join once in a while. And we actually get quite a few numbers from that as well when we send them a webinar link, so…
Lauren: “We also notice when we do marketing campaigns for those smaller hosts that don’t need to talk to sales, just to go on the website and buy. So, with our outreach, we think we managed to convince them to check our product out.”
Okay, and what does your typical campaign look like?
Mayori: “We use Smart Sequences, and we usually enter filters. But before we do, we research what filters can get us the most leads and which ones are the most relevant for us. And then, after that, we copy and paste that Sales Navigator link and transport it to Skylead. And we use sequences to connect and start our conversation with the leads on LinkedIn depending on the action they take.
We are also uploading email lists and using email outreach through Skylead. We are using these campaigns separately - one for LinkedIn and one for email outreach.”
Lauren: “In terms of the revenue, it’s hard to see the full potential here because normally, our sales start with the trial, and our customers like to test it out first before they start the full subscription. So it’s hard to measure the full revenue generated. However, since we launched our first campaign in Skylead, we have been generating about 6 qualified leads per month. We call them Marketing qualified leads. So we can say 6 MQLs per month. And as we said, we’ve generated a lot of webinar attendees and responses of uninterested leads, which helped us grow a lot.”
Mayori: “Yeah, we usually have campaigns every 2 months or so, and we don’t launch campaigns every month. If the numbers slow down, we would usually launch it. We’re definitely still exploring Skylead’s potential, but what I’ve noticed so far is we have really honest feedback from our prospects, and so the way we look at it is how we want to help our prospects rather than just getting a lot of sales from them. So it was really nice to have a paragraph sent every now and then.”
What features do you find most beneficial in Skylead?
Mayori: “I think it would be the labeling feature in the Smart inbox. It’s really nice just to label our prospects so we can know who we can prioritize. And we can also look at their LinkedIn profile.
The second is the blacklist feature because sometimes we don’t really know who we reached out to yet, so it’s good to make sure we don’t send the same message twice to the same prospect.”
Lauren: “Yes. The reports and the label button! Allowing us to focus on ones that are more relevant to our product offerings and analyze the performance of our messaging”.
Why did you choose Skylead, and do you have any words for our potential customers?
Mayori: “The fact that we actually have received very honest feedback from our prospects. We are very grateful that we are able to use Skylead as a tool to have an organic one-on-one conversation with our future customers. We are definitely still exploring its potential.”
Mayori: “We found Skylead very easy and simple to use! It allows us to manage sequences, do A/B testing, and mark prospects who are highly interested in Minut. The other thing we found very useful was the analytics dashboard. We uncovered a lot of learnings of what works and doesn’t from the stats.
What we also love about Skylead is that we can have all messages within the platform, and we can reply for our sales members.”
Lauren: “We also love Skylead’s customer support team. They are always ready to answer our questions, and we usually get a reply in no time. Always a pleasant experience with the live chat feature as well.”
Mayori: “Yes, I agree. Skylead’s customer support team was really great for us. They are really quick, and they are resourceful as well when answering our questions. And I think I solved a lot of problems here and there with the Skylead team, so I find them really helpful.”
Lauren: As for the tool itself, I think it's very easy to use and can do a lot. It’s really user-friendly, which is the biggest reason for me. Skylead’s user experience and video tutorials make it a very easy LinkedIn tool you and your team could use! The UI is very clean and clear. It offers many useful features; just give it a try yourself.”
