👉 New Users, Start Here

Leadfwd includes multiple features that can support a wide range of use-cases that can help grow your enterprise. Whether it's cold email outreach to build pipeline, engaging inbound leads, expanding existing customer value or automating customer success - the Leadfwd platform is ready to deliver. To help maximize your results and streamline the management of the Leadfwd platform, it’s a good idea to get organized right from the start.

The purpose of this intro guide is to help you build a strong and organized data foundation from the very beginning, that will help you successfully scale a modern and robust outbound program. Time is precious and making the most of the Leadfwd platform means that the platform needs to constantly be returning time to you and your team, not taking it away.

Contacts, Data Properties, Ownership, Access and Compliance

One User or Multiple Users?

If you're subscribed to a Pro plan then you can support multiple user / team environment. Within Leadfwd, a user can assigned any custom role to grant various permissions. These can be as an Administrator, Creator, Data owner or Analyst (read only reports).

Contacts

Leadfwd's data architecture is similar to a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) with a single database (a.k.a. list) for storing 'Contact' records. All of your contacts that you import into Leadfwd will be stored in the Contacts database.

Our single database enables you to import a person once, but engage the same person multiple times from multiple platform tools (Sequences, Automation, Email Campaigns), without storing contacts separately into each tool or campaign. This also ensures you have a single-source of truth and timeline for your entire engagement history with every individual contact across the entire platform.

• Every contact record requires an email address. If there is no email address, the contact can't be saved to your Leadfwd database.
• You need to import or save Contacts to your database before those contacts can be enrolled in a Sequence, touched by a workflow, etc.
• Duplicates are automatically removed using email address as the unique identifier. 

The unique identifier that Leadfwd users for records is the contact records email address. The Contacts database automatically de-duplicates and duplicate records (by email address) are never permitted. 

Every Leadfwd plan will be assigned an 'Active Contact' limit. This is the maximum number of unique Contacts, with a record status of Active, that your database will support at any single time. The record status 'Active' enables the contact record to be eligible for processing and tracking by the Leadfwd application. This does not infer that the record has taken some type of action or that you have taken any action with the record, it's more of an on/off switch. When a contact record is set to 'Inactive' that would be considered the 'off' switch and the will not be tracked or eligible for any processing by the platform. Learn more about record status

Custom Data Field Properties

The Contacts database can be customized and horizontally scaled with 'Custom Data Field Properties'. Some examples of default data field properties include Name, Company Name, Title, City, State, Country, Mobile Phone, etc. Account Owners can add an unlimited number of custom data field properties (text fields, numeric fields, date fields). When a new custom data field property is created, it is appended as a data field for all new and existing contacts. Values can be added to new custom data fields for existing contacts by import a spreadsheet or manually updating fields.

Default System Fields

The Leadfwd Contact database comes with some pre-built system fields that cannot be modified. These data field properties can be quite valuable for managing different stages of your contacts lifecycle.

These system fields are considered 'smart' fields and are automatically updated by the Leadfwd platform. You can leverage these fields for building Workflows and Segments or filtering Reports, but they cannot be updated directly by the account owner or platform user. 

How will you and your team organize Contacts?

Why is this important? Scale. Disorganized data clutter doesn’t scale and it quickly eats up time, to the point where it's unmanageable. 

Plan your data

1. Ensure each team member can easily access and engage contacts they own.
2. To make targeting and outreach consistent and stable. You don’t want to be guessing as to whether or not you’re actually reaching your intended audience.
3. To ensure that alert policies are reaching the right team member, when a prospect is exhibiting buying signals.
4. To track and visualize what’s working and what’s not, so you can optimize every aspect of your sales engagement program.
5. You can’t automate faulty data. Workflows and Sequences rely on data integrity to execute their missions. To truly maximize automation, you need a consistent and organized data system.

Contact Ownership - How do team members keep their contacts organized?

There are multiple methods you can employ to organize and separate contacts for each team member. The most popular approach would be Segmenting contacts by the Owner and setting the data field property when you import Contacts or by using an Automation Workflow. 

• Segments
• Tagging Contacts
• Owner Data Field Property
  • Utilize user email address and owner naming convention (example, use the team members email address in the Owner field)
  • Automation to create segments automatically

Segment and Tag: Contacts - How does the team owner intend to track contacts? 

• Account Persona (industry, geolocation, etc)
• Key Contact Persona (title and role)
• Source (LinkedIn, Prospect Search, External Data Tool, CRM, CSV)

Where will team members work from?

• Inside the CRM using Leadfwd Sidebar
• Inside their Inbox or Browser using Leadfwd Sidebar
• Inside Leadfwd directly in-app

What data properties will our contacts need for our outreach program?

• Email address is required for every record in Leadfwd.
• LinkedIn automation tasks require a valid Linkedin profile URL in the [linkedin_url] data property field.
• SMS touchpoint steps require a valid E.164 formatted mobile phone number in a data property field. This field is then defined in the Sequence action step settings.
• Voicemail drop touchpoints require a valid E.164 formatted phone number (ideally mobile) in a data property field. This field is then defined in the Sequence action step settings.
• Direct Mail touchpoints require a complete and valid physical address to POST to the external provider (Lob, Handwrttyn, etc). 

What compliance measures do we have to consider and implement?

• Valid opt-out mechanism:
  • Automate with opt-out link
  • Automate with ‘opt-out’ reply detection
    • Automation with NLP and opt-out any negative reply
    • Move replies in Unibox to 'Not interested' to set unsubscribed status
  • Manually update records with requests
• Physical address requirements:
  • Embed in email signature for each sender
  • Global Do Not Contact (Suppression) List
    • Enable to ensure no contacts are ever active or touched again.
• GDPR or CCPA
  • Legitimate Interest Qualification
  • Subject Data Requests

Workflow Automation

Workflows help create consistent playbooks that run on autopilot, so you and your team don’t need to spend any time thinking about otherwise tedious tasks. Workflows can help support the team as a whole or individual team members. 

Who’s responsible?

• Should individual users be able to create their own workflows?
• Should an Account Owner or Manager be responsible for creating workflows on behalf of the team and individual team members?

Workflow templates

• Route contacts to sequences automatically based on their profile (data properties), segment, tag or ownership.
• Should a specific task outcome or call disposition end a sequence automatically? Or, enroll the contact in a new Sequence?
• If a contact is unresponsive should they be enrolled in a ‘slow burn’ sequence or enrolled in a sequence with higher call touches vs. automated touches?
• If a contact demonstrates some interest by clicking one or many links in an email, should this trigger a Call task for the contact owner? Or should the increased interest unenroll the contact and move them to a more appropriate sequence based on the link/content they viewed?
• When a contact provides a specific objection, should they be routed to a sequence or reassigned to a different team member for follow up?
• When a response is received from a contact, trigger a webhook to a third-party app (like Slack) using Zapier.
• When a contact engagement status changes, update a corresponding data property field in your CRM.

Outreach

Who’s responsible?

• Should individual users be able to create sequences?
• Should an Account Owner or Manager be responsible for creating sequences on behalf of the team and individual team members?

Private and Shared sequences

• Shared sequences allow any user to enroll contacts into the sequence
• Private sequences allow only the sequence owner to enroll contacts into the sequence

How will we find and enroll our audience into Sequence outreach?

• LinkedIn using Sidebar (Chrome Extension)
• Import from a spreadsheet
• Import from a third-party app using 'no code' platform (Zapier, Pabbly, etc)

What channels will we use?

• LinkedIn Engagement
• Email
• SMS
• Voicemail Drops