How To Find Ideal Buyers and Customers Using hunter.io

When it comes to finding leads, hunter.io, the all-in-one cold email platform, is a great place to go. Here's why and how.

Every SaaS company is looking for leads. In some cases, they're fortunate to have them come to their site, but for the majority, they have to top up their pipelines with demand generation. But where are you going to find those leads?

Today, I'm explaining the role that a platform like hunter.io can play when you know your ideal customers and the buyers you need to reach.

Let's go!

What Is An Ideal Customer Profile?

Before we get started, let's remind ourselves about ideal customers.

If you remember our guide on sizing your market, your ideal customer (ICP) is the result of understanding your Serviceable Obtainable Market. 

Ideal customers are the businesses that you should be going all-out to engage. They have the right headcount, revenue, and location - with revenue to boot.

But this information is just the start. You now need to find people within those organizations who will care about who you are and what you say.

Enter the buyer persona.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

If your ideal customer is the business, the buyer persona is a general overview of the person who covers these buying roles:

• The researcher (typically who would receive a demo or trial)
• The budget holder (who will sign off on the purchase)
• The influencer (who will be involved in the implementation?)
• The user (the everyday user)
• The champion (a subject matter expert or senior management figure)

Building your buyer persona(s) is a process that involves effort. However, once you've created a snapshot of the persona via a template (like this persona PowerPoint) you've got a picture of what a "lead" is to your SaaS company.

Now what?

Why Do Ideal Customers and Buyer Personas Matter?

These two pieces are the bedrock of your initial positioning and messaging research. They'll be key to recruiting new team members and navigating funding rounds, and, on a more practical level, they're central to demand generation.

Demand generation is all about creating awareness and traffic to your site.

Targeting the businesses and people who fit into your niche makes sense. 

If you have someone interested in your software that fits the ICP and persona, you increase the chance they'll want to buy.

How Do They Help You Find Leads?

The ICP and persona act as a map. 

You feed that information to sales reps, you hand it to your product team, and your marketing team builds their strategy out from this base.

Today, I'm going to show you how you can use this information in a very practical way using hunter.io, a cold-email platform. hunter.io has a lot of power behind it, but for now, I want to show you how you can build a leads list with accompanying email addresses using it.

How Can You Find Leads Using hunter.io?

There are three ways to find your leads using hunter.io. Let's walk through them.

1. Discover x AI

The first way to find leads on hunter.io is the easier - 

You'll be encouraged to do this as you go through the set-up wizard in Hunter.

Step 1: Create your free hunter.io account

Step 2: Head over to this URL: https://hunter.io/discover

Step 3: Take your Ideal Customer Profile descriptor and place that into the text field:

Great, Disqus fits our profile.

Step 4: Because we like the look of Disqus, so we'll click into the account and see results for our leads on the right:

Step 5: Be sure to narrow down who you want to engage with by using information from your buyer persona. We know we want management members, so we apply that filter:

Step 6: Save your leads

Hit the "Save as lead" button and...

Step 7: Woo! You're done and ready to repeat, at scale!

2. Signals

The second path is found in the Signals section of hunter.io.

You can use a target list of companies that you've got in mind, based around your ICP, to find those companies that are showing the right types of engagement in your product category.

Let's start with a list of company domain addresses we think are the right fit for us (found using Discover):

Step 1: Head over to this URL: https://hunter.io/signals/new 

Step 2: Click “Company” on the Category screen:

Now enter your domain you'd like to track and the type of signal you're after:

When it comes to signals, some educated guesswork is needed that applies to your tech.

For instance, if you offer HR software, seeing a job change in the Head of HR would be a signal to run demand gen to that company.

Or, if you can see someone onboard technology that you integrate well with, that opens another avenue for you.

Once you're ready, click "Create Signal."

Step 3: Create another one!

Here, we want companies that are increasing marketing headcount - and we'll know that by adding in our filters for industry, headcount, and "marketing" in the keywords box

Step 4: Monitor your signals with email notifications!

3. Verifier

The final path is Verifier. This is an option when you already have a list of contacts, but you're missing details.

If you have an outdated CRM or you have worked with data-brokers before, you may likely have data in need of a refresh. Similarly, with the frequency at which people change jobs, this is a useful way to track these changes.

Step 1: Head over to this URL: https://hunter.io/verify 

Step 2: Start by adding one email of the contact you want to verify, here I'll use myself:

Results will show:

You can then add that to a lead list using "Save as a lead" or you can directly add it to a demand gen campaign in Hunter.

Step 3: Verify a larger list.

Now you've tried one, in some instances, you'll then have a longer list of emails to verify.

In that case, simply click this option and directly upload, following Hunter's instructions:

Find Your Leads In hunter.io Today

With this step-by-step lead-finding process and hunter.io's hugely user-friendly platform, there's little standing between you and finding prospects.

To get started, download our persona template pack by clicking below, and then create your free hunter.io account today!

Click here to download your ICP and Buyer Persona template and guide pack.