Having a hard time finding new leads? If you haven’t already, try using the website technologies found on a company's website to go hunting for hidden gems. Prospecting based on a company’s tech stack may be commonplace amongst IT consultants and digital agencies, but the data works just as well for those less familiar with website technologies.
If you’re struggling to find new sales leads, consider these five tried-and-tested modern methods the next time you prospect.
1. Start from the obvious
Selling advertising? Look for companies who are already spending online. Offering a customer service solution? Look for those that have an online chat tool. Offering translation services? Look for sites with foreign languages.
If you sell to a vertical or function that can be identified based on website technologies, using this data should be the basis of all your sales prospecting.
To identify what your core searches may be, just visiting an ideal customer’s website will often suffice. Check to see if there are any distinguishing features, and these will most likely be found under the hood of other interesting sites as well.
Search for companies with an online chat tool
2. Narrow down longer prospect lists
When you already have a longer list of prospects based on company size and industry, filtering by technology data is a good way to narrow down the list. Start by analyzing your current customer base to better understand which technologies they use, and use these same technologies as criteria when filtering through your prospects.
Alternatively, we at Vainu have created digital indexes for our prospects to evaluate a company’s general level of tech-savviness – these can be equally used to filter through to a specific industry’s digital leaders or not-so-digitally-oriented prospects, depending on your ideal target group.
Search for companies with a high digital index
3. Carry out smarter conversations
Before contacting a prospect, check out their tech stack and use that to your advantage. If your service offering is stronger because your prospect uses Salesforce, it’s definitely worth mentioning. Even by merely mentioning these tools you will make the prospect feel like you understand their business better, valuable for building trust.
Search for companies using Salesforce or any other specific technology
4. Pick out the right timing
When implementing a new technology, tons of different needs will arise in addition to the actual technical implementation. For example, when a company starts using marketing automation, they will most likely rethink their content creation strategy, fine-tune their core brand messages, and train employees in employee advocacy, just to name a few examples.
Follow these changes in technologies as you’d follow any other changes in your prospects to find the right time to act.
Stay updated with the latest events for the companies in your target groups
5. Identify opportunity through negative search
While in most cases technology will tell you who’s most likely to buy, in some cases the opposite logic will help you find leads as well. Companies lacking certain kinds of technologies in core target groups are obvious prospects for those selling these technologies, but this lack of a key technology is also a signal that they are behind the times. Look for these opportunities and use the fault in your pitch.
Exclude companies with a certain feature:
