Sales teams that struggle to meet their goals may not be short on prospects–more likely, they're short on actionable insights about these prospects and the businesses they work for. In other words, they don't know their customers and they don't know when they are ready to buy—they have a hard time qualifying their prospects.
How to use company information to qualify prospects
1. Deep dive into actionable insights
Actionable insights are understandable facts about a company based on company data and CRM inputs which work as sales triggers. In many situations, these nuggets of information will answer your qualifying questions and reveal if a prospect is worth your time.
Prospecting used to equal paying for a long, static list of companies filtered by very general qualifications such as industry and revenue size. Many companies that still use this traditional way to find prospects often have thousands of accounts within their CRM, but no systematic way to track changes within the accounts. They lack a data-driven way to nurture these accounts and identify the right window to re-open the case.
DANGERS of a non-data-driven approach to prospect and lead qualification include:
- Inefficiency, as salespeople are forced to spend a lot of time sales prospecting in internal systems instead of acting on relevant changes in the companies listed there.
- New sales hires discovering that the best prospects are marked as taken in the internal systems even though no one is working on them.
- Outdated information, as the data in the internal systems, is being added manually.
A dynamic company database can help you improve your prospect qualification and the timing of your sales efforts. To find customers that are a perfect fit for your company, be sure to first create your ideal customer profile.
2. Automate tracking trigger events to find the right timing to get in touch
Trigger events are the most important actionable insights for a salesperson. They refer to events (such as news and recruitment ads) that indicate prospect readiness to invest. By importing a list of all companies listed in your CRM to an actionable insights platform like Vainu, you can get notified EVERY TIME a buying signal occurs in your accounts.
Product or service vendor will save a lot of time automating this job instead of manually scanning social media channels and news sites for buying signals to act on? You can e.g. filter companies that currently go through a specific organizational change instead of reading about the latest news on several companies one by one.
Import a list of all your existing customers in Vainu and get notified of important buying signals from any of these companies. You can see this right in your CRM
3. Get detailed company information
Vainu’s web indexing technology crawls millions of websites every day to read and collect everything ever written about all of the world’s business. The tool can provide you with actionable insights about all the companies in your CRM that you could realistically gather through manual searches. You can filter companies in your target group based on both static company information and not-so-obvious characteristics to find the companies that are most likely to benefit from your product or service.
Find detailed information about a company’s characteristics on their company card in Vainu
4. Conduct a successful first sales meeting
Modern sales is an efficiency game where quality eats quantitative sales efforts for breakfast. To get the meeting, salespeople are recommended to use AI-generated actionable insights to deliver a tailored pitch at the right time as today’s customers are more informed and selective.
Once you've done your homework, you'll be in a good position to run a successful first sales meeting. Qualifying prospects should be the primary goal of your first touch. Focus on hearing more about the prospects and their circumstances, and don't hesitate to disqualify prospects if those aren't a good-fit.
Tap into technology to qualify prospects
Curious to know more about how Vainu can help you find the right prospects for your business and the buying signals to act on now? Book a 30-minute free Vainu demo and have one of our product specialists show you how the tool can help you and your sales team reach quota.
