In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, a canned sales pitch is more likely to lead to the person on the other side of the line hanging up on you mid-sentence than an encouraging "please, tell me more."
Company data is the solution to fixing poorly targeted sales efforts. When you only connect with companies when there's a data-driven reason to do so, and tailor your messaging according to the prospect’s situation and needs, you'll significantly improve your hit rate in every step of the sales process.
Here are the top ten reasons why company data is a pivotal part of your sales prospecting strategy. To help you win your data-driven badge, we recently partnered with HubSpot to write a step-by-step guide to data-driven sales prospecting.
Injecting company data into your sales prospecting process helps you:
1. Focus attention on the right companies
It’s hard to get a full and accurate portrayal of a company unless you use hard facts. When basing your ideal customer profile on merely a hunch, you’re likely to make assumptions you don’t even realize you’re making, and ignore facts that don’t fit the exact image in your head. Data doesn’t make these mistakes. To get a complete and accurate overview of your best-fit prospects, you’ll need to use a sufficient number of data points: firmographics, technographics, buying signals, and intent data.
2. Avoid wasting resources on poorly-fitting customers
A deal is a deal, but you don’t want to sign customers that are a bad fit and likely to churn. A dissatisfied customer takes a lot of time from your customer success team and might end up costing your company more than they’re bringing in. By looking at the commonalities between your churned customers, and the most common objections from prospects who never converted, you’ll be able to create a “bad fit prospect” profile in addition to your ideal one. This will help you recognize company characteristics that indicate that a company doesn’t have the bandwidth to sign a deal with you right now.
3. Get more granular with your sales prospecting
Sales intelligence technology, more specifically, a dynamic company database, allows salespeople to conduct pointed searches for companies with a specific set of real-time data points. What this means to you as a salesperson is that you can find a list of companies matching your ideal customer profile to a T in a matter of minutes or seconds; sales prospecting no longer has to be a time-consuming and arduous task.
4. Automate big chunks of your sales prospecting
We live in a time where there’s a megaton of automation at our fingertips. With your ideal customer profile in place, a dynamic company database can help you track relevant changes in every account on your total addressable market and notify you when a new company falls into the description of your ideal customer profile.
5. Filter out the best prospects from a larger pool of leads
When you have a longer list of potential customers, you need to decide whom to reach out to first or dedicate most of your resources. You have to prioritize. Only through access to a sufficient amount of data can you successfully identify micro-segments in B2B. With each additional variable you use to differentiate your audience from all other companies, you’ll increase the similarity of the companies in that group, and get a better understanding of what prospects to focus on first.
6. Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities with existing customers
The more quality company data you have, the easier you can identify signals that indicate your customers are ready to expand into other product offerings or grow their existing contracts. As mentioned previously, a dynamic company database can process enormous amounts of data, recognize important events in your key accounts, and notify you when relevant changes that indicate a chance to upsell or cross-sell occurs in any of your customers’ business.
7. Identify the right time to connect
There are moments when your product or service will be needed more than at another time. You can identify these moments by tracking buying signals; organizational changes that either a) make a company match your ideal customer profile or b) gives you a good reason and angle to approach a company already matching your ideal customer profile now. A dynamic company database powered by real-time data helps you track these types of events, and hit the perfect timing in B2B sales each and every time you connect with a potential customer.
8. Understand the right talking points for every customer interaction
Decision makers are more likely to consider your product or service when the experience is personalized. When you fully understand what’s going on in the company, you should have a good understanding of why they need what you’re offering right now. Insights from company data help you understand what offer and messaging make your best-fit prospects tick. Now you just need to tweak your sales script accordingly.
9. Increase the hit rate at every step of the sales process
When you only connect with companies that you've identified as a good fit and tailor your messaging based on their current interests and needs, you’ll see your hit rate jump significantly, not just in the prospecting stage, but throughout the entire sales process.
10. Make data-backed improvements
After each customer interaction, keep notes and review: what generated value, and what are the obstacles? The data that the sales process generates needs to be fed back into planning and used to identify potential improvements. Among other things, this will help you tweak your ideal customer profile and thus improve the precision of your sales prospecting.
Company Data Changing the World of B2B
In an age where personalization is king, filling your pipeline with the right potential customers, those who are most likely to succeed with your product or service, and tailor your offer based on their current situation and needs is a prerequisite for strong sales figures.
By tapping into the wealth of company data, you’ll get a better understanding of who you should be talking with, when you should reach out to them, and what you should be talking about. A dynamic company database puts all this information in front of you during every customer interaction, ultimately helping you increase your hit rate in every step of the sales process.
