Prospecting takes a lot of time out of a SDR’s day. Depending on the source, prospecting is estimated take up between 24 percent and 50 percent of a salesperson's time! Yeah, let that sink in...
Knowing the best methods and platforms for you to find new, quality prospects will help you streamline your prospecting and focus more on the most important part of your work: creating value to your prospects and customers.
1. Exploit open data and modern technology
Instead of manually researching company after company through a static list, capitalize on insights from open data by using a dynamic B2B sales database like Vainu. Filter companies based on a combination of characteristics to see if their features match the description of your ideal customer profile.
2. Know what you’re looking for
Don’t fly blind. Define your ideal customer profile, this should be a company that gets significant value out of using your product and provides significant value for your organization.
Look for what your most happy customers have in common. Is it their location, number of employees or industry? Or is it less obvious characteristics, such as their attitude towards technology, high activity on social media or investments in their staff?
Which company characteristics are relevant to your ideal customer profile depends a lot on what you're offering. For instance, if you’re selling a technical solution, a company’s tech stack could reveal a lot about how ready a company is to buy. Or if you’re selling transportation services, then you’d probably include buying signals: a company having won a large contract, for example.
3. Automate the tracking of buying signals
By reading the main news sites and following up on LinkedIn, you will stay on top of things to a certain degree. Automate the grunt work by using an intelligent aggregator like Vainu to sift through millions of data sources to find the leads relevant for your case. With Vainu, you can get notified through email, Slack or in-app notifications as soon as any of your connections go through a specific change.
4. Understand the importance of disqualifying
Just as important as it is to know what defines a great window of opportunity is to know what reveals the opposite. Not every company matching your ideal customer profile is ready to purchase what you sell now. For example, if you’re selling a technical tool that helps companies streamline their customer support, companies that bought a similar tool during the last three months probably aren’t that likely to switch to your service just yet.
The ultimate goal of disqualifying prospects is to quickly eliminate non-opportunity accounts to make sure you’re not processing a large number of accounts in vain.
5. Find a home for all your data
A good CRM will be the basis for your whole sales process, gathering all of your prospect data, activity data, contract data and working as your reporting tool. To create a systematic workflow for how you collect and benefit from all company research you do, make sure you’ve picked a CRM that suits your business, is pulling data from all necessary sources through integrations, and creates a clear process for how you store your data.
