Technology leaves footprints that other technologies can track and follow. While looking for new sales opportunities, these footprints can tell you a lot about a company’s current needs and help you determine whether it’s worth it for you as to spend your time cultivating that lead or not.
If a company is using a technology that your software integrates seamlessly with—or if they show an obvious positive attitude to modern technology—they are more likely to welcome a sales call from you. Insights about a company’s tech stack and website technology not only helps you find out whether a company is likely to need your solution or not, it can also help you tailor your pitch better.
If you’re struggling to find new sales opportunities, consider these five tried-and-tested modern methods the next time you prospect.
Technology leaves footprints that other technologies can track and follow. These footprints can tell you a lot about a company’s current needs and help you determine whether they are likely to become your customers or not.
How to generate good sales opportunities
1. Find companies using a service you integrate with
With modern technology, you don’t have to wait until the discovery call to find out what CRM or marketing automation provider your potential customer is using. That simple piece of data can quickly tell you if your prospects are real sales opportunities, and it's readily available in the source code of the company’s website. Don't worry, you don’t have to understand source code and spend time trying to make sense of all the characters. Sales intelligence and company information providers, like Vainu, track what technologies a company is using. With our technology filter, you can, for example, find all companies using Salesforce or the Pipedrive CRM.
Knowing whether a company uses a platform that your service integrates with before cold calling increases your chance of getting the meeting as 1) You will only call companies that really benefit from your offer, and 2) You come out as trustworthy when you know the company's pain points and explain in a tailored pitch how you can solve them.
Knowing whether a company uses a platform that your service integrates with before a sales call increases your chance of getting the meeting.
At Vainu, we eat our own dog food, so to speak. As we recently launched our new CRM integration with Pipedrive CRM and Salesforce Sales Cloud, companies using either of these CRM platforms are great prospects for us. Our B2B sales team uses Vainu to find companies matching our previously defined ideal customer profile that use either of these CRM platforms.
2. Find sales opportunities who are mindful of new technology
Let’s jump to conclusions–sometimes, it can actually be justified, anything for new sales opportunities, right? If a company uses a number of new technologies we can assume that the decision makers at the company have a positive attitude towards technical innovations. If you’re offering an advanced technical solution, you stand to benefit from pursuing this type of company as you don’t have to go through all the trouble of convincing them that “digitalization is the new black” and your solution “isn’t as difficult to understand as one might think when first laying an eye on it.” Instead, you just have to prove the value of your service over your competitors’.
In Vainu's platform, you can find early adopters by using our digitalization index filter. We’ve calculated how “pro-new technology” a company is based on a number of criteria, such as how many new technologies the company is using and how its social media activity looks.
3. Find the right timing to get in touch
Sales opportunities come and go every minute. 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 a CRM platform that might indicate that the company is in the process of ratcheting up its sales and they might need a lead generation platform too.
Any change in any data point in your contact database can open a window of opportunity for you to sale. That's what we call trigger events. As we've seen so far, website technology is one of the easiest trigger events to follow and will often lead to uncover new sales opportunities.
4. Find or exclude companies that use a service from any of your competitors
Does your service outperform your competitors every day of the week? Then going after sales opportunities that use any of your competitor’s solution can be good for you to go after. They, without a doubt, have a need for it. Even if you–hand to heart–don’t have that exceptional position, reaching out to companies that already use a service similar to the one you offer can be good. If you’re selling a subscription-based SaaS service, you can win over customers as their current deal expires.
5. Find sales opportunities with a low Alexa rank
A company’s Alexa rank doesn’t only tell you how well-visited its website is, it can also tell you what support and technology the company might need. A company with a large number of visitors are more likely to need an advanced analytics tool or a software that helps personalize parts of the website and/or increase conversions. If you offer such technology, companies with a low Alexa rank, meaning a large number of visitors, are possibly good prospects for you.
A company’s Alexa rank doesn’t only tell you how well-visited its website is, it can also tell you what support and technology the company might need.
Finally, exclude fake sales opportunities
While in most cases technology will tell you who are good sales opportunities–those best-fit prospects most likely to buy, in some cases the opposite logic will help you find leads as well. Vainu can not only filter companies with a certain set of characteristics that use a specific technology, but can also do the same for those who lack the same technologies—this is known as our negative search function. Companies lacking certain kinds of technologies in core target groups are obvious prospects for the salesperson selling these technologies.
Companies lacking certain kinds of technologies in core target groups are obvious prospects for the sales person selling these technologies.
Before contacting a prospect, check out their tech stack and use that to your advantage. For example, even merely mentioning that you know what CMS the company uses will help your prospect feel like you understand their business better, which is a crucial part of building a relationship and trust.
