How Sales Leaders Can Help Revenue-facing Teams to Identify the Right Target Audience

As a sales leader, you want your team to focus on generating revenue rather than wasting time on mundane tasks. Reaching the right decision-maker is more difficult than ever, leading to extended sales cycles. But have no fear! 

There are tools available to ensure that your team targets the right audiences, increasing efficiency and ultimately leading to reliable sales forecasts. 

Identifying the Problem

Put on your detective hat for a moment. What is it that your sales team needs? Chances are you’ll uncover their need for data – and it goes beyond basic firmographic and contact data, like a company’s main phone number.

Rather, they’ll require the full breadth of data types to be successful, including firmographics, technographics, up-to-date direct contact data (like direct dials), and intent data. Lacking access to this information can hinder the team’s efficiency, so you’ll want to utilize a B2B data provider that has this information readily available to you. 

If your sales team can’t increase the pipeline efficiently, you’ll miss your sales quota.  Given the complexity of B2B sales cycles, if you don’t increase your sales team’s efficiency by focusing on revenue-generating activities, then you won’t be able to build a sustainable pipeline. Your team’s sales quota will be missed both this quarter and in the future.

Thankfully, there are tools and techniques that you can use to arm your revenue-facing teams to meet their targets, exceed expectations, and connect with the right prospects. 

1. Establish or Re-Evaluate Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

According to information gathered by  HubSpot, organizations with a strong ideal customer profile (ICP) achieve 68% higher account win rates. That’s a pretty substantial success! 

To start, you need to identify what your true ICP is. While it may be tempting to simply grab the list of Fortune 500 companies to use as your target accounts list, it’s worth the time to identify who your ideal customer would be. Understanding  why an ICP is important is critical in identifying and communicating to your team who they should target.  If your sellers are going to be focused on diving deep into a target account, picking the wrong type of company will result in a waste of time and frustration. 

“Having good data that matches your ideal company and personas is necessary for anything to improve and scale,” said Daniel Lewis, Director of Revenue Operations at  SalesIntel. “If you’re targeting the right people with even a subpar message, you can still get conversions if the prospect continues to see ads, does research on their own, or can connect enough of the dots to realize that the product may be useful to them.”  

It’s also important to note that as your company grows and expands its product offerings, your ICP may begin to differ. This is a dynamic process and should be reviewed and revisited frequently to ensure productivity is high and deals are closing. 

2. Prioritizing The Best Leads

Having a general idea of who they should be reaching out to is not enough for sales. The next step is to help your team prioritize and rank whom to contact. 

If you don’t help your team identify the right accounts to go after, they will end up wasting precious time chasing accounts that do not fully align with your ICP. Every day wasted makes it harder to play catch-up in an environment with long sales cycles.

How do you determine whom to prioritize? Think about your ICP and what you want from a “perfect” lead. What job title would they have? What industry? How large is their company? What’s in their tech stack? Then, start assigning value and weight to those characteristics. Are there certain must-haves that a lead would need to meet to even be considered a potential customer? Be sure those are covered first. 

This may take some trial and error and may need to be tweaked if you find certain characteristics mean more than you initially thought. Using a platform like SalesIntel may reveal buyer insights that you had previously overlooked, simplifying your lead scoring model. 

3. Connecting With The Right People

Your team has now identified their ideal customer, prioritized their leads, and now all that is left is outreach! But are you able to get in touch?

According to HubSpot, the average salesperson only spends about 34% of their time talking to prospects. The rest is spent on administrative tasks, like researching contact information. What if you could cut down on all that time, instead having accurate contact data at your fingertips?

RevDriver, SalesIntel’s free Chrome extension, allows your team to instantly find human-verified contact information for your prospects while you’re on LinkedIn or your target company’s website. SalesIntel’s industry-leading B2B intelligence platform powers the accuracy and power of RevDriver.

You may also find that you have key data points missing in your database. By investing in data enrichment, teams can append this missing data, and even deduplicate redundant entries, streamlining sales conversations to the right contact. 

With this enriched data, you can enable your entire team to curate the most accurate and effective prospect lists they’ve ever had, with many contacts having email addresses, direct dial, and even mobile numbers listed. Providing better data upfront to the sales teams will make them more efficient.  Less time doing research equals more time available to sell, coach, or learn.  

With SalesIntel offering human-verified data that is 95% accurate, your team will be able to easily connect with leads the first time instead of becoming lost in phone trees and wrong numbers.  

Access SalesIntel’s human-verified emails and mobile numbers

Arm Your Team To Meet Their Sales Quota

All in all, you need to ensure your sales team knows they are supported and set up for success. “You need to ensure your sales team knows that you care. How do you show that you care? Make sure they feel they are well supported and set up for success,” stated Manoj Ramnani, Founder and CEO of SalesIntel. 

“Imagine asking them to do research for half the time? Research isn’t why they took a sales job. Please give them the tools they need, such as the right data and insights that are accurate and in real-time.”

SalesIntel can provide everything teams need to meet their sales quota and revenue goals. Whether it’s to decipher intent data, establish an ICP, score prospects and leads, or find human-verified contact data, we have everything you need to help your revenue-facing teams to identify and connect with their target audience.