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 your B2B sales strategy has your team targeting the right audiences, increasing efficiency, and, ultimately, creating 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 a 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 data provider that has this information readily available for your B2B sales strategy.
If your sales team can’t increase pipeline forecasting, you’ll miss your sales quota. 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. 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. So, how can you build your ICP?
To start, you need to identify what your true ICP is. While it may be tempting to simply grab the list of the biggest companies in your target industry, 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, especially for account-based marketing. 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. By building your ICP efficiently with SalesIntel, you’ll see up to a 5X improvement in your marketing and sales efforts.
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.
If you don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered. In our eBook, From ICP to Revenue Growth: How to Use Your Ideal Customer Profile to Drive Sales Pipeline, we cover how to define your ICP, where the benefits come from, the biggest roadblocks, the ideal process for overcoming them, and finish with step-by-step instructions for your ICP definition
2. Prioritizing The Best Leads with Intent Data
Having a general idea of who they should be reaching out to is not enough for a B2B sales strategy. 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 even to be considered a potential customer? Be sure those are covered first. This may take some trial and error and need to be tweaked if you find specific characteristics mean more than you initially thought.
The next step is targeting those contacts who are ready to buy. Use industry-leading Buyer Intent Data with over 12,000 intent topics actively monitored to help you hyper-target the exact accounts and contacts that meet your ICPs.
With SalesIntel, you can monitor companies for a specific topic, score them based on activity level, and discover and pursue the targets most interested in your products and services. You can then prioritize and act on those red-hot leads in real-time.
3. Connecting With The Right People
Your team has 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 and manually logging account details. What if you could cut down on all that time instead having accurate contact data at your fingertips?
By investing in data enrichment, teams can append missing data (like phone numbers or email addresses) and even deduplicate redundant entries, streamlining sales conversations to the right contact.
With enriched data, you can enable your entire team to curate an accurate and effective prospect list with many contacts having email addresses, direct dials, 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.
By providing human-verified data that is 95% accurate, SalesIntel enables your team to connect with leads the first time instead of becoming lost in phone trees, wrong numbers, and spam filters.
Access SalesIntel’s human-verified emails and mobile numbers now.
Arm Your Team To Meet Their Sales Quota
All in all, you should 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, SalesIntel’s Founder and CEO.
“Imagine asking them to do research for half their 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.
