Companies no longer tend to purchase a one-off list of names and phone numbers. Instead, sales teams need a broader, more sophisticated perspective into their target contacts and businesses.
This change led to company data, technographic data, business experience, sales capacity, and sales prospecting tools. But no matter what we’re calling the sales data, the data from the provider has become more advanced.
In this article, we are going to see how company data can help you to improve your sales prospecting process.
What is Company Data?
In today’s hyper-competitive market world, a scripted sales pitch is more likely to lead the prospect on the other side of the line to hang up on you mid-sentence than give an engaging “please tell me more.”
Company data is the answer for addressing poorly focused sales efforts. If you only interact with businesses when there is a data-driven justification to do so and adapt your message to the situation and needs of the prospect, you can significantly increase the hit rate at any stage of the sales process.
Here are the top nine reasons why company data should be a vital part of your sales prospecting approach.
Including company data into your sales prospecting process helps you:
1. Focus attention on the right companies
It’s challenging to get a complete and accurate picture of an organization unless you use hard facts. When you base your perfect customer profile on assumptions, you’re likely to make decisions that you don’t even know you’re making. You ignore details and realities that don’t match the exact picture of your head.
The data doesn’t make such mistakes. You need to use a reasonable number of data points to get a full and reliable analysis of the best-fit prospects: firmographics, technographics, and buyer intent data.
2. Avoid wasting resources on poorly-fitting customers
A contract is a deal, so you don’t want to sign a client that’s a bad deal and is sure to churn. A dissatisfied consumer takes a lot of attention off the customer success staff, which can end up losing your business time and money.
By looking at the commonalities between your churned clients and the most common objections from potential customers who have never converted, you would be able to build a “bad fit prospect” profile in addition to your perfect one. This will help you understand the company’s features that suggest that a company doesn’t have the bandwidth to sign a contract with you right now.
3. Get more granular with your sales prospecting
A sales intelligence tool, more specifically a complex business database, helps salespeople to perform tailored searches for businesses using a specific range of real-time data points. What this suggests to you is that in a matter of minutes or seconds you will find a list of businesses matching your perfect customer profile to a T. Sales prospecting should no longer be a time-consuming and arduous process.
4. Automate substantial portions of your business prospecting
We live in a moment when the automation machine is at our fingertips. With your ideal customer profile in place, a comprehensive business database can help you monitor the related developments in any account in your overall addressable market and alert you anytime a new company comes under the description of your ideal customer profile.
5. Filter the best opportunities from a wider pool of leads
If you have a longer list of possible clients, you need to determine who you should reach out to first or devote more attention to. You’ve got to prioritize. Only by obtaining a sufficient amount of data can you effectively classify micro-segments in B2B.
For each new variable that you use to distinguish your audience from the other firms, you can improve the comparison of companies in your category and develop a clearer sense of what the best opportunities are to concentrate on first.
6. Identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling current consumers
The more quality business data you have, the better it is to detect signs that your clients are willing to extend into other product offerings or to change their current contracts. As described above, a complex company database will process large volumes of data, recognize significant events in your main accounts, and inform you when any related shifts that suggest a chance of upselling or cross-selling have occurred in your customers’ companies.
7. Identify the right time to connect
There are periods when the product or service will be desired more than at any other time. You will detect these moments by monitoring purchasing signals; internal improvements that either a) make a company suit your ideal customer profile or b) give you a compelling excuse and an angle to target a company that already matches your ideal customer profile.
A complex business database, driven by real-time data, lets you monitor these types of events and achieve the optimal timing of B2B transactions any time you communicate to a potential client.
8. Understand the right points for every customer interaction
When the experience is tailored, decision-makers are more likely to choose your product or service. When you understand what’s going on with your business, you should have a clear understanding of why they need what you’re selling right now. Business data analytics help you grasp what’s on offer and messaging to tick the best-fit prospects. Now you just need to change your sales script accordingly.
9. Increase the hit rate at each stage of the sales process
If you only communicate with businesses that you have established as a strong match and tailor your message to their current desires and needs, you can see your hit rate jump dramatically, not only at the prospecting level but across the entire sales process.
Final Thoughts
If you focus entirely on inbound leads or obsolete prospecting methods, know there is a better way to power your sales pipeline. By leveraging the asset of company data, you will have a clearer understanding of who you should be speaking with, when you should reach out to them, and what you should be talking about.
Partnering with a B2B data provider is no longer a “nice-to-have” thing. It’s a must-have.
