Build Pipeline with Smarter Prospecting

On a good day it can be difficult to get a prospect to return your call. It takes time, persistence, and a clear path to value to get a buyer’s attention. So how do you succeed? For many, it’s not easy. You need perseverance and patience. You also need data.

Quality business data can support your quest by providing insights into your prospects’ situation, spending patterns, and decision makers. Being armed with this information can help maximize your productivity — and potential for success — by helping you focus on the opportunities that best align with your use cases. You’ll spend more time working with qualified leads and less time chasing after leads that are unlikely to close.

The Value of Data

Commercial data (or B2B data) provides facts about a business. For example, B2B data can reveal a company’s financial situation or its activities that align with the solutions you sell. With this information, you can make more informed decisions about which companies you want to work with and which you do not. 

B2B companies generally regard comprehensive, current, trustworthy data to be a powerful asset. In our 10th annual Dun & Bradstreet B2B Data Report, almost 70% of survey respondents said their company’s investment in data quality increased during the past 12 months and they expect that investment to increase through the end of this year. 

Regardless of size, location, or industry, quality data can help companies develop more engaging and effective sales and marketing strategies that can help grow revenue. For sales managers that means you don’t have to rely on instinct alone to determine whether a particular business can be considered a qualified lead and how to score it against other leads. 

We’re not saying you shouldn’t apply your experience, too. But when you can trust your data, you can be more comfortable and confident in letting it support your hypothesis, or even better, using it to help you discover brand new opportunities.

Let’s look more specifically at how B2B data and insights can help sales professionals:

• Target more strategically
• Understand risk
• Prioritize the strongest opportunities
• Identify decision makers and buying centers
• Get in the door before your competition
• Connect the challenges your prospect is facing to the problems your solutions can solve

Target More Strategically

Today’s buyers are more sophisticated and educated about their options. Buying cycles are also more complicated, and budgets are shrinking. To secure a meeting with a prospect, you need to demonstrate value. It is much easier to do that when you understand the buyer’s needs and challenges. Data can provide this insight.

One way to segment a list of prospects is to add criteria that identifies activities or conditions that align with your ideal customer profiles or exposes a need for your products or services. A sales intelligence solution such as D&B Hoovers^® can help identify opportunities based on business characteristics and behaviors that a company is engaged in. 

For example, a sales team can make more informed decisions to target, or not to target, an account based on hardware or software usage (are they using a solution that works well with what your company sells?), growth, signs of merger and acquisition, bankruptcy activity, legal issues, contract wins, and more. By adding specificity to your search, you can target with precision to identify opportunities that are more likely to close.

Understanding Risk

An important component to evaluating whether to do business with a company is an understanding of their financial situation. Do they have cash flow? Are they paying their bills on time? 

Credit scores provide some insight, but there are other tools that provide even deeper insights into spending and payment behaviors. This can help you better evaluate the level of risk associated with doing business with prospective customers — and your existing customers too. 

Prioritize the Strongest Opportunities

Data can provide insight into who may be actively researching products and solutions like those your company offers — even if these prospects aren’t visiting your website. These insights can help you target in-market buyers who are showing active interest in solutions like yours. More advanced analytical tools can also be used to score accounts based on intent, so you can prioritize your prospects. For a deeper dive into how this can improve sales alignment and efficiency, read about this global cybersecurity firm’s exciting results. 

Identify Decision Makers and Buying Centers

Part of any sales process is identifying the decision makers. It’s easy for deals to stall when decision makers and the person who will ultimately sign off on the deal are brought into the conversation too late. 

One way you can find decision makers is to identify the buying centers within an organization, but this can be difficult to determine. Another approach is to focus on the C-level executives.

A tool like D&B Hoovers, which uses a combination of data and analytics, can help reveal members of a buying committee and help you more effectively customize your communications to these key players. 

Get in the Door First

Sales success is often influenced by timing. It’s important to get the proverbial foot in the door as early as possible — before your competition. One way you can do this is by monitoring your accounts for breaking news that can signal a cross-sell/upsell opportunity or a new sale.

Company websites and social media accounts are good sources for company news. You can also set up Google Alerts for key accounts. But when you’re hunting for new opportunities, the volume of data can be overwhelming. Where do you start?

Monitoring tools, such as the real-time trigger alerts, can alert a sales team to breaking events such as an executive change, merge, acquisition, or layoff. These events could warrant sales to reach out with a savvy offer or solution. 

Connect Challenges and Problems to Solutions

Company websites can provide insight into the leadership team, news, and what the company does, but to see the big picture, you also need industry publications, news articles, analyst reports, and competitor websites. As valuable as this information is, the research is time consuming. Aren’t you supposed to be spending more time selling?

Fortunately, there are tools that busy sales teams can leverage to create a strategic message and value proposition for resolving a company’s particular issue. For example, in-depth company profiles, available in D&B Hoovers, can provide extensive data about a business and its industry in an easy-to-understand format, so that a proactive sales team can quickly leverage that information to draw the buyer’s interest and attention. 

Keep Calm and Carry On

In any economic climate, activating B2B data can provide valuable insight and guidance for sales teams. Knowledge of business behaviors, spend capacity, buyer intent, and decision makers can help sales teams to eliminate distractions and prioritize the leads that have the best opportunity to close.