Tag Archive for: business database

In Business-to-Business Sales, Contact Intelligence Is Vital

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If you know your customers’ daily challenges, you can easily explain how you can help them, whether that’s with a product or ad inventory. Most sellers, when they find a business opportunity, lead with email outreach. But a one-size-fits-all approach might not be the best way to identify the best way to reach the most valuable opportunities.

What can you do with a name and a business email address?

There’s a ton of information you can find out about your prospects if you can get a business email address for them. At the very least you’re going to have their company name and website URL. Once you visit that URL you will probably get a sense of what your prospect’s business is and how you might help them achieve their goals.

Everyone email in a company’s business email address directory will tend to follow the same format, too, so once you know one person in an organization, it’s not very difficult to extrapolate that out over the people in the organization you want to reach.

Usually you’ll be looking at some combination of first name (or initial) and their last name (with or without a dot separator). Some companies limit their name-side of the email address to a specific number of characters so there might be some truncation involved, but you don’t have to be Wikileaks to figure out the pattern. This knowledge is particularly useful if you’ve heard about a promotion or new hire in your target organization and want to get on their radar before anyone else.

Unlock their social media accounts

Business email addresses will also help you find the company on LinkedIn, and from there you can find all the employees who work there and begin connecting with them. Maybe not all of them, but you get the idea.

With a name – and a LinkedIn profile picture – you can also find your target’s Twitter account. If your goal is to get to know your prospects, these accounts are plenty. Trying to approach them on Facebook is probably taking your profile-building a little too far

Learning what your target prospect likes to post on LinkedIn and Twitter will give you an idea of what’s important to them. More importantly, their content might give indicators of what practices they value and which they consider a professional no-no.

No crystal ball needed

Everyone has a different communication style. If you understand what kind of communication your prospects are most likely to respond to, you can tailor your messaging to get the response you want. CrystalKnows is a tool that hands you that information. Using the DISC personality profile system, CrystalKnows can tell you if your prospects like brief to-the-point emails or longer messages; whether they’re likely to be very direct with you or if they’ll give you information and expect you to connect the dots; and if they’re likely to get testy with you if you’re a few minutes late for a meeting. It can even tell you if they prefer email, phone calls, or face to face meetings.

So where can you get a list of names and business contact email addresses? In the Mirren/RSW New Business Tools report for agencies, Winmo was voted the most accurate, most reliable and most preferred tool for business intelligence.

Start a no-strings Winmo trial today.

Advantage You: How to Baseline Business Intelligence Tools

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Serving up leads and sales is easy with the right sales intelligence. Knowing what you want in a platform, however, can prove to be a bit more challenging (think trying to take down Serena Williams or Andy Murray: Not an easy task!). We thought we’d break it down a bit, giving you the top four tips for finding your must-have sales resource.

Human-verified data

While a machine can serve you tennis balls to help up your game, one thing technology can’t do accurately is verify data for prospecting. The people checking the data in your business intelligence solution should understand how you’re going to use the information to ensure the data they gather is up to date and useful. Some providers data-scrape websites or social media communities for contact information. But if there’s no verification by actual humans, then the contact information you get could be out of date, inaccurate, or just wrong. Like strawberries and sour cream, or cucumber sandwiches in principle.

Relationship mapping

The ideal business database contact platform needs to break down the who’s who for you in a way that’s accurate, valuable, and easy to understand. You shouldn’t have to guess which agency and marketing contact is working with which brand. Bigger corporations often have multiple marketing divisions, each dealing with individual brands. Sometimes getting the contact information for the CMO of Nissan UK will be less helpful than getting the contact information for the SVP of marketing for the Nissan Micra team. Unless you’re looking for a conversation that ends with “you cannot be serious,” let your sales intelligence platform serve up something you can smash.

Custom filters

Blindly swinging your racquet trying to hit the ball will almost always result in failure. Whether you’re looking for organizations to prospect or waiting to return service, focus and concentration will always get better results. Your sales intelligence platform should allow you to focus on the information you need and cancel out the noise. You don’t want to work with every High Street clothing retailer, so a function that helps you filter media spend or agency specialities allows you to identify your top prospects with one smooth hit. If you can’t narrow down your prospects in the platform, you’re going to end up spending time filtering them manually, and if you’re going to do that you might as well go ahead and make your Pimm’s with 7-Up.

Integrations

While your sales intelligence platform may be the main event, it’s no secret that your sales team uses a variety of resources to perform at their peak. The business database platform you choose should integrate with other information sources, such as LinkedIn to uncover potential connections, and provide CRM integration to help you import and develop leads and prospects. If you work with advertisers, or creative agencies that develop content, look for integrations that give you a firsthand view of potential agencies’ creative work through platforms like AdForum. When resources like Nielsen are connected as well, you can expect to have easy-to-find information on media spending by channel, giving you the advantage over your competition.

Request a trial and hit the ground running.

Your new resource is sure to be an ace!