Tag Archive for: business intelligence tools

15 B2B Outbound Sales Tactics to Accelerate Growth

The Winmo team understands that B2B outbound sales tactics are a powerful way to drive business growth. We’ve drafted up a handy list of approaches to incorporate this strategy in 2023. Keep reading to explore the key tactics… And, bonus! We’ve also created custom email templates to help your sales team effectively communicate with prospects and clients.

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1)  Identify your target audience

First, have a clear understanding of who your target audience is. Then, tailor your messaging and sales approach to the specific needs and pain points of your potential customers.

2)  Build a targeted prospect list

The next step is to build a list of potential customers to target. This can be done through a variety of methods, such as leveraging a tool like Winmo to build a list of prospects who match criteria such as:

  • Company size
  • Ad investment
  • Demographic Focus
  • Vertical
  • Territory

3)  Develop a strong value proposition

This is the unique benefit or value that your product or service offers your customers. It’s important to clearly communicate this value proposition in your outbound sales efforts, too. This differentiates you from your competitors and convinces potential customers to choose your company.

4)  Create a personalized outreach strategy

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, create a personalized outreach strategy for each potential customer. First, customize your messaging and sales pitch to address each prospect. Then, to aid you in your outreach efforts, our team has put together some email templates to help guide you along.

5)  Utilize a multi-channel approach

Don’t rely on just one method of communication when reaching out to potential customers. Instead, consider using a combination of email, phone calls, and social media to make a connection and close a sale.

6)  Follow up consistently

As you know, most customers aren’t ready to make a purchase decision right away. Follow up at regular intervals, so you can stay top of mind and increase the chances of eventually making a sale.

7)  Leverage customer testimonials and social proof

Customer testimonials and social proof, such as case studies or customer reviews, can be powerful tools in your outbound sales efforts.

8)  Use data to inform your sales approach

By using data and analytics, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your outbound sales efforts and make data-driven decisions about how to optimize your strategy.

9)  Stay up-to-date on industry trends and best practices

To stay competitive in the B2B space, it’s important to continuously educate yourself on industry trends and best practices. This can help you stay ahead of the curve and position your company as a thought leader in your industry.

10)  Utilize automation and sales technology

There are a variety of tools and technologies available that can help streamline and optimize your outbound sales efforts. From automated email campaigns to CRM systems, these tools can help you save time and increase efficiency in your sales process.

11)  Use personalized messaging

In today’s market, customers expect personalized and relevant messaging. By taking the time to research each potential customer and tailor your messaging to their specific needs and pain points, you can increase the chances of making a connection and ultimately closing a sale.

12)  Use social media to connect with potential customers

Social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter can be great tools for reaching out to potential customers and building relationships with them. By regularly posting valuable content and engaging with your audience, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry and position your company as a go-to resource for potential customers.

13)  Utilize video to enhance your outreach efforts

Video can be a powerful tool for connecting with potential customers and bringing your value proposition to life. Consider using personalized video emails or video sales pitches.

14)  Invest in employee training and development

Your sales team is the face of your company. It’s important to ensure that they are equipped with the skills and knowledge to effectively execute your outbound sales strategy. Investing in employee training and development can help ensure that your team is up-to-date on industry trends and best practices. Additionally, they’ll learn to effectively communicate the value of your products and services.

15)  Offer unparalleled customer service

Finally, excellent customer service is important not just for retaining current customers, but also for attracting new ones. By ensuring that your team is responsive and helpful, you can build trust with potential customers and increase the chances of closing a sale.

Obviously, what we’ve laid out above may not be one-size-fits-all solutions. You may have to do a little extra work by analyzing exactly which of the methods and tactics best suit your business development goals. Nonetheless, we’re confident that by handpicking these strategies á la carte. And continually evaluating and optimizing your outbound sales strategy, you can drive growth for your business in 2023 and beyond.

Download Email Templates 

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

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.

Free vs. Paid: Marketing and Business Intelligence Tools

If you’re in business as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your mailbox is probably full of offers trying to sell you marketing and business intelligence tools. The trouble is, how do you know which services are worth the money, and which ones have a free competitor that will work for you until you start generating revenue? We’re looking at eight marketing and business intelligence tools in four areas — CRM, CMS & inbound, project management and sales intelligence — to give you the scoop on which ones are Harry Kane and which ones are Wayne Rooney.

Customer Relationship Management Tools

Zoho vs Salesforce - Business Intelligence ToolsTracking your sales opportunities is vital for timing outreach and knowing how long your sales cycle is, not to mention pipeline volume and velocity. If you’re selling anything you need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to stay on top of your sales efforts.

Consistently rated as a top 10 place to work in the UK, Salesforce is also the leading product in customer relationship management. Salesforce uses a “per user, per month” pricing structure with tiers ranging from £20/user/month for tracking opportunities and some prebuilt dashboards, to £240/user/month for the Unlimited Edition, which offers forecasting, rules based workflows, custom dashboards and a ton of other functions. But with 10 users, that’s £2,400 per month in expenditure.

ZOHO CRM, on the other hand, is free for up to 10 users, and the top tier of pricing (CRM Plus) tops out at €50/agent/month. The free version offers tracking at lead, contact, account and opportunity levels; email templates, lead forms and some limited workflow functionality. Upgrades across a wide array of functions are available at €12, €25 and €50 per user per month.

Winner: ZOHO for free (Salesforce if you decide to pay)

Content Marketing & Marketing Automation Tools

Pimcore vs. HubSpot - Business Intelligence ToolsBehavioural triggers have become the norm for nurture campaigns and warming up prospects. From site visitors to asset downloaders, understanding what collateral resonates with your audience – and how to personalise and follow up that engagement with additional targeted content – is an industry best practice for inbound marketers.

HubSpot offers a set of tools to publish your website, track visitors, capture leads, serve landing pages and offer downloadable assets, along with email list management, segmentation and content distribution and measurement. But for a list size of more than 1,000, website and reporting add-ins, you’re looking at a plan priced at just under £25,000 per year, and that’s not including the £3,500 onboarding fee. To call it prohibitively expensive for most startups is an understatement.

Pimcore is open source, and for that reason alone, it’s not going to appeal to everyone: there are technical considerations like the files need to be installed in the document root of your web server and you’ll need to set up the database (talk to your IT professional about that), and when anyone can create code, you need to be extra careful about what you install. On the other hand, it’s completely free.

But what does it do?

At its core (see what I did there?), it offers product information management and master data management tools, content management and digital asset management, along with e-commerce options. As far as content management goes, Pimcore offers website publishing, email marketing automation, content personalisation and analytics, and even publishing options across multiple channels from a single source. If you don’t have £28,000 to spend on those tools this year, and have the technical know-how available to you, Pimcore is a powerful competitor to the high price content systems out there.

Winner: Draw – depends whether you want to spend the money on setup or technical staff

Project Management Tools

Bitrix24 vs Basecamp - Business Intelligence Tools

Providing a way for interested constituents to maintain and monitor the work of your internal functions, from marketing to creative to account services, is the best way to have accurate information when your boss asks for status updates. Both Basecamp and Bitrix quote prices in $US, but for customers outside the US, the payment processor will charge you whatever the cost in $US is in your local currency.

Basecamp is the gold standard for project management and collaboration, but it runs at $99 per month, which can be enough to dissuade solopreneurs, small shops and startups.

As an alternative, Bitrix24 offers many of the same functions including calendars, document sharing (up to 5GB total storage), versioning, CRM and sales automation, Gantt charts and projects with up to 5 dependencies.

You can add more storage, external users, workflow automation and unlimited dependencies if you subscribe to the Plus ($39/month) or Standard ($99/month) versions. If you want to add in reporting and time tracking, your price jumps to $199. Discounts for paying ahead are available.

Bitrix24 also partner with Intreface in the UK. Intreface offers pricing in $US, £GB and €EU for Bitrix24 implementation and custom development.

Winner: Bitrix24 for free (Basecamp if you decide to pay)

Sales Intelligence Tools

Google Alerts vs Winmo - Business Intelligence Tools

In sales, one of the most frustrating parts of the job is that you rarely get a decision maker on the phone right away. Big companies have gatekeepers, while managers at smaller companies are wearing so many hats they’re often simply unreachable. More than this, knowing when to time your outreach so you’re pitching services when your target might be interested – like when they’re in budget planning – is guess work for most sales professionals.

This is where Winmo and DailyVista succeed. Winmo is packed with information for sales professionals who target national advertisers: planning periods, prior year budgets and spending analysis by channel, filters that allow you to home in on niche markets, verticals or geographies. And at the click of a button subscribers get access to human-verified direct dial phone numbers and emails for decision makers that match their search criteria. DailyVista, Winmo’s daily email newsletter, offers actionable insights from its news gathering team which contextualizes earnings calls, fiscal reporting, movement in the C-suite and startup funding announcements. A subscription to Winmo and Daily Vista will set you back £4,350 per year for 2 users, with each additional seat costing £300 per year.

The free alternative to Winmo’s sales intelligence platform is Google Alerts and LinkedIn. I know that sounds like a win, because Google is brilliant, but to be effective you’ll need to set alerts for specific things like “earnings call” and “series A funding” and “promoted to CMO” – which means you’ll need to know which alerts you need, then spend time setting those alerts up, and then spend time on a daily or weekly basis reading them to see what insights you can glean from them. If you’re in sales, you’ll understand that every hour you spend on activities that don’t generate revenue, you’re missing out on sales calls that could win you business, and this manual alerts system — while it’s free — will quickly cost you in lost revenue opportunities.

If you choose the Google Alerts path, you’re also going to have to dig up contact information for the decision makers you plan to reach out to. Company About Us pages will just land you in front of a gatekeeper, while LinkedIn profiles are likely to be out of date – and do you really want to cold call your target’s personal mobile?

Winner: Winmo — While most of the free services mentioned here give the paid service a run for its money, when it comes to sales intelligence, there’s no substitute for Winmo. 

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