How Sales Intelligence helps your prospecting

Have you found sales prospecting seems to get harder and harder? You’re right, and sometimes it just doesn’t look as though things are going to get better! Are you looking for “best practices” to facilitate business lead generation without having to do more prospecting? Find out how Sales Intelligence can help you to prospect BETTER and make your daily B2B sales life easier…

Problems with sales prospecting in 2017

If you spend even a small amount of your time seeking out potential customers by phone, email, via networks or directly in the field, you’ll already know that:

• Your prospects are plagued by canvassers,
• Your prospects are sick of fielding prospecting calls with no added value,
• Your prospects are fed up with telling people what they do, how they do it, and what they need,
• Your prospects don’t have any time to waste!
• Your prospects are the wrong ones (for you)!

So how can you get a shot at finding the right leads, getting past gatekeepers, talking to decision-makers and drawing them into a proper business discussion?

Easy! You need to:

1. Target the right prospects in your sales prospecting plan to ensure you don’t waste time on bad sales leads, and maximise your prospecting efforts
2. Know a minimum (or ideally the maximum) amount about who your prospects are BEFORE you pick up the phone / send an email / make an on-site visit! How do you do this?

Well, that’s exactly where Sales Intelligence comes in!

Imagine you could access a whole collection of information and business signals which let you target the best leads directly, i.e. the ones who best match your current (or ideal) customers.

Imagine you could start a conversation with a context-relevant introduction, differentiating you from all the other intrusions on their time that day and getting you a real window of attention.

How would that sound?

Let’s take a look at how Sales Intelligence will help you to prospect better.

Prospecting 2.0, the Sales Intelligence way

With a Sales Intelligence tool such as Predict by Sparklane, prospecting immediately becomes much easier. Simply ask: who is the ideal customer (for my business)?

You can just analyse your existing customer portfolio to establish a typical profile; or alternatively (and much more excitingly), ask yourself who you’d like to work with:

• Business sector
• Company size
• Turnover generated
• Financial health
• Geographical area
• Annual budget spend in your sector
• Etc.

Once you’ve weighed up all these key characteristics, which constitute the “best prospects” for you and your business, simply enter these details into your Sales Intelligence tool and it will spit out a list of hot leads! Does that sound so hard?

Now let’s see how to strike gold at an interview…

Work out a sales pitch for each target

Using the list of prospects by segment, produce a sales introduction which resonates with THIS specific prospect. How?

Produce a pitch designed specifically for the targeted company profile.

Because, let’s face it…

If you want to break free of the usual boring sales monologue with a person who’s just waiting for an excuse to hang up the phone on you, you need to do your homework! Pretty obvious.

So talk to your prospects about the subject that interests them most: themselves!

Using the business data and business signals served up on a platter to you by your Sales Intelligence tool, find an angle of attack which matches your prospect’s situation and priorities.

For example, if you’re talking to a sales director (who you know was recently appointed to her post), ask her: what are her expectations for her sales force, and how does she plan to increase its performance? Ask her what she’s planning to do differently to her predecessors to make her mark in company history?

Differentiate yourself with powerful questions

Obviously, all the time you’re interacting with the customer, try to ask your prospect relevant questions which feed into your sales strategy.

Not only will it give you more information about the company and its needs, you’ll also differentiate yourself by the quality of your approach and your sales diagnosis.

A high-impact introduction + a relevant sales diagnosis = 80% chance of making the sale.

And that takes us to the very heart of the sale!

Sales Intelligence puts your sales teams in the best position to succeed.

According to a study conducted by CSO Insights, just 9.7% of companies supply their staff with Sales Intelligence tools, so imagine just how much you could differentiate yourself…

Are you looking for a competitive advantage to pull out a sizeable lead over your competition? Stop looking!
It’s worrying just how many companies don’t help their sales staff to prepare properly to allow them to create and initiate interesting conversations with prospects. This gives you a golden opportunity to boost your productivity and sales performance using Sales Intelligence.

Generally speaking, sales directors expect their teams always to give their utmost when making the call; they explicitly demand this, and check up to make sure it’s happening. However, sales reps often don’t have enough available information to satisfy this expectation.

Sales staff need access to Sales Intelligence if they are to make calls and produce contacts which turn into sales leads.

It’s as simple as that.

Sales Intelligence, along with the tools and practices it generates, is an essential investment for any company wanting to win more business in 2017!

So ask yourself the right questions: what would you do with the right Sales Intelligence tools? What sort of prospecting and sales results could you generate?