B2B Prospecting

There are two key challenges faced by almost all businesses engaged in B2B sales.

The first is to streamline the process of capturing basic data about all the target businesses in a region / sector (address, contact data, website, social media etc).

The second is to enable the rapid sorting and filtering of these lists to build a reliable set of target prospect lists.

We know that a doubling of productivity at this stage results in up to 100% increase in revenue, and yet most businesses have suboptimal prospecting strategy, processes and tools.

The List is the Strategy

Often B2B businesses will use a tool like Linkedin Sales Navigator to build a target list.

Our analysis has shown that such a list will typically only cover about 50% of the market in a given region and about 80% of the companies will be outside the true target criteria.

Using this as the foundation of the B2B outbound sales effort is inefficient. It results in poor results and poor morale as most of the sales effort is wasted. Not knowing the true coverage means no useful data regarding market penetration, etc is generated.

Ideally, we need a tool to fill the funnel with close to 100% of the precise target market segment within a defined region.

We then need a fast and efficient way to further segment the list into at least two sales processes; “Focus” and “Nurture”.

This “Sales System” eliminates data waste and produces a 6x increase in sales with the same sales resources.

We can then repeat the process with another region or discrete micro-segment in the same region.

Technology can be used to extract useful data (like the presence of specific words or phrases) to help segment the list, but in our experience it is a mistake to rely on technology alone to make the decision.

The experienced sales person can apply a sophisticated blend of trade-off judgements very efficiently if presented with the available information in a standard format in a single view.

The data extracted must be presented along with the business website and rapid viewing of social media pages. This allows for the subtle multi-variable judgement to be made to categorize the prospect (A, B, C) and to capture other data before swiftly moving on to the next.

Companies first, then Contacts

Only when we have identified the true target prospects (100% of companies in the region that match the specific criteria) should we proceed to identify the appropriate contacts in each company.

Here, an automated search of Linkedin can be useful, together with efficient and low-cost tools to find the appropriate email address and phone number.

The relevant sales process (Focus, Nurture) – using a combination of email sequences, social activity, calls, etc, and the appropriate content and personalisation – can now be activated for each group (A,B,C) of prospects.

By following these simple steps we build a robust Sales System.

Most B2B sales organisations do not do this.

Instead they base their prospect list on those email addresses apparently related to the target “sector” they can obtain most easily, and push them all through the same sales process.

They therefore do not have a database of 100% of their target prospects in a region that they can segment, measure and nurture to develop leads across multiple sales cycles.

In practice, the majority of B2B prospecting today can be conducted by evaluating the target business website and finding contacts in Linkedin.

There are various tools that aim to make elements of the B2B prospecting process more efficient but care must be taken to piece together the right tools for any specific business and to use them in the right order.