B to B prospecting: the best hacks to apply in 2018
Improve your B-to-B prospecting now by exploiting the most effective solutions for finding customers in your market. There's no secret to optimizing your B-to-B sales prospecting: you need to generate quality leads. This makes it easier for you to secure appointments with prospects, and your calls lead to more sales.
appvizer reveals the marketing techniques and digital platforms that are changing salespeople's lives:
Telephone prospecting: never on the first night
Let's not laugh: this is a real wake-up call for the managers of a large number of companies that are losing momentum, and therefore a real hack for them to implement!
The digitalization of business practices means that the traditional rules of cold calling have to be broken.
The management of successful companies demands ever greater efficiency and profitability from upstream marketing actions:
For 88% of B2B marketing decision-makers, lead quality is paramount. 70% want to reduce the cost of lead acquisition.
Gone are the days of advertising, telemarketing, door-to-door canvassing and Granddaddy's direct marketing, replaced by a new B-to-B communication plan, largely deployed on the Internet, thanks to webmarketing techniques.
The web offers a way to avoid time-consuming tasks and generate business at fiber-optic speed for all sales forces who know how to exploit its data.
Let's start by recalling the best practices of a prospecting plan:
- define your professional target,
- qualify the prospect,
- identify the contact's needs,
- determine the right time to make an appointment,
- contact the prospect by telephone with a personalized offer,
- initiate sales negotiations, make a successful sale and build loyalty.
To enable your sales force to adopt a quality and sales efficiency approach, it is advisable to centralize all contact information in your CRM tool.
This commercial organization is very useful for importing and exporting data to other platforms capable of exploiting the full potential of the hacks that are embellishing today's B-to-B commercial canvassing landscape.
Let's open the brochure and unveil the product pitch that invites you to be part of the journey.
Prospecting on B2B Tinder in masked mode
We apologize if this digital allegory offends you: its sole purpose is to draw your attention to the importance of targeting, without being entirely accurate if we quibble (let's avoid all amalgams and hiatuses).
The sales department's results depend on the quality of the contacts the marketing director sends them.
So..:
It's imperative to conquer new customers by exploiting all the key targeting criteria to increase sales.
Whatever your objectives, any sales or marketing strategy starts with defining your target and segmenting it - that's the rule.
But where can you find the famous Meetic B2B (incorrigible, this author!) to segment your B2B targets and improve your sales process?
In a 2-in-1 tool, for example: the EasyBusiness solution integrates an international B2B database with 60 criteria for qualifying different types of company (from VSEs to major accounts), coupled with an emailing platform.
Within this comprehensive B-to-B prospecting tool, the user addresses the most relevant decision-makers directly, selecting in particular :
- exact company location,
- business sector, type of products or services sold,
- number of employees,
- decision-maker's job function,
- name, etc.
Undeniable advantages for sales and marketing teams:
- unbeatable precision for targeting B-to-B contacts (up-to-date files),
- a "Marketing Analysis" module for market research and assessment of market opportunities before committing to them,
- customized creation of your prospecting file,
- complete management of your email marketing campaign, including performance measurement to refine your funnel,
- connection with Salesforce CRM,
- mobile application with contact geolocation.
Hack Big Data with Sales Intelligence
This sales prospecting technique makes the task of sales teams easier in every respect:
- you enter a typical customer profile into a software program equipped with B-to-B sales-oriented artificial intelligence (Sales Intelligence),
- the software constantly scans the web and gathers relevant data on your prospects, scattered all over the web,
- the algorithms score the prospects, - the tool alerts sales staff to opportunities.
Sales Intelligence scans the web, detects business opportunities and passes them on to the sales rep.
Which ship should you use to become a wise privateer?
You can take the helm of Bypath software: it navigates the Internet in real time in place of salespeople.
The tool analyzes Big Data, i.e. the continuous flow of information published on online financial news magazines, press sites, blog articles, recruitment sites, social networks such as Twitter, each company's website, as well as the Kompass database of companies, etc.
Bypath qualifies potential customers, then alerts sales staff to the profiles most ripe for purchase, and the levers to be activated to encourage closing on presentation of the quotation.
Video overview of Bypath's capabilities:
Artificial intelligence offers serious advantages for sales managers, field sales representatives and sales engineers:
- an end to time-consuming tasks,
- prospecting focused on real purchasing potential,
- faster social selling,
- intelligent support for customer portfolio development.
By communicating with your customer relations tool, Bypath updates all the data in your customer file in your CRM.
Develop your customer relations in automatic mode
The Blacksales platform breaks the rules of B-to-B email prospecting for the benefit of sales teams.
Here's how this virtual prospecting assistant enables you to automate your email prospecting:
- the tool analyzes your CRM database and identifies prospects defined according to your own criteria,
- it does not take into account your contacts under negotiation and acquired customers,
- the platform sends content appropriate to the prospect's behavior and at the right time,
- it takes care of follow-up contacts and handles initial objections,
- Only high-potential leads are sent back to the sales representative for an appointment.
Automating B-to-B email prospecting enables sales reps to concentrate on their real added value: converting and offering personalized support to customers.
The software connects with your CRM such as Salesforce Sales Cloud or Zoho CRM to compare your customer profile data with a collaborative database of hundreds of thousands of B-to-B profiles.
The solution pushes effective content to qualified contacts in order to engage a relationship as soon as contact is made. A marketing automation scenario is triggered and improved according to affinities, responses and email open rates, until the desired and achievable sales performance is reached.
On the social selling side, Blacksales also scans Linkedin to retain the most relevant information and contact worthwhile prospects.
Blacksales is a guarantee of excellence for success, whatever the sales challenge:
- you don't have to use the solution; you simply receive the leads (and the follow-up in full transparency),
- a team of copywriters experienced in sales prospecting content personalizes messages,
- lead nurturing is carefully monitored by a customer success manager,
- the more the software prospects for you, the more it learns, the higher the quality of leads (machine learning).
Blacksales lets you calculate your cost per lead in just 11 questions:
Upgrade your sales force with access to the best prospects
Nobody ever says no to a ticket, do they? Corporama's solution is capable of sending you a daily list of scored contacts: sales reps only make appointments with "smart leads".
The recipe for putting a smile back on a salesperson's face? Give them scorable leads to contact: smart leads.
The secrets of Corporama software :
- an integrated Business Intelligence tool,
- a collaborative database of 11 million B-to-B contacts, updated in real time,
- 35 search criteria (sector, financial, semantic, location, etc.) to identify prospects,
- detection of business signals, such as the publication of a job vacancy or the winning of a tender,
- data cleaning expertise.
To target a priority prospect, you can, for example, focus your search on growth companies in a particular sector, target the French market, or even companies with significant export sales.
All relevant information can be added to your sales pitch: geolocation of customers to optimize appointments, legal and financial information, contact details, news, key events, capital increases, etc.
Here's an overview of the Corporama platform, reflecting the functional and operational aspects of the solution:
Additional benefit: the prospecting tool communicates with the majority of CRMs such as GRC Contact, Vtiger CRM, Sugar CRM, Sage CRM, Oryanoo CRM, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, noCRM.io, Ines CRM and many other applications. Salespeople can smile even more: the tool allows you to supplement your contact database with strategic data, deleting duplicates and erroneous information.
Last B-to-B tip: the free Linkedin hack
Here's a video tutorial on how to extract members from a Linkedin group:
This trick doesn't match the prospecting power of the aforementioned tools, but has the advantage of being free and targeting members of a specific group.
Last tip, approach within the framework of the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation applicable in May 2018):
For emailing campaigns in particular, the current derogation regime remains unchanged. Consent (a key regulatory requirement) is not required for commercial prospecting or loyalty campaigns. However, certain conditions must still be met: information on the conditions of data processing, respect for the right to object (unsubscribe link) and ensuring that the solicitation is related to the profession of the person being canvassed.
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Article translated from French