How important is researching a prospect before you reach out to them? Based on some of the emails I receive, most sales people don’t spend enough time getting to know their audience. How much time is enough though.
Is it because it’s hard to find out what a company actually does? Once you’ve figured out who you want to research, what else should you look for when researching? These are all decisions you have to make when prospecting.
Typically the approach I see most salespeople do is:
- They start with a Linkedin search for a specific contact in an organization.
- They use a title search that relate to people they have sold to before
- Then they use additional keywords to find individuals who use competitors tools or have certain experience with tools
- Once they’ve narrowed their search they follow these individuals in Linkedin they begin scoring the account names to see which companies these individuals work for.
- They go to individual profiles and navigate to the contact’s company website
- Once on the website, they take a look at the home page, then the products page to figure out the products that the customer sells
- Next, they might check the careers page to see if the company is growing and what roles the company is trying to fill.
- Finally a last google search of the company they are researching with who their competitors are
Now back to Linkedin to begin to get the user contact research can be completed
- You will typically look up the past titles of the person you may end up reaching out to.
- Check to see if they know anyone you are already connected to.
- Next will be to discover, using your intent software, if the company has shown any buyer intent
- Based on the intent and the contact’s experience, this will drive how you would initially approach the contact you are researching.
- Back to your internal database of knowledge, where you can search for internal resources that you can use to begin your conversations with your potential prospect. Hopefully, your Google Drive or Knowledge Management system is organized.
Great, so 20 minutes later now you can begin to send your first email. According to Marketing Monarchs, it should only take 15 minutes to complete.
We believe there’s a better, more scalable way to start prospecting.
TotalSDR’s sales technology gives you the ability to quickly understand a company and the potential pains it might be experiencing. It uses an LLM to pull all data from the internet and it shares information about a target company. You’ll learn how your product would benefit the company you are going after, what pain they might already be experiencing, and who cares about that specific pain. Try it out yourself.
The research process should take 6-8 minutes if you are using the right resource.
If you’ve like to learn more about how to do this on TotalSDR, check out the How To Videos on the website.
Look at these docs:
Let’s take a look at Zendesk as a seed company where I target Bridgestone as a potential client. Here’s what I can learn about bridgestone by adding it to my target company.
I had no idea that Bridgestone prides itself on customer service and they strive to minimize environmental impact. Funny enough Zendesk believes in the same philosophies which means you can derive an immediate connection between the two companies. It gets better though because TotalSDR then spoon feeds you how Bridgestone can benefit from using Zendesk’s service desk.
Now I have a great baseline for what to talk about when I reach out to prospects who work at Bridgestone. This was all generated in a few minutes versus having to run a series of google searches in hopes to find the latest information about bridgestone. The last part of research I can do with TotalSDR is to generate a deepdive that tells me the potential issues/pain going on at Bridgestone that my product (Zendesk) could solve. Each pain is outlined with how it impacts Bridgestone and the downstream effects of that pain if it’s not mitigated. What I would do is use the pain points to ask questions to prospects. The mind map shows you which titles at Bridgestone care about each of the pain points described. This now gives you a capability to go and research the contact information of the people you should be contacting.
The more you know about your buyer, the better chance you have of selling to them the way they want to be sold. By utilizing TotalSDR you increase your chances to start and drive a conversation. The power of the software is that it will do a herculean amount of knowledge gathering for you in just a few minutes. This saves you time and you can personalize your outreach engagements far better. Bottom line is pipeline generation is the lifeblood of a company.
