What have you done for me lately?
It seems like every manager I’ve ever worked with says, “Nice Work on INSERT COMPANY NAME. Now who else can you sell to?” The fabled what have you done for me lately spiel. Now in theory this sounds easy but how do you execute on a strategy to close other accounts that look similar to INSERT COMPANY NAME? Well read on because TotalSDR has an easy method to help you pull this off. Just make sure when you reach out the company fits in your Ideal Customer Profile.
What’s Lookalike Prospecting???
Have you ever heard of lookalike prospecting? It’s the ability of a seller to target companies, based on similarities to existing customer(s). Plain and simple – These prospects look like existing customers so I should sell to them.
Typically you see the approach handled as an inbound type of lead generation. For example, Facebook might draw parallels to similar companies or individuals and offer ads for products to buy. We will focus on the outbound marketing/sales approach to lookalike prospecting.
Okay, how can you pull it off?
The standard ways are to look at a company’s demographics, size, industry, culture, and company location. How can you analyze these at scale?
You can use a search engine, like Google or Bing, to do a lot of the work for you. You can use LinkedIn as a method whereby you review similar companies on a LinkedIn Account Page. Or if you have access to Linkedin Sales Navigator, you can use their latest Account IQ beta which gives you a few of the competitors they currently compete against. Don’t forget too that Gartner provides the magic quadrant – a graphical representation for emerging technology companies. Other providers include G2Crowd where you can compare software as well. There are many other ways to use software to do this.
Almost all of these processes are arduous even if they cost money. Although, it does pay off when you corner an entire market/industry. This is the power of lookalike prospecting. Are you convinced yet?
Create some FOMO
You can create a FOMO effect at these lookalike prospects. Remember, if you already have existing customers who play in the same marketplace, you should be able to sell to all the competition. When you call a customer’s competitor, definitely mention that you’re talking to similar companies. It might even be worth mentioning the name of the company. This can entice your prospect to be more interested in your product. Why? Because a competitor is using your product. This means they may have a leg up on others in the same marketplace. By selling your software to them, you level the playing field.
How Does TotalSDR do it?
TotalSDR uses a unique way to come up with lookalike prospects. We build data sets, analyze approaches, understand publicly available and licensed proprietary information. We use a graph to compile it. We process data in real time and continuously. We use that graph to find similarities between the company you want to target/were successful selling to in the past, and which other companies fit that same mold.
TotalSDR focuses on the verticals the target company competes in and finds similar companies. We use data from the user, and data from OpenAI to accurately depict a target company. The more you search, the more information you provide to TotalSDR the smarter TotalSDR gets about your sales marketplace.
TotalSDR takes a phased approach to lookalike prospecting. Our technology relies on our data, that is enriched constantly by public and licensed data sources, and customer sourced data via requests.
We gain an understanding of your company, the target company, and then how your company can provide value to the target company. We also determine the verticals the targeted company competes in. Based on our knowledge of the space, the verticals, the selling company, and the target company; TotalSDR is able to develop a list of look-alike prospects. These targets are highly relevant and likely to be great prospects for your company. All of this is done with a massive stateless processing engine build on top of our massive graph. Try it for yourself!
Example in TotalSDR
Let’s take two examples to illustrate the power of the TotalSDR Sales AI. The first is Prophecy, a company in the data transformation industry. They recently received 35M in funding.
This is an example of a smaller company joining a larger group of companies in a more mature market. These companies are arranged so that similar companies are located closer to Prophecy.
Prophecy, colored in yellow, is the seed of the opportunity landscape. The green boxes are the industries that are related to Prophecy which helps organize the competitors. The blue boxes are the companies/competitors. You can use those to do research, see if they match ICP, and either generate content or run a deep dive.
The second example we will run will consist of a new industry/market. For this example, we’ll use Striveworks, a company in the Machine Learning Operations or MLOps industry.
Most of the companies in this landscape are all very new companies playing in a new space. Databricks is probably the oldest company which was founded in 2013 and only recently delved into the MLOps space.
There are many approaches to Lookalike Prospecting. TotalSDR offers a unique approach when considering how to scale your outbound efforts.
