Preparation and knowing your account or target prospect is high among the golden rules of inside sales. Whether it’s simply looking up the company’s website to understand what they do, their products and their offerings or  its indepth pre sales research which involves reading and understand all that one can find on the decision maker, the more one knows before going into a call, the better prepared they are. The better prepared they are, the more the likelyhood of success. In almost any organization, there are some who will walk the extra mile to do some pre sales research, look up company websites and learn what they can before going into a call and there are some who won’t.  Even though its an inside sales and field sales commandment to know your customer well before engaging them, on the practical side, it is time consuming and can hamper productivity unless its all laid out in front.

There is no reason it can’t be laid out infront of a sales person before a call or before contacting a prospect. That’s what rich marketing data is all about. It’s about providing more information than just the absolute basic data on names, addresses and contact details. Enriching data is about enhancing the value of the data used by the company with additional information and intelligence. One great source for this kind of intelligence is the RSS feed.

RSS feeds have been a great way of tracking information whether it’s news, blog posts or updates. At the account level, many companies have their corporate blogs, news publications, press release pages, stock ticker and other sources of regularly updated content. A lot of these now offer RSS feeds for this information. Adding the RSS feed links to your CRM or marketing database will go a long way in allowing a sales person to qucikly browse through the latest updates and click on any interesting finds without having to spend time researching and going through the individual sites. On the decision maker level, several executives and individuals too have taken to running their personal blogs and websites so an RSS feed from there beside the other information on the contact withiin the database provide great insights into the person which can give inside sales team an upper hand. 

While the process of searching and adding RSS  to company and contact data is tedious, it’s an investment which will give your organization richer data to work with. Rich data helps sell smarter, so the effort is worth it!

I know there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to inside sales with one selling aggresively without taking no for an answer and trying to push towards sales and the other more passive who digg for insights to judge whether the prospect is open to buying and carefully wait for the right time to pitch an offer. I’ve seen both work so I can’t advocate one over the other but there is one tactic which is very relevant to the current slow economic times which can help inside sales pitch to the right accounts in a more informed way.

Sales account profiling or building detailed first hand intelligence on target accounts can really give the inside sales team the kind of ammo they need to alter their message and sales pitch based on what they know about the account, the decision makers, their preferences and their inside agenda. A set of key questions would normally help shed some light on who those decision makers are, what their challenges are and what their budget and time line look like. However , a lot company plans have been upset by the economic conditions today and getting a clearer insight into where these companies stand in light of this will help identify which accounts are better to pursue so that inside sales can focus their efforts. A pre sales call into key target accounts to ask a decision maker within your market area with open ended questions can help pre qualify and prioritize the accounts. For example:

• Has your company changed direction or announced a new strategy for the current times?
• How has it impacted your department?
• Has the company strategy to tackle these times hit your departments budget?
• What are the current challenges your organization is seeing?
• Have you curbed spending on new initiatives? When do you see things possibly turning around for the better?

As mundane as it may seem to know the answers to such questions for every target account in your database, these questions can help quickly filter out businesses who have completely capped spending and have extremely tight budget restrictions within the organization being sold into. This can be a huge saving on inside sales or sales’ time which can be directed at accounts which are still investing and growing or possibly not hit by the economy at all. Even one or two questions slipped into the usual account profiling process will help streamline the efforts towards what can convert and not chasing the wrong leads. Bad times call for better practices. Start with better account profiling.

Salesforce Annnounces Twitter App – Read this post on the Zdnet blog and it confirms one of the new year predictions we made in January and validates what we have been talking about in some of the earlier posts B2B Marketing Data Forecast – Blog, Twitter & Linkedin Info A Standard Data Field . 

As quoted in the Zdnet blog:

As for the Twitter application itself, salesforce is enabling companies to query the tweets that are being blasted through the Twittersphere as they relate to the company’s brand, products or even competitors and monitor – in real time – what people are saying. A company like Comcast might quickly learn when a city is experiencing an outage or service problem, for example, while a company like AT&T might be able to monitor what’s being said about iPhone service in a particular region.

Twitter feeds are a great source of intelligence and can give you a great insight into what a company is doing or even an individual. The fact that you can put up a 140 charachter update in just seconds as opposed to having marketing communications come up with a press release, its often a realtime source to hear chatter related to companies. Almost exactly like a quickly doing some research into a company’s website and a google search before calling in, checking out a Twitter feed can help with some really good insights and goin in better prepared.

Other than a source of intellience and updates, its proving to be an equally good channel to get a message out to a group or individuals who actively follow on Twitter and is slowly developing into a channel for communication. With phone channels being protected from cold calls and email boxes being plagues by spam, reaching out via Twitter is picking up pace. How long this will last and will it ever reach the popularity of phone and email is not certain. What is sure is it is currently gaining momentum and Salesforce has been quick to act on it. Gathering account intelligence data just got smarter!

To get updates on what I’m currently doing, follow me on Twitter

ReadyContacts.com was covered very recently on Killer Startups and generated a fair amount of inquiries from marketers who wanted to know a bit more about our offering and how it works. With the current financial situation it’s only natural that our customers and prospective customers are keen to know how a marketing database management solution is relevant to our times and why they should consider it. I think Vaibhav, Founder & CEO of ReadyContacts sums it up the best in his comment on the Killer Startups article when he says

Overall, accurate role-based contact data and profiling intelligence is key for sales efficiencies in this economic climate.

If there is one good fallout of the recession and global economic crisis, it’s that companies have been forced to develop more efficient practices and fine tune every process to drive the most revenue while still keeping a check on rising costs. Marketing and lead data is no exception to this and maintaining a highly accurate database of decision maker contacts and comprehensive account intelligence is a path to efficient sales and marketing campaigns.

Cultivating more leads into customers may be the main focus but it all starts with great data. The better your data, the stronger a foundation you build for your marketing and sales teams to work off and the more efficient your conversion becomes. If you are building a contact / lead database, ensure you have accurate and relevant decision maker contacts. If you are investing in email campaigns, check that you have the most accurate and up to date email addresses to ensure better results. If you are targeting specific accounts, profile each account with useful sales intelligence to help you customize your message and approach. Quality, quality and quality. Acquiring richer data will contribute to better results and clearer ROI.

Having great lead and marketing data is more relevant in our times than it’s ever been. Right?

‘Sell smart’ is the mantra today among business to business marketing and sales professionals. From the time of launching an all out attack on every single name one could gather in their database, b2b marketing and sales has evolved int to a more careful, well thought out and strategic approach based on qualifying prospects before engaging them. Knowing all you can about your target customers is an essential part of this evolution and has become even more relevant in case of the complex sale or selling to large companies.

In a “rich” marketing database, its not just the volume of data or the number of fields you have for each record which gives it more value. It’s the ability of your data to give you as much useful information as possible on your target accounts to give you an edge while deciding how, when and where to engage that account in the smartest possible way. Account profiling and sales intelligence gathering is one of those solutions which helps you get that deeper insight into an account so that you can decide your moves better informed.

If you are a business to business marketing or sales professional and understand the importance of “knowing your target customer” this is a quick slide show to showcase our on-demand, pay per delivery, account profiling & sales intelligence gathering solution. Enjoy!

In these economic down times when cost cutting is the mantra the positive effect is that it forces you to think out of the box and come up with alternative solutions to ensure you get the most out of your marketing and lead generation dollars. After having discussed this with a number of marketers and bloggers who have debated how will the recession affect lead generation budgets, there are a few things that most of us would agree on:

• Overall spend on online marketing is still likely to rise
• Budgets on offline advertising like television, newspapers, magazines will take more of a hit
• Measurability of results and being able to show clear results on every dollar spent will be important. You need to be able to link spend to what you get back for it clearly in these times.
• There is going to be pressure to generate more leads and more qualified leads during these times and since budgets wont increase, marketers will be driven to do more with less 

I was reading an interesting post that we could relate to on Jill Konrath’s blog Selling To Big Companies on one sales persons dilema of how he can justify to his sales manager that its worth going after fewer larger deals at bigger companies over more and regular deals at smaller accounts. Similarly we know of many smaller  business to business companies out there whose products and services are well suited to bigger companies but its a known fact that its a must to do your homework well before you attempt to sell into a bigger company. This additional groundwork  means more time, longer sales cycles and more risks as compared to the smaller companies where its comparitively easier to find a decision maker and get hold of them on a cold call. So to many companies this extra time and effort that goes into researching, intelligence gathering, account profiling, qualifying, locating business contacts and other pre-sales activities is a significant risk because shifting focus to these accounts can mean re-allocating bandwidth that was bringing in the smaller but more reliable sales. So do you have to give up the idea of big risk-big reward deals which can be found at the bigger companies?

One of the areas we have been able to successfully help some of our customers at smaller companies is by helping them with their pre-sales activities to help them take their focus off this and put it on the selling itself. By helping do the initial groundwork by doing account profiling where you have someone else do the initial research, identify multiple decision makers within these larger accounts, do some initial calls and have an understanding of their pain points and some intelligence before they attempt to sell. After having these targets accounts profiled and having a clear insight into these companies, you know which ones are worth pursuing and adjusting your sales approach, message and pitch becomes easier and much more focussed.

This way a company can have their pre sales preperation done without having to reshuffle or disturb the current flow too much to also take a shot at the bigger business opportunities and the bigger companies. The rewards could be well worth the risk. 

I just finished an interesting conversation with a CEO at a security software company and he told me something that made me think about the underlying strategy. He said a well known startup in the email space that was acquired by a large public company started off with one part of their sales and marketing effort focused on selling into accounts that were using their competitors product. At the face of it, it might seem strange and unnecessary. But if you think further it can be a very good strategy for some businesses:

• Targeting your competitors’ customer defines the target market for you very easily. You know that the customers have a need, suffer a pain point and are using something. You, obviously, have to show something to differentiate from your competitor, but this strategy solves an important issue of finding target accounts who have a pain point. 
• If you can sell into your competitors’ customers it helps you to validate your product and build confidence in its ability to address well defined requirements of customers who are already using another solution and have their requirements clearly identified. It helps you to whet your product and sales pitch very well. 
• If your customer has a large customer list, then focusing on those customers may be a good for your startup to go out and get some quick wins without having a heavy duty list building, lead generation, lead qualification and appointment setting process. You can go straight to the decision makers and pitch. They already know what you are trying to sell them. 

How to go after your competitors’ customer is a topic for another post that I will cover soon, but dwell on this and see if this is applicable to your startup. 

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.