Know your customer well. It’s the golden rule. We have all heard about it. We all know it and yet so many will still take a chance picking up the phone and dialing a random with a number from a list or their CRM hoping to charm their prospect and coax them into buying. It’s not just phone based, emails and direct mails are often send with a hit or miss strategy without really doing some background research on where they are headed. Even if they are not interested in buying what you have to offer right away, prospects always respect the fact that you know something about them or their companies. If you’ve done some homework on them the chances are they will at least have a first impression good enough to hear you through or read what you have to say.

That homework or brief background need not be a detailed dossier or deep intelligence. Sometimes a simple 50 word description on the company is all that is needed to seperate someone who knows ’something’ and someone who knows ‘nothing’ about your company and first impressions are made quickly. Most marketing lists and CRM databases will have a link to the account/company website and this is usually enough to quickly go through before connecting with a prospect. However i’ll admit even I would prefer having some kind of excerpt or company description which tells me about the company, products and background on the same screen or list to avoid that additional effort of having to open and research a site myself.

Good data is not just about volumes. Just like selling and marketing has evolved and become smarter, more information driven, CRM data and lists have evolved into more than just a set of names, phone numbers and addresses. Data enrichment and data append solutions can help add valuable data points to ensure you’re better informed and updated on prospects a quick glance. While for the complex sale, investing in more comprehensive pre sales research is worth the extra effort, for most, it’s important to identify what additional data can help you make a difference and invest in enriching your database. After all, those first impressions are important.

‘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!

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.