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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!