For some clients the necessary focus is the account team’s engagement with existing customers to yield deeper and wider relationships and thus increased revenue.
For others it is about new customer acquisition. Our unique sales prospecting productivity tool, ProspectSafari, has been built to address the need to streamline B2B sales prospecting.
We never engage unless there is a clearly agreed method to measure success, typically in terms of incremental revenue. In this way we know for a fact that our engagements have resulted in over $2bn of incremental revenue.
Through our analysis we evaluate whether the marketing claim matches the target customer’s pain, the target segmentation is correct and the message is matched to the perception, and if the go to market strategy is aligned with the target customer’s expectations and habits.
Once the target customer and message is defined, execution will often require the building of a prospect database to drive direct marketing and sales initiatives.
Working with a client struggling to achieve this in the most efficient manner we were struck by the lack of tools to facilitate simple B2B prospecting.
Working with a client struggling to achieve this in the most efficient manner we were struck by the lack of tools to facilitate simple B2B prospecting.
In general, businesses are limited by the cost and therefore size of their sales resources. In a well-aligned sales process with a finite number of hours available for prospecting activity, a simple tool to double the productivity of this stage will result in up to 100% increase in revenue.
Just as we identified an opportunity for 600%+ ROI in the Account Management process, here we have identified a 1000%+ ROI opportunity at the other end of the sales funnel.
The challenge for our client was to streamline the process of capturing basic data about ALL the target businesses in a region / sector (address, contact data, website, social media etc) and then enabling the rapid sorting and filtering of these lists to build a set of target prospect lists.
By analysing the qualification process (how to judge whether this is a valid prospect) we can customise automated tools to identify the connection to competitor’s systems or the presence of specific word strings (eg specific product or service types) in the company website, and adding this to the collected data.
By analysing the qualification process (how to judge whether this is a valid prospect) we can customise automated tools to identify the connection to competitor’s systems or the presence of specific word strings (eg specific product or service types) in the company website, and adding this to the collected data.
Technology can be used to extract such useful data to enable a judgement to be made whether to include a business in the target prospect list, but in our experience it is a mistake to rely on technology to make the decision.
The experienced sales person can apply a sophisticated blend of trade-off judgements very efficiently if presented with the collected information in a standard format in a single view.
The data extracted must be presented along with the business website and rapid viewing of social media pages. This allows the subtle multi-variable judgement to be made and the prospect to be rated (A, B, C) and other data captured before swiftly moving on to the next.
The data extracted must be presented along with the business website and rapid viewing of social media pages. This allows the subtle multi-variable judgement to be made and the prospect to be rated (A, B, C) and other data captured before swiftly moving on to the next.
The majority of B2B prospecting today is conducted by evaluating the target business website and finding contacts in Linkedin. We know that a doubling in productivity at this stage results in up to 100% increase in revenue, but we could find no such tool for our client to use.
So we set about making it.
The result is a lightning-fast prospecting tool we have called ProspectSafari.
The result is a lightning-fast prospecting tool we have called ProspectSafari.