This is a guest post by Richard West, Chief Revenue Officer at Red Flag Alert.
Sales prospecting is what keeps businesses running. It involves finding, vetting, and contacting potential customers with the expectation that a portion of those prospects will become paying customers.
For this to be productive, you need to find the right leads to increase the probability of them converting to paying customers. But how do you go about finding new leads?
ProTip 1: Target new businesses
New businesses need a ton of services, from accounting and marketing to printing and stationery. By targeting businesses as they open, you’re less likely to run into incumbent suppliers, and you can create marketing materials specifically targeted at growing businesses.
ProTip 2: Make your messaging sector-specific
While your service may work well across different businesses, each sector will have specific needs. For example, the accounting work for a retailer will be different from that of a manufacturing business. By breaking down your marketing by sector, you can create a message that speaks directly to the pain points of those businesses.
ProTip 3: Use turnover data to find leads
Knowing a business’s turnover helps you decide where to focus your sales efforts.
To use marketing services as an example, turnover information can help form an understanding of what services each lead will want. A business with a turnover of £300,000 will have a different marketing budget than a business turning over £10m. Also, the trend of turnover will have a bearing on marketing spend; struggling businesses are probably cutting costs and less likely to spend on marketing than businesses with fast-growing revenue.
ProTip 4: Look at the number of employees
Knowing how many employees work within an organization opens up many sales avenues for some businesses, such as companies selling HR services, employee benefit programs, computer hardware, or phone lines.
Knowing employee numbers gives businesses insight into the potential size of a contract and what services to sell. Their size might qualify them for special deals, so your sales team can be highly targeted with the sales messages they send.
ProTip 5: Use financial health to speed up your sales process
A clear view of financial health allows sales teams to avoid prospects that might be a future credit risk, making it useful for sorting leads. Financial health can also be a useful sales signal. Some products and services work well for companies in poor financial health—for example, short term loans, leasing, or outsourcing. By identifying prospects with a certain level of financial health, sales teams can both reduce risk and open up new opportunities.
Gather the data you need to focus your sales
If you do business in the UK, you could tap into Red Flag Alert, a reservoir of data on UK businesses that holds the key to finding great leads. It contains data on 6.5 million UK businesses that have a data footprint, giving you clues to which businesses may be shopping for services.
The B2B Leads extension for Zoho CRM allows Zoho CRM users to access the Red Flag Alert database right from Zoho CRM. It gives you real-time information turnover, cash in the bank, current assets, net worth, credit limit, health rating, and more. Using this data you can build highly targeted lists of prospects that have all the characteristics of a likely buyer. You can filter and build a list of prospects based on either one or a combination of these parameters.
Try the B2B Leads extension for Zoho CRM to see your sales skyrocket.
Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace.
Comments