I don’t need to elaborate on the fact that most sales reps are mostly dissatisfied with most of the leads they get from the marketing department. If you’re a sales rep reading this, you know what I’m talking about all too well. The “standard” leadgen methods (website, events, lead lists, contact databases, etc.) will bring in some good leads, but the fact is that most of your best prospects are hiding out of view.
Sure, a certain percentage of the leads found using the standard inbound marketing approaches described above will buy from you. And, certainly, techniques like lead nurturing may increase the chances that one of those leads will eventually become a customer. But what about the majority of your most likely potential customers who will forever remain on the “dark side of the moon” for your organization? If you could tap into this dark side of the truly great prospects, your close rates would be much, much higher.
We’ve found that most of the likely buyers in B2B markets never make their way into a company’s standard leadgen pipeline. On the other hand, perhaps three-quarters of the most likely potential customers are leaving “fingerprints” on social networks and the Web. The opportunity this presents should be extremely exciting for every B2B sales rep!
By fingerprints, I mean detailed information that highlights individual people as likely buyers of what you are selling. These fingerprints can be found in the detailed information available on individuals and their employers in professional profiles, management pages, case studies, events, press releases, interviews, blogs and resumes. Additional fingerprints may exist in the form of conversations they’re having on Twitter, LinkedIn or Quora.
By focusing prospecting efforts in these readily-available online data sources, you can reveal the “dark side of the moon” and find your most promising prospects: not only are there a huge number of potential buyers out there, but the extensive data available allows you to identify and target the ones who are most relevant to your offering.
Performing Web and social prospecting is not the same as searching for prospects in a contact database. When prospecting in contact databases, you’re limited to company criteria (e.g., industry, size, location) and the job title of individuals working within the company. However, on the Web you can drill down with far greater precision by looking for the detailed criteria (we call it “professional DNA”) which describe your ideal buyer. For example, you can go beyond the title to find people with specific job functions (e.g., platform development, software architecture) who use particular products (e.g., Heroku, EC2, Azure) and technologies (Ruby on Rails, virtualization) in their work.
To be successful in this type of prospecting, it is important to:
If this sounds like a difficult and time-consuming task, then you understand what I’m talking about! “Big data” – the huge amount of information available on the Web and social networks – presents a massive opportunity to outflank your competition and go directly to the most promising prospects. However, the challenge of harnessing this resource to uncover your own prospecting “dark side of the moon” in a manual manner can be quite daunting.
The solution to uncovering highly-relevant prospects without a lot of elbow grease is to let a computer do all the heavy lifting. Automatic Web prospecting is a technological approach to performing all three of the steps outlined above, with no human effort.
An automatic Web prospecting system can research your existing customers online to automatically determine all the granular criteria which describe your ideal buyers, and then go online to find them for you. When integrated into your CRM, such a system can make effective online prospecting as easy as clicking a button!
