Category: Sales Triggers

Use Data Enrichment to Filter and Prioritize Prospects

June 10, 2022 / Mateja

A HubSpot survey found that More than 40% of salespeople say prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process and at least 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for what you sell.* This is super frustrating!

*https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-statistics

Outbound sales efforts are often tedious using up a lot of time and resources and often chasing the wrong types of prospects. CRM’s and sales platforms provide a lot of insights into a prospect but these are often irrelevant or out of date. The reason for this is that the data they utilize is not being updated often enough, only uses a couple of data sources or the platform doesn’t have the capability to drill down enough or overlap the insights.

That’s why data driven sales teams are turning to data to enrich companies and help them filter and prioritize leads. Not only do they continue to use platforms like Salesloft, Outreach.io, HubSpot, Clearbit etc but they are taking it a few steps further and enriching their prospects even more. This gives them competitive advantage which helps them to increase reply rates and meetings with prospects.

Identify companies hiring

Finding which companies are hiring is a great signal because it’s likely that they are investing in people and resources. Sales teams use hiring data in two ways. A) to find companies with the most live jobs regardless of the job type of job or b.) finding companies hiring for particular roles. In the second instance, companies hiring for marketing are more likely to buy marketing automation and companies hiring for accounting are more likely to buy financial software.

Identify companies hiring for C level executives

Finding companies who are hiring for C level executives means that sales teams are more than a few steps ahead. This is because when a director, manager or head of a department joins a company, it’s likely that they will implement new changes, evaluate tools and resources and be open to change. Sales teams who look for these signals early secure meetings and get ahead of the line before their competitors, making this tactic a no brainer.

Resonating with a prospect

“Hi John, I’m reaching out because … um … because …”. Sometimes finding a good prospect is easy but reaching out in a way that will grab the prospect’s attention is tiring, time consuming and frustrating. We all know that it’s important to resonate with a prospect so that they are more likely to open and read your email but finding that hook is like finding a needle in a haystack.

Data driven sales teams solve this by looking for newly available sales triggers like awards, new funding rounds, new partnerships, new integrations, hiring intent, companies they have in common with a prospect, latest acquisitions in their industry, new product offerings of their competitors etc. These are easy ways to create familiarity and show that you know something about their business.

Finding the Right Leads at Scale

Some sales reps cast their net too wide in an effort to attract as many prospects as possible and meet their quotas. Unfortunately, this often wastes time and creates low morale. Getting limited or no answers is frustrating and not a good feeling which ultimately reduces productivity.

To avoid this, it’s important to have the right data to quickly figure out which prospects to pursue. Having good data means a good lead list which means good quality emails, a high response rate and more meetings booked. More and more sales teams are using the help of growth experts or growth support teams to help them identify the right leads to keep on track. Growth teams then utilize data to gain sales triggers and build targeted lead lists which increases conversion rates.

PredictLeads data is one source of sales triggers, growth indicators and company intelligence which helps sales teams and sales platforms gain a competitive advantage. Datasets like Jobs, News Events, Technology, Key Customers/Connections, Products and Website Evolution are all being used to identify new opportunities and stay ahead of the game. These are available through API, Webhooks or Flat Files and can be accessed daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

Contact mateja@predictleads.com to dive deeper into more ways that company intelligence data can help enhance your use case.

Company intelligence data in your Sales enablement platform

January 25, 2021 / Fanny L

You’re already aware that the more insights and data you have on your prospects, the better. Exactly how could you take advantage of this data and how could it be integrated into your sales enablement platform?

Sales enablement platforms are without a doubt incredibly valuable to sales teams. They have endless use cases as illustrated in the “SalesTech Landscape” below – such as engaging clients with smart messaging tools, improving productivity with easy to use sales resources, identifying leads and scoring them, and of course, the CRM that helps you stay on top of customers and prospects.

In the CRM, all the information you have on your customers should be tracked, which can be made manually by the SDR itself or automated using a 3rdparty system. Data like company name, contact information and demographics is usually logged into the CRM and creates a long lead list of prospects. For sales teams to become successful they usually need more information than this. Here’s how sales intelligence like company intelligence data can enrich sales enablement platforms and improve the performance of SDRs using it:

Personalized Outreach

All SDRs have heard the importance of being personal. No prospect wants to listen to some robot pitching their idea without knowing a single thing about them, their company or understanding what value their product can give them.

PredictLeads can provide insights to increase Personalization such as:

News Events alerts like “Company X receives Y Award” can give you an icebreaker to open up the conversation by congratulating them and letting them know you did your homework.
Key Customers data insights can help you identify if you and the customer share the same partners or clients to build familiarity and trust.

Sales Triggers

Imagine you have this very long list of leads in your CRM. You start making phone calls from the top but cannot seem to move the deal forward even though you’re having great rapport with prospects. The most likely reason is you’re not reaching out to the right prospects, the ones that are in the buy mode. Companies are not always looking to invest in products for many reasons. Maybe they’re already satisfied with what they have, or they don’t currently have the budget to invest in new software or the product that you’re selling. With sales triggers you can identify companies with signals indicative of growth – meaning the company is more likely to invest.

Examples of Sales Triggers PredictLeads provide are:

Company signs new client.
Company launches new product.
Company received financing.
Company increases headcount.
Company made a new integration.
Company expands facilities.

Targeting Leads

When sourcing for leads, most CRMs provides search functions with filters that help you target the right prospects. With more company data you can advance these search filters to create a more targeted approach. The more filters you can use, the better you can target prospects matching your ideal target persona.

How PredictLeads data can be used as filters for Targeting:

Technologies used in the company can help you identify prospects that are more likely to have an interest in buying your product. For example, if you’re selling a Salesforce extension product you’d want to target companies that are actually using Salesforce.
Companies Hiring for X category, if you’re selling a Marketing automation product you can filter companies hiring for Marketing category as they’re more likely to have a need for your product.

These are just a few examples on how company intelligence data can be integrated into your CRM or other sales enablement tools, and I’m sure there are hundreds more creative ways. One thing is for certain though – sales teams will benefit from using this data, because it’ll be doing all the research for them. This means that they can focus on what brings them most value – selling.

Fanny

Introducing Key Customer Data

April 16, 2020 / Roq X

PredictLeads now provides four main datasets. News Events, Hiring Intent, Technologies and Key Customer data.

Key Customer data is our newest addition. As the name implies it provides key customer data for a given company. Eg. who are their customers, partners, sponsors, vendors, investors etc. We’re able to get this data by searching through news articles, blogs, case-studies pages, testimonials, “Our customer” sections and more.

We go as far as to use image recognition to connect a logo on a given website to a domain name it belongs to.

Key Customer data is served via clean APIs, with same structure as our other three endpoints. We follow best practices from jsonapi.org.

Besides using APIs data can also be provided via Flat Files or Webhooks.

If you’re interested in checking it out simply sign up here: https://predictleads.com/sign_up and you’ll find an API key in the settings.

Documentation for the Key Customer data can be found here: https://predictleads.com/docs/#connections

For more details please reach out to founders@predictleads.com and we’ll be happy to help!

Cheers, Roq

Native Salesforce App

August 31, 2019 / Roq X

We’re excited to share we’ve started working on a much requested native Salesforce app and plan to launch it on Saleforce AppExchange in November 2019.

It will include enriching your target accounts with Job Openings data, News Events data, Technologies data and Business Connections (partners, clients, vendors …).

It will include functionality our Discovery endpoint provides. It will allow you to perform searches like:

show me all the companies that use Slack and have signed Inc. 5000 clients in the past month
show companies that are hiring for Marketing and are already working with one of our clients
show companies that launched mobile apps and received funding in the past year
show companies that will expand offices to Tampa, Florida in 2020

Above questions are just some of the questions we received from prospects who wanted to use our data but since they did not have engineers available who would integrate with our API endpoints the conversations stopped there.

As questions pilled up over the months and years we now decided it is finally time to start integrating with platforms like Salesforce AppExchange. Soon other platforms will follow.

If you’re interested in knowing more or are wondering if we can help you answer your business questions please contact us at founders@predictleads.com.

Leveraging Hiring Intent

October 11, 2017 / Roq X

When companies are hiring for categories such as Marketing, Sales, Financing … companies are normally in good shape to invest in new solutions that would aid them in these areas. So if you’re trying to find a segment of companies that would fit your product? Don’t overlook the hiring intent data!

Hiring intent indicates first off if a company is in good shape and in buying mode. If they are hiring for many positions this is a good sign they are in position to spend money. Specific job titles / job categories indicate what kind of area they are currently investing in. Are they hiring for SDRs, HR managers, iOS developers, Support agents … ? Each of these indicate they might be in need of a new HR system, TalkDesk software, offshore dev, Sales enablement software, Marketing analytics system …

Inside a job description one can also find expertise companies are searching for like: Content Marketing, Lead Nurturing, eCommerce Dev, …

Job openings also include information about what kind of techniques a company is exercising. For example on could find keywords such as: Kanban, Scrum, Metrics Driven, Customer Success, Social Media, Sales Prospecting … and can help identify more forward thinking prospects that are more open to new solutions.

Inevitably job openings also include location. So if you would analyze a large company with many subsidiaries one could identify which regions they are currently investing in. Do they have 27 jobs open for an office in Hong Kong and 1 position open in France? Are they hiring for 12 SDRs in Utah and have 5 jobs open in New York -> this can help focus your efforts to promote your solution to the right subsidiary.

One of the good indicators is also job type. Is company offering Full-time, Part-time job or a Remote job possibility? For example your solution provides outsourced blog writing. Companies searching for part-time blog writers with a possibility of a remote work should prove to be a great fit. Thanks to job opening data you are able to figure this out and spend more time with highly qualified prospects.

You can combine hiring intent with other technographic data ie.: find companies using SalesForce, HubSpot, Tableau, AutoCad … & at the same time hiring for Marketing. These combinations can prove to be really powerful & help you pin point the target segment with laser like accuracy.

Happy selling!

Cheers, Roq

8 Sales Triggers Stats That Will Make You a Believer

July 14, 2016 / Miha S

By now you have probably already heard of sales triggers or trigger event selling. Maybe you even went as far as setting up a Google Alerts system to track specific keywords or accounts. But do you actually use that information in conversations with your prospects or customers? As we’ve discovered from our interviews with customers and prospects the answer is “Probably not.”

In case you just need a little nudge, here are 8 stats that might help you take the next step .

But, before I get into details, let me tell you a story how InnoPath discovered the value of sales triggers by accident.

When InnoPath was just starting up, the founders were trying to match their algorithm with the right application. By talking with NEC, one of Japan’s then leading feature phone manufacturers, they found out the corporation is concerned about costly device recalls on account of several firmware malfunctions and bugs. That made InnoPath founders realize they could leverage their algorithm to build a solution which uncovers hidden firmware bugs. Demo with NEC went great and InnoPath’s first deal was signed.

Now that InnoPath figured out who their ideal customers are, they set up a system that tracks keywords revolving around firmware bugs appearing in news articles or forums. In the next 3 months they closed a number of major handset manufacturers, such as Samsung and Sharp.

Eventually, InnoPath achieved over 90% market share in Japan. Deals were closed within months at high-margin prices and competition couldn’t come close.

An inspiring success story.

Now, without further ado, here are the stats:

Prioritising your prospects by key trigger events lifts conversion rates. Companies where key trigger events occurred are 400% more likely to buy. (Source: B2BLeadBlog)
Connecting with companies that have recently received funding is a great first step to sales triggers adoption. Those who recently experienced a financial event and can now afford your services, are now up to 8x more likely to buy. (Source: SHIFT! By Craig Ellias)
Depending on industry and geography, the data suggests that a change in vendors is triggered by changing managers 28% of the time. (Source: PersistIQ)
Frustration with the existing vendor is one of the greatest motivators for change. Organizations recently dissatisfied with the status quo are up to 10x more likely to switch vendors. (Source: Craig Ellias)
Always be on the lookout for trigger events at target accounts and start a conversation with them before anyone else. Sales reps have a 74% chance of closing the deal, if they engage a prospect first in a consultative manner. (Source: DestinationCRM)
70% of customers want to talk to sales during the early stages in the buying process: when they’re information-grazing, when they first learn what you can do and when they put you on the shortlist. (Source: ITSMA)
You can close that event-triggered account, even though your solution wasn’t budgeted for at the beginning of the year. 80% of B2B purchases are unplanned and unbudgeted. (Source: DemandGen)
Segment your accounts by trigger events to gain a better conversion rate. Event-triggered campaigns will see their messages receive, at minimum, 5x the response rate of non-targeted push messages. (Source: Gartner)

How to benefit from trigger events?

January 7, 2016 / Roq X

John Barrows (jbarrows.com) said recently in a SalesHacker conference that if there is one thing a sales rep needs to do when reaching out is to start each call by providing a reason for contact. They need to be relevant to open up a conversation with a prospect.

In this article we’ll share 6 examples on how a sales rep can create more relevant outbound emails when uncovering sales triggers. Sales triggers can be events such as leadership change, funding received, vendor changed, new technology introduced, new job opening, acquisition, award, etc.

1. Leadership changed

Whenever a prospect changes one of their executives these new appointed execs are more likely to introduce some changes to their current processes. This is a good time to follow up with them. Say you notice a target prospect has appointed new CTO called Ben. Your email could look something like:

Subject: How CTO’s can automate marketing efforts …

Ben,

congratulations on you new position. If you will be trying out some new technologies in the following weeks I’d love to show you a demo on how we can automate your marketing efforts #{insert your one line pitch}. Are you available this Th at 10am or 3pm for a 10 min Skype chat?

2. Funding received

If a company receives new round of financing or if they’ve succeeded with their crowdfunding campaign they should have some resources available. This again is a good time to check if your solution makes a cut.

Subject: Congratulations on new funding Alex

Alex,

I noticed you just closed another round of financing. Since our solution helps insurance companies such as yours reduce their risks #{insert your one line pitch} I thought we might add value to what you do.

Would you have 5 mins next week for a quick Skype chat?

3. New job opening

With job openings it depends on what you’re selling. Say you’re outsourcing iOS development and you notice a prospect’s company is hiring iOS devs. Knowing this allows you to send highly relevant email and have a better timing.

Subject: Want to outsource iOS development?

Mike,

saw you’re hiring iOS developers and since we outsource iOS development I said I’ll reach out to you.

Do you want to schedule a 5 min chat on Wed 9am or 3pm next week about what we can do for you?

4. New technology

Say the prospect just started using Marketo and your product is tightly connected with Marketo platform now is the perfect time to introduce your solution. If the prospect installed SugarCRM – and you offer an add-on for SugarCRM include that in an email. The same if they’ve put on Vimeo video – and you’re a video producing company.

If you’re able to differentiate which prospects are more likely to convert than the others based on the technologies they are using, you will find “new tech” alerts of high benefit.

You could usually send an email sth along the lines of:

Subject: We can help your leverage your Marketo system

Hey Michelle,

saw you guys started using Marketo. Our solution helps you analyse all the inbound leads automatically and filters out the false positives #{provide a reason how your solution helps them because of using this specific technology}.

Would you like to see a 5 min demo on Tu at 3pm next week?

5. Notable mention

Say you find an article in an online magazine (NYTimes, Medium, TechCrunch …) writing about your prospect. Notable mentions are not as significant as the previous examples but they are still better than just checking in or touching base.

Subject: TechCrunch’s article

Hey Josh,

Noticed you guys are getting some traction recently – saw you in TechCrunch article. We offer a tool that automates your social postings #{your one line pitch}. Would you like to join our webinar next Wed at 4pm on how to manage your social channels?

6. New product offered

You might find your prospect just launched new version of their product. You might offer an online customer support system you might write:

Subject: New product might deserve new online customer support system?

Hey Jeniffer,

saw JenniferCompany just introduced new product, cons on that! For new products to get good adoption it’s essential your customers know how to use it and where to find help if they don’t, right? We offer super intuitive customer support system #{your pitch}. Would you find 5 min on your calendar next week, say Th 9am for me to show you a quick demo?

Using triggers events to be relevant when reaching out increases engagement with your prospects and helps you form better relationships. Thus conversions and up-sells will go up.

When different triggers meet

It gets interesting if a company has changed their CMO, received funding and already introduced some new vendors – all in the previous 2 months.

Your perfect email now depends on what you’re selling. You need to assess your strengths and put forward the one that creates most conversions.

More on combining the triggers and using this to create emails in our next post.

Happy selling,

Roq, PredictLeads.com

Timing & selling

January 7, 2016 / Roq X

Craig Elias divided the sales cycle in his book Shift! the following way:

1. Status Quo

Prospect is happy with their current process you are trying to optimize.

2. Window of Dissatisfaction

Prospect is unhappy with their current solution but is not yet searching for alternatives.

3. Searching Alternatives

Prospect is currently searching for alternatives.

When trying to sell to a prospect when they are in their Status Quo phase is the hardest. Only around 1% of them will convert. Prospect searching for alternatives is a better option and an easier sell. Though again not perfect since you’re already competing against other alternatives prospect is exploring.

The best time to reach a customer is obviously when a prospect is not satisfied with their current state and just before they start searching for alternatives. Our goal is enabling you to detect when a prospect enters this phase. Getting the first mover advantage and always staying on top of what’s happening with your prospects is what we bring to your selling process. If you’d like a demo of our beta product shoot us an email at hei@predictleads.com.

Until next time!