Author: Mateja

Use Data Enrichment to Filter and Prioritize Prospects

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 CRM’s and sales platforms provide a lot of insights into a prospect but these are often irrelevant or out of date.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. 

  1. 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. 

  1. 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. 

  1. 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. 

  1. 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.

Case Study: InReach Ventures & PredictLeads

InReach Ventures uses technology to help scale venture capital and make
investments in early stage startups throughout Europe. They built their own
proprietary software and developed a new model of investing to discover and invest in the most promising startups.

There’s a few major data challenges VC’s often face including data quality and the
time, effort and cost it takes to acquire or crawl data.

Here is a short interview with Ben Smith the Co-Founder / Partner / CTO of InReach Ventures and how PredictLeads company intelligence data helps InReach Ventures discover new companies and track growth signals for companies of interest.

How do you identify growing companies?

“InReach combines data from lots of different data sources. Some of that is around signals on how a company is performing like PredictLeads data, which helps us to find startups from all over Europe. This data, along with other types, allows us to look at how companies are growing, whether they’re growing their team, if they’re getting new customers or new business connections or partnering with different companies. “

PredictLeads

Are there any specifics on how PredictLeads data is being used?

“With job postings in particular, outside the general idea that a company is growing positively, it gives us an idea whether there is real substance behind a company. Seeing that a company has a product and engineering DNA and are looking to invest more in it is a positive.”

What challenges were you able to overcome with PredictLeads data?

“It’s all about how best we leverage our own product and engineering resources. Having the InReach team focus on what we’re good at and working with partners that are better than us in areas is an important point of leverage.”

Why did you decide to subscribe to PredictLeads data?

“PredictLeads helped us by doing some of the work that we had always planned but never been able to prioritise. Finding news events around a particular company and identifying company customers through logos/connections is really interesting for us and also it’s something that takes significant time and effort to get right.”

What’s your view on the VC industry using data and what are the biggest challenges on the horizon in the industry?

“The value of data, machine learning and a data driven approach to capital is an ever growing trend. The point of venture capital is to fund innovation and how much innovation is happening in venture capital in the past 10 years is very limited. I think there is a change now where data and software is being seen as a way for venture firms to innovate their model. The issue that traditional VC firms first face is that culturally at their core, they are not a technology firm but a professional services organisation. Where we think we have an advantage is that we started as a technology, product and engineering organisation, taking a very data driven approach to venture capital. That’s where we think we will long term hold the advantage because we started doing this earlier. Traditional venture capital will start to utilise data over time, but at their core they are not tech or engineering organisations. Short term, data and tech will play a broader role in terms of the whole industry using it as it’s becoming more and more of a buzz and as data is becoming more demanded.”

What are some of the trends in Venture Capital?

“My co-founder and Investment Partner Roberto layed out the the data trend in VC well in his blog post: The Full Stack Venture Capitalist

How do you see PredictLeads to help you achieve your long term goals?

“Two things PredictLeads does and will continue to do is that it helps us discover that a startup exists in the first place and then tells us whether there’s something interesting happening that we might want to talk to them about.”

© 2024 PredictLeads Blog

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑