Traditional sales prospecting is hard because it relies on tactics that are often hit or miss for a business and its sales team. That can create unsatisfactory results, including missed sales and revenue for your company. Luckily, there’s a way to avoid those mistakes and make your prospecting that much easier by using sales data. Running a data-driven sales prospecting campaign might sound challenging, but it’s the best way to learn about your prospects and turn them into buyers.
Why Use a Data-Driven Sales Prospecting Campaign?
Using a data-driven sales prospecting campaign in place of a traditional one is like replacing a flashlight for a spotlight to help you see in the dark. It makes your job easier and helps you uncover even more than you could have hoped for with traditional methods. Instead of relying on blind emails or waiting on referrals from other businesses and past customers, data gives you all the information you need to be more proactive with your sales prospecting approach. It helps you pick the best prospects for your business and saves you time and effort.
5 Tips for Running a Data-Driven Sales Prospecting Campaign
Here is a list of tips to help you run a more successful data-driven sales prospecting campaign:
1. Define Your Goals
Before starting a sales prospecting campaign, whether you’re using data or not, it’s important to set a target for your campaign to achieve. Knowing how many prospects you want to find, engage with, or finalize sales with can help you monitor your campaign more effectively. Then, you simply track your prospecting status as you go.
For example, let’s say your goal is to engage with 90 prospects by the end of three months. That equates to 30 prospects every month. If you notice that your sales team is falling behind after the first month, you can adjust your prospecting strategies to reach your objective. Changing those strategies might include targeting a different geographical area, using a different cold-calling approach, or understanding when a better time to contact your prospects may be.
2. Understand The Timing
Though you might have the data you need to approach your prospects, it’s important to understand the best time to do so. Not all potential buyers are ready to make a new purchase, especially if you sell large-ticket items, like heavy equipment. Using data products, like EDA and RigDig BI, you can see when businesses tend to make purchases and what they tend to buy. This information can help you understand the best time to approach them to sell new products, or if you should approach them about other services you offer.
For example, let’s say you’re a multi-brand dealership that sells long-haul trucks. If you notice that a number of fleets in your area recently purchased a truck from another company, you could still approach them about your maintenance services for the brands you currently offer. Directing your pitch in this direction might help you make a sale for the services you offer or, at the very least, help you build a relationship with them so you can approach them again during their next buying cycle.
"Not all potential buyers are ready to make a new purchase, especially if you sell large-ticket items, like heavy equipment. Using data products, like EDA and RigDig BI, you can see when businesses tend to make purchases and what they tend to buy."
3. Develop a Content Strategy
Highlighting your products or services and the benefits they offer is crucial to the success of a sales campaign. That’s because, as of 2021, B2B buyers are often 90% through the buyer’s journey before contacting a sales rep and 67% of that buyer’s journey is done digitally. Most buyers have already researched your business and the products or services it offers before reaching out to you.
How do they do that? Through the content you offer on your site. In fact, 44% of people say that they read three to five pieces of content before engaging with a business.
Developing a content marketing strategy can be beneficial to your sales prospecting in multiple ways, including:
- Establishing Thought Leadership: When you create content that talks about different industry topics and your opinions on them, you can establish thought leadership and authority. This can help convince prospects that your business is knowledgeable in the products or services it sells and can answer any questions they might have.
- Relaying Information: Informing and educating your audience helps them feel like you care about their businesses and want to help them outside of the goods or services you sell. This can show them that you care about your business’s community and want to help them in more ways than one.
- Additional Marketing Channels: Content marketing also allows you to inform your audience about the products and services you sell and direct them to different landing pages on your site. If your content ranks for certain keywords, it can also bring in more organic traffic to help boost your brand awareness and draw in additional leads.
Looking to start your own content marketing campaign? At Randall Reilly, we provide an in-house content marketing team for our clients to help them develop their long-term content marketing strategies and generate more demand for their business. Contact us today to combine your sales prospecting with high-quality lead generation.
4. Build a Relationship
Data can give you keen insights into your prospects, from what type of products they already own to when they’re most likely to make a purchase. But directly approaching prospects and revealing how much you know about them might not always be the best approach. It’s often more effective to first establish and build relationships with your prospects and leverage your knowledge discreetly. Building relationships helps to create trust between you and your buyer or client.
When your prospects trust you more, they’re more likely to make a purchase. In fact, 80% of buyers consider trust a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions. Using the data you’ve uncovered about your prospects, you can learn the best way to build relationships with them before attempting to move them into the next step of your sales funnel.
"It’s often more effective to first establish and build relationships with your prospects and leverage your knowledge discreetly. Building relationships helps to create trust between you and your buyer or client."
5. Know Your Data Products
Understanding different data products and the tools they offer can help you make more informed and effective decisions for your prospecting campaign, both in developing your goals and in choosing the right data product for the job. For example, let’s say you found a data product, like EDA, that has the ability to find and organize prospects for your business. You can use the data to ID key prospects that might be a great fit for your products and target them with engaging, attractive content.
Likewise, let’s say that a main goal for your prospecting campaign is to provide support for salespeople in the field to help them find potential buyers in their area. You can search for data products that might be a good fit for that objective, like RigDig BI, and use its tools most effectively.