Let’s be honest, reaching out to C-level executives and other decision-makers is challenging. 92% of C-level executives NEVER reply to email blasts or cold calls. Based on the 2011 Sales Performance Optimization Survey from CSO Insights, an average sales professional spends 25% of their workday looking for potential prospects. However, after spending hours online, you still can’t identify the right buyer or what technologies they use.
In this interview 1to1 Media‘s Tom Hoffman speaks with Ralf VonSosen, Vice President, Marketing at InsideView, about the steps that decision-makers can take to collect and act on intelligence about B2B customers.
Spray and pray tactics don’t work.
Contact data is not enough. A phone book is not an efficient tool to go after new prospects. Traditional methodologies of cold calling is dead, without context around your contact and having relevant information on your prospect you are not going to get their attention. Building a story around your product and how that can help a specific prospect can’t be achieved by dialing for dollars. That sales process just doesn’t scale any longer.
The average sales professional spends 25% of the workday researching potential prospects
Gathering personal insights
Once your sales teams learn to leverage sales intelligence applications and cut down their research times they can become more effective selling machines. Most sales professionals do not have the opportunity to go into a prospects office and look at the photos on their desk, understand their pains and get the complete view of their situations.
Contact data can’t provide this but through other technologies all sales people have the ability to get into the customers brain and see what they are dealing within the industry, corporate initiatives and even their personal lives. Traditional news and social profiles open up a world of possibilities to both customers and sales reps to make sure that communications are timely, relevant and welcomed. We are now dealing with the social enterprise where companies and the employees are actively engaged with social networks, sales teams that can adjust to this trend will reap all the rewards while companies that lag behind will be left wondering “Where did all my customers go?“