B to B prospecting: the best hacks to use in 2018

Improve your B-to-B prospecting now by using the most effective solutions for finding customers in your market. There's no secret to optimising your B2B sales prospecting: you need to generate quality leads. This will make it easier for you to get meetings with prospective customers, and your calls will lead to more sales.

appvizer reveals the marketing techniques and digital platforms that are changing the lives of salespeople:

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Telephone prospecting: never on the first night

Let's not laugh: this is a real wake-up call for the managers of a large number of companies that are losing momentum, and therefore a real hack for them to implement!

The digitalisation of business practices means that the traditional rules of cold calling have to be broken.

The management of successful companies is demanding ever greater efficiency and profitability from upstream marketing actions:

For 88% of B2B marketing decision-makers, the quality of leads is paramount. 70% want to reduce the cost of lead acquisition.

Gone are the days of advertising, telemarketing, door-to-door canvassing and Grandaddy's direct marketing, replaced by a new B-to-B communication plan that is largely deployed on the Internet, thanks to webmarketing techniques.

The web offers a way of avoiding time-consuming tasks and generating business at fibre-optic speed for any sales force that knows how to exploit its data.

Let's start by recalling the best practices of a prospecting plan:

• define your target group of professionals
• qualify the prospect
• identify the needs of the contact,
• Determine the right time to make an appointment,
• contact the prospect by telephone with a personalised offer,
• initiating sales negotiations, making a successful sale and building loyalty.

To enable your sales force to adopt a quality and sales efficiency approach, it is advisable to centralise all the information about your contacts in your CRM tool.

This commercial organisation is very useful for importing and exporting data to other platforms capable of exploiting the full potential of the hacks that are embellishing the current B-to-B sales canvassing landscape.

Let's open the brochure and unveil the product pitch that invites you to be part of the journey.

Prospecting on B2B Tinder in masked mode

We apologise if this digital allegory offends you: its sole purpose is to draw your attention to the importance of targeting, although it's not entirely accurate if you quibble (let's avoid any amalgam or hiatus).

The sales department's results depend on the quality of the contacts the marketing director sends them.

So :

It is imperative to set out to win new customers by exploiting all the key targeting criteria to increase sales.

Whatever your objectives, any sales or marketing strategy starts with defining your target and segmenting it - that's the rule.

But where can you find the famous Meetic B2B (incorrigible, this author!) to segment your B2B targets and improve your sales process?

In a 2-in-1 tool, for example: the EasyBusiness solution integrates an international B2B database with 60 criteria for qualifying different types of company (from VSEs to major accounts), coupled with an emailing platform.

Within this comprehensive B-to-B prospecting tool, users can address the most relevant decision-makers directly by selecting :

• the exact location of the company,
• business sector, type of products or services sold,
• the number of employees,
• the decision-maker's job function
• name, etc.

Tutorial for prospecting with the EasyBusiness platform from Kompass France :

Undeniable advantages for sales and marketing teams:

• Unbeatable accuracy for targeting B-to-B contacts (up-to-date records),
• a "Marketing Analysis" module for researching the market and assessing whether it offers opportunities before committing to them,
• customised creation of your prospecting file,
• complete management of your email marketing campaign, including performance measurement to refine your funnel,
• connection with Salesforce CRM,
• a mobile version of the application with contact geolocation.

Hack Big Data with Sales Intelligence

This sales prospecting technique makes the task of sales teams easier in every respect:

• you enter a profile of a typical customer into a piece of software equipped with B-to-B sales-oriented artificial intelligence (Sales Intelligence),
• the software scans the web constantly and gathers relevant data on your prospects, scattered all over the web,
• the algorithms score the prospects, - the tool alerts the salesperson to opportunities.

Sales Intelligence scans the web, detects business opportunities and passes them on to the sales person.

Which ship should you use to become a wise privateer?

You can take the helm of the Bypath software: it navigates the Internet in real time in the place of sales staff.

The tool analyses Big Data, i.e. the continuous flow of information published on online financial news magazines, press sites, blog articles, recruitment sites, social networks such as Twitter, each company's website, as well as the Kompass database of companies, etc.

Bypath qualifies potential customers and then alerts sales staff to the profiles that are most ripe for purchase and the levers to activate to encourage closing when the quotation is presented.

Video overview of Bypath's capabilities:

Artificial intelligence offers serious advantages for sales managers, field sales representatives and business engineers:

• an end to time-consuming tasks
• prospecting focused on real purchasing potential,
• faster social selling,
• intelligent support for developing your customer portfolio.

What's more, Bypath's Sales Intelligence solution considerably enhances the quality of your prospecting database by connecting with your CRM (interoperability with Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SugarCRM, Pipedrive CRM, etc.).

By communicating with your customer relations tool, Bypath updates all the data in your customer file in your CRM.

Develop your customer relations in automatic mode

The Blacksales platform breaks the rules of B-to-B email prospecting for the benefit of sales teams.

Here's how this virtual prospecting assistant enables you to automate your email prospecting:

• the tool analyses your CRM database and identifies prospects defined according to your own criteria,
• it does not take into account your contacts under negotiation or acquired customers,
• The platform sends content that is appropriate to the prospect's behaviour and at the right time,
• It takes care of follow-up contacts and handles objections for the first time,
• Only high-potential leads are sent back to the sales rep for an appointment.

Automating your B-to-B email prospecting allows sales staff to concentrate on their real added value: converting customers and offering them personalised support.

The software connects with your CRM such as Salesforce Sales Cloud or Zoho CRM to compare your customer profile data with a collaborative database of hundreds of thousands of B2B profiles.

The solution pushes effective content to qualified contacts so that a relationship is established as soon as contact is made. A marketing automation scenario is triggered and improved according to affinities, responses and email open rates, until the desired and achievable sales performance is reached.

On the social selling side, Blacksales also scans Linkedin to retain the most relevant information and contact the prospects who are worth the effort.

Blacksales is a guarantee of excellence for success, whatever the sales challenge:

• you don't have to use the solution, you simply receive the leads (and the follow-up in complete transparency),
• a team of copywriters experienced in sales prospecting content personalise the messages,
• the lead nurturing is meticulous and verified by a customer success manager,
• the more the software canvasses for you, the more it learns, the higher the quality of the leads (machine learning).

Last but not least: if you want to use this solution, you will only be invoiced on a performance basis, i.e. only if a positive response is received from the prospect. You optimise the effectiveness, but also the cost, of your sales actions.

Blacksales lets you calculate your cost per lead in just 11 questions:

Upgrade your sales staff by gaining access to the best prospects

Nobody ever says no to a ticket, do they? The Corporama solution is capable of sending you a list of scored contacts on a daily basis: sales reps only make appointments with "smart leads".

The recipe for putting a smile back on a salesperson's face? Give them scorable leads to contact: smart leads.

The secrets of Corporama software :

• an integrated Business Intelligence tool,
• A collaborative database updated in real time, comprising 11 million B-to-B contacts,
• 35 search criteria (sector, financial, semantic, location, etc.) to identify prospects,
• detection of business signals, such as the publication of a job vacancy or the winning of a call for tenders,
• expertise in data cleaning.

The solution brings together all the tools needed to identify the right contact and analyse business potential. Prospects are rated according to the business signals they generate: all the information about them is updated in real time.

To target a priority prospect, you can, for example, focus your search solely on growing companies in a particular sector, target the French market, or companies with significant export sales.

All the relevant information can be added to your sales pitch: geolocation of customers to optimise your meetings, legal and financial information, contact details, news, key events, increase in capital, etc.

Here is an overview of the Corporama platform, reflecting the functional and operational aspects of the solution:

Additional benefit: the prospecting tool communicates with the majority of CRMs such as GRC Contact, Vtiger CRM, Sugar CRM, Sage CRM, Oryanoo CRM, Zoho CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud, noCRM.io, Ines CRM and many other applications. Sales reps will be smiling from ear to ear: the tool allows you to supplement your contact database with strategic data by deleting duplicates and erroneous information.

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Last B to B tip: the free Linkedin hack

Here's a video tutorial for extracting the members of a Linkedin group:

This tip does not match the prospecting power of the tools mentioned above, but it has the advantage of being free and of targeting the members of a specific group.

One last piece of advice: work within the framework of the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation applicable in May 2018):

For email campaigns in particular, the current derogation regime remains unchanged. Consent (a key regulatory requirement) is not required for commercial prospecting or loyalty campaigns. However, certain conditions must still be met: information must be provided on the conditions under which the data will be processed, the right to object (unsubscribe link) must be respected, and it must be ensured that the solicitation relates to the profession of the person being canvassed.

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