B2B Sales Data: The Key to Smart Selling
Tags: B2b Sales, B2b Data, B2b Lead Generation, B2B

While most business processes over the years have witnessed massive transformations in both their operational structures and day-to-day activities, sales remain an outlier that’s still mostly done the same way as over a decade ago. Take a list of names and phone numbers and start calling each of them until you find someone interest in buying your product.

That said, there is a better way, smart selling, so to speak that has emerged in recent years and gaining popularity by the day. But before we get into many details of smart selling and the role B2B data plays, it is worth taking a look at the overall process.

Hard Selling

Traditionally, successful selling has always been considered a function of brute force. That is, the more calls you make, the more appointments you will set and by extension, the more deals you will close. In fact, many organizations measure the sales productivity of their sales reps based on the number of calls they make. Even marketing people build large target lists of tens of thousands of contacts to shoot emails and are often happy with abysmal CTRs of 2–3%

This rise of CRMs further makes managing such large volumes of contacts simple and efficient giving little incentives to sales and marketing professionals to refine their process. After all, if you can easily segment and send a hundred thousand emails every day, why would you send any less!

Embrace Smart Selling

If there is one thing that people hate more than receiving unsolicited calls and emails, it receiving them over and over again. While most businesses continue to sell hard, some have quietly moved away to a more reasonable and effective strategy. Tactics like Account-based Marketing, that forego the traditional obsession with scale and focus on precision, have become massively popular due to their higher effectiveness and returns.

The philosophy of smart selling is pretty simple- instead of operating at scale and trying to market and sell to everyone, it much more efficient and productive if targeted marketing and warm calling are used. It’s like instead of using a wide net to catch whatever’s in the water, a hook is used with an optimum bet to catch the most desired fish.

The process itself is relatively straightforward:

An ICP is built based on market research and product specifications

2. A target list is built based on that ICP

3. Detailed information is gathered for each of the target companies including all the decision-makers

4. They are reached out with personalized emails and content

5. Finally, warm calls are made to push for conversion

As you might expect, this kind of methodical and measured approach has much better conversion rates and overall ROI than simply marketing to everybody.

B2B Sales Data: The Key Ingredient

While smart selling works exceptionally well compared to traditional methods, it nonetheless faces a critical problem- the pain of acquiring data. All the steps mentioned earlier- building ICP, target lists, market research, finding decision-makers, etc require an incredible amount of research time and it might take months preparing for each campaign. Unless of course, all that B2B sales data is served to you on a platter.

This is what sales intelligence is really about. It is based on the premise that sales and marketing professionals should work on strategies and tactical issues while assets like data and intelligence should simply be sourced from reliable providers.

Take SalesIntel for example, it’s a sales intelligence platform that offers account and contact data along with buying and intent intelligence. This means, once you put together your ICP, you can simply use their portal to get all the requisite data and intelligence to immediately kickstart the outreach process thus saving countless hours of research time that ultimately reflects in better productivity and ROI.