Researching Prospects: Finding Data for Calling in Sales

Data for calling in sales is one of the most valuable tools any sales representative will have. In any industry, customers are more likely to respond to well-informed, relevant, and intelligent pitches from a representative. The only way to ensure you’re making the right impression is to ensure you collect the appropriate data for your call before it begins.

A business development representative, or BDR can gather all kinds of useful insights and data for calling before they initiate a conversation with a lead. The key to success is deciding what you need to know in advance.

Where to Find Data for Calling

Data for more effective sales calls is available from a range of different environments, depending on the kind of information you need for a sale. If you’re collecting calling data for call centers full of sales reps cold-calling prospects, you might check out locations like LinkedIn, company websites and directories.

You can also look at websites like Crunchbase, which are full of details on prospect inventors, funding round and competitors. You can also collect various pieces of data from locations like:

• Your CRM: Customer Relationship Management tools are excellent for finding information about customers you’ve interacted with in the past.
• Marketing Autoamtion systems: Marketing automation systems offer insights into things like your customer contact details and marketing campaigns they’ve interacted with.
• Competitor research: Competitor research can help you to gather information about your audience based on their interactions with your competitors.
• Market research: There are various groups who publish market research for all kinds of industries, which can give you a clearer view of your target audience.
• Press releases: PR information and content from the website of your chosen prospect can help you to learn more about what the company has been doing recently.

What Kind of Data is Valuable for Sales Calls?

There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for succeeding with a sales call. The more information you have about your customer and their needs, pain points, and expectations, the more you’ll be able to tailor your sales pitches to suit each individual prospect.

Just some of the details you may need for your sales include:

• Your prospects name and job title: These are obvious pieces of information you should have to make any sales call feel more personalized.
• Purchasing power: You’ll need to know what kind of budget you’re dealing with so you know what you can offer your customer and what kind of deals they’re likely to take.
• Details on their company: Details on the company your prospect works for, like their number of employees, revenue, and what the business does is always valuable.
• Recent activity: Knowing what your prospect has been working on lately, or what they recently accomplished provides an excellent opportunity to break the ice.
• Their position in the business: Knowing exactly where your prospect is positioned in the business hierarchy is useful because it helps you to determine whether they’re a key decision-maker or someone you need to bypass to get to a crucial executive.
• Common connections: Having information about the common connections you and your prospect has can help you to highlight your credibility. Mentioning people you both know can make you seem more credible and trustworthy.

It’s also worth making sure you take the data from each previous call with you into new conversations. If your company has interacted with the prospect in the past, even if only for a short while, it’s important to know what you spoke about with the prospect and what their perceptions where of your company and offer.

If you know things like what kind of objections your prospect had to your offer in the past, or what kind of problems prevented them from making a purchase back then, you can start on a stronger foot with your new sales call.