7 tips on using B2B data effectively in a new business creation process
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For most business leaders, the idea of ringing up a list of strangers and asking for a sales meeting or generating interest in a product or service sends a shiver down their spine. On the other hand, most of them also agree that a professionally planned and executed telemarketing project is the marketing technique most likely to succeed in growing new business sales for most businesses.
Like many things in life, success lies in carefully planning, designing, implementing and managing the project; and everything that this simple to read sentence entails; certainly more than can be written in one short article. So let’s start with the basics.
Any new business creation activity needs to start with a good prospect list to target. If you’re attempting to promote or sell to prospects that are unlikely to want or need your product or service, it’s all going to be a very frustrating uphill struggle. In this article we look at seven tips to making sure you have the right prospects to target, and you have a campaign that will give you the best chance of success.
The seven tips:-
- We all know the 80/20 rule where most companies find that 80% of their profit comes from 20% of their customers? If only we could clone the profitable 20%, then we could double our profit whilst only growing our business by 20%. Profile your customer base and use the profile of your most profitable 20% clients when building your prospect list.
- Create a profile of your ideal prospect. Get a flip chart and your sales team around you and together describe your ideal client – who are they, what do they look like, what sort of job do they do in what sort of business, etc. As before, use this when building your prospect list.
- Understand prospects’ pressure points. When communicating with prospects, you really want to join in with the conversations they are already having – you need to join in with their real world. Think carefully about the pressure points in your prospects’ businesses and what will be in the front of their minds. Do everything you can to enable the benefits of your product or service to bring solutions to their current problems in their current real world.
- Build your prospect list. Use a data specialist to select a prospect list that matches up with the profile and prospect numbers that you will now understand if you’ve gone through steps 1 – 3.
- Start communicating with prospects. Make sure that you have material that you can send to prospects or a website or page to point them to. If you’re telephoning prospects then it’s great to have some information to email to them or a website to direct them to whilst they are still on the phone.
- Don’t try to sell the product or service during the first communication step. You are only selling the next step in your new business creation process. So you may be on the telephone trying to arrange a sales appointment; only ‘sell’ the sales appointment – you simply want to meet face to face when you can really sell the product/service.
- Feedback. Continually hone your prospect list and your approach by feeding back your learnings into your prospect data and into your sales and marketing processes and tools.
Above all, learn to enjoy the experience and treat it as the highly rewarding challenge that it is.
Article written exclusively for Marketscan by telemarketing and lead generation experts, Great Guns Marketing (www.greatgunsmarketing.co.uk).
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