2.0 Tools for Sales Prospecting

Hunting for new sales prospects is one of a salesperson’s most frustrating tasks. It is time-consuming and has a low success rate. With sales 2.0, it is easy to find the right prospects. Smarter prospecting involves finding the right targets — that is, potential clients that want or need your service. With the Web 2.0 tools available, it’s easier than ever to pinpoint who within a company is the right person for you to contact and to uncover some pre-existing links between you and your target prospect that can increase the chances of making the sale. Here is how you can go about using those tools.

Building Your Prospect List

In order to search for prospective clients, the first thing you need to do is come up with a “prospect profile.” That’s a definition of whom you will target and contact. You need to make this definition as tight as you can. Decide on a company size (by revenue or number of employees) and an industry. When choosing an industry, try to be specific. Better yet, choose a slice of an industry. Narrow the category further by targeting specifics such as geography or the company’s growth — has it been expanding? Is it a fast-growing company?

Then think of which executives (by job title) would be the target prospects that you might want to reach in a company. Would that be the vice president of marketing, the CIO or an office manager? In most cases, it won’t just be one person. Recent research shows that in Fortune 100 companies, for IT solutions costing more than $25,000, there are 21 people who are involved in the buying decision. Think of a handful of people to reach. When you are defining your prospect profile, you are defining the search criteria you will apply in the next stage of the prospecting process, which is the search that will build your prospect list.

For example, imagine you are an IT consultant dealing with the legal profession, and you want to identify potential clients. You might define some potential clients as follows:

—Industry: lawyers with corporate practices

—Company size: $100 million–$500 million in revenue
— Location: New York tri-state area
—Titles to target: CEO, COO, CIO, VP of tech support, partners, business manager

Once you have a profile of your target prospect, you can search for companies that fit that profile, and executives within those companies. Use online resources like Hoovers, OneSource, InfoUSA and Dun & Bradstreet to find companies, and then get the names of people with the titles you defined in your prospect profile — and only from companies in your prospect profile. Resist the “more is better” syndrome. You want to create a manageable list of people you can begin contacting, not generate thousands of names. These resources are all basic data sources for companies and executive names and provide information on company size, revenue and growth and descriptions of their businesses. (See table on page 26 for details on these and other resources mentioned in this article.)

Continuing the example of the IT consultant looking for law firm clients, I ran a search on OneSource and found 41 legal firms in the New York tri-state region with revenue between $100 million and $500 million. Picking one at random in the middle of our size range, I settled on the firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. I got the size of the firm and a detailed description of its services, office locations and internal departments. I also procured the names of several senior officers — the chairman, the executive vice president of operations, a partner — as well as the firm’s Web site URL, stblaw.com.

If you’re looking for names of prospects that are in middle management in large companies, Hoovers and OneSource can’t help you. For that, I recommend you turn to Jigsaw or Spoke. The data on these sites is community based (meaning the names of executives are submitted by community members, including the hard-to-find middle managers). Community-based data is also usually updated more frequently than sources like Hoovers or One Source. In my continuing search, I jumped into Jigsaw, looked for additional contacts at Simpson Thacher, and found 882, including the director of business development, the chief information officer and the director of finance.

Once you have the names of prospects — both the companies and the executives within the companies — you still need to do some work before you pick up the phone. Doing your homework on your prospects is the key to differentiation in a Sales 2.0 world. Sites like ZoomInfo, Google and LinkedIn and even a company’s Web site can be valuable sources of background information on contacts, especially their biographical information. ZoomInfo uses spiders that search the Web for bios of executives and collects them into one huge database. LinkedIn is a huge social network, and the most popular one for business people. It contains biographical information on millions of executives. LinkedIn allows you to search a wider network based on whom you are connected to, so the larger a network you have, the more people you will have access to. You need to invest time proactively building your network (that is, inviting contacts to “link” to you) if you want LinkedIn to work effectively.

There are some sources that seem obvious but shouldn’t be overlooked. Google can be used to find whatever there is to find on the Web. Remember to check the company Web site, too.