You’ve just struck out on your fifth lead of the day. All five had the ideal job title at companies that you’re targeting. They seemed like ideal prospects… but none of them bit. And now you’re stuck with a handful of cold leads, and a lack of motivation to add another one to that list.
Reaching out to prospects based on static profiles is a strategy doomed to failure. Job title and company alone won’t tell you what you need to know about a prospect in order to engage with them and close a sale.
Just because someone is a C-level decision-maker who – on the surface – matches with your target audience doesn’t mean they’re in the market to buy. They may not be in the buyer’s journey for your product at all, whether that’s due to a lack of need, budget or a plethora of other reasons.
To access better leads you need to understand the context around their static profiles – with the ultimate goal of building living profiles instead.
Recommended for You Webcast, September 7th: 3 Ways to Speed Up Your Marketing Review and Approval Process
After all, your competition is accessing the same information, burning through the same static lists, and trying to reach out to prospects at the same time as you. In order to give yourself a leg up, you’ve got to incorporate context.
Demographic data, psychographic data and the like are all great additions to any prospect’s profile. But we think you should go further, and dig into the content-based contextual data that is available to you.
What was the last piece of content your prospect shared? Does she regularly share industry-related news? Is she downloading white papers from the competition?
Understanding what content your prospect engages with will help you paint a picture of her that goes beyond job title. It will show you what she is interested in right now in your industry.
The content that your prospects engage with could be anything from ebooks to blog posts to tweets to white papers, but they all have one thing in common: they indicate whether a prospect is interested in your product, and where they are on the buyer’s journey.
If a prospect recently watched a 30 second high-level video about your competitor’s product, that could mean that she is starting to do her research. If she has visited your website three times in the past 24 hours to download a handful of resources, that could mean that she is closer to making a purchase and may be ready for a sales call.
Static profiles are no longer valuable to successful sales professionals unless they have context built-in. A job title doesn’t say whether a prospect just got an increase in budget, or if they have a mandate to upgrade their software in the next three months. It doesn’t tell you that they are researching industry best practices. In fact, on its own, a job title doesn’t tell you much at all – without context.
Are You Still Relying on Static Profile-Based Outbound Prospecting?
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire