I was inspired to write this post on efficiency in sales research based on some recent prospect and community interactions. In my experience organizations often research too much or too little for their sales outreach. If you research too little you may not be prepared for the interaction and conversely if you research too much you will waste time that could be spent on more outbound efforts. Here are a few of my thoughts on the amount of sales research you should be before these different types of interactions.
Mass outreach
For large mass outreach we typically use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Wiza to generate a sales list with emails. This list is loaded into our CRM and sent out as a marketing email. The list is typically created based on filters on things like industry, geography of the contact, size of the organization, job title, job seniority, and even keywords in their profile. We would then create an email that would target the ideal customer profile and buyer persona. If there is information that could be loaded into HubSpot, like a business description, that will be added. There is not much additional research done before the email is sent. We would typically only add additional research if we get some decent interaction with the emails. Typically we would make a call based on clicks and/or multiple opens.
Account based research
For account based sales outreach we would email the targets and then call several times. We might use a tool like ChatGPT to determine the targets. Our prompts usually request that the information be presented in a table format. This makes it easy to request a small summary and then we add that as a note. Often we will include the LinkedIn bio and may review quickly and add notes as we add it into our CRM.
Prep for a Cold call
As we get prepared for the cold calls we will make sure that we have a few notes, and that they are pinned in your CRM. This allows you to quickly review without having to visit their site and LinkedIn profile.
Preparing for a discovery call
If you cold call, cold email, or Linkedin message relates in a meeting then do a deeper dive. You can spend some additional time reviewing their website and the contacts’ LinkedIn profile. This could mean exploring some of their common connections as well as recent posts to their LinkedIn account. You could also use an AI tool like Perplexity or ChatGPT to help with some research. This could be achieved by adding their LinkedIn bio into the prompt and asking about some of the challenges they could be having or benefits they may be looking for.
CRM
Your CRM is key to efficient sales research. It starts when you add the contact information into the system. Adding notes and pinning the important ones allows you to quickly find the information needed for your sales activity. Record what you have done and also create your future tasks. Your future tasks should drive your daily sales activity.
If you would like some help with your sales planning, reach out and connect with me.
