Reduce Sales Rep Research to Boost Pipeline: Part 3

The digitally powered sales rep has never had more data and information on their prospects than they do today. With the social web, internet research, just-in-time financial data, buyer intent data, and other available sources, reps can profile their territory like never before. However, most reps lack the ability to navigate these data and the time to do it right.

From basic firmographic data, to buyer intent data, sales people can glean so much information on prospects and customers as they target, prepare, engage, sell, and retain. While this is an effective new tool, it also changes a few elements of the sales rep role.

  1. Sales reps spend an inordinate amount of time researching, analyzing, and interpreting this information, which prevents them from getting in front of buyers. Recent research has shown that sales people spend 20% of their time alone researching prospects.
  2. Surprise….but sales people are not professional researchers. Even with all of this research and profiling, customers say that only 29% of sales people are adequately prepared when they reach out to engage.
  3. And…the expectation around the outreach has changed as well. Buyers now expert personalized outreach, tailored to their individual needs along with the needs of their organization.

Luckily, there are tools in the market that make it simple to aggregate all the data your organization cares about. These tools make it easier to gather this information and tailor messaging to meet individual prospect profiles. Automated customer profiling delivers key data insights to a sales rep’s desk and eliminates the time spent researching prospects. With this feature, it’s now possible to simplify the sales rep research and preparation process by providing deeper profiling information on customers and prospects.

MarketBridge’s SaaS app, Stringer, is one example of automated customer profiling. Stringer performs comprehensive customer profiling on over 100 third party social media and demographic data sources. In addition, it pulls internal data such as CRM, marketing automation, and other internal data sources. The outcome is ease of personalizing outreach and increased likelihood that a contact will engage with your sales rep.

Check out part 4 of the series!