Prospect research is the process of identifying, analyzing, and qualifying new potential customers to pursue as sales opportunities. As a Sales Operations Manager, implementing a scalable prospecting strategy across your sales teams is key to driving predictable revenue growth. In this comprehensive guide, learn how leading sales organizations leverage automated prospect research to capture 2x more qualified pipeline and reduce manual research time by over 80%.
The Challenges of Manual Prospecting
Traditionally, sales representatives spend countless hours combing through various websites, news articles, company databases and social networks to uncover details on each prospect. Not only is this a tedious, manual process, but it often fails to provide sales teams with a 360-degree view of each potential customer. Key challenges include:
- Time-Consuming Research: Manually researching prospects is inefficient. Valuable selling time is spent on administrative tasks versus customer-facing interactions.
- Incomplete Prospect Profiles: Piecing together information from various sources makes it difficult to get a complete picture of each prospect. This results in poor lead quality.
- No Prioritization: With limited context on each prospect, sales teams struggle to identify and pursue the most promising accounts first.
The Solution: AI-Powered Prospecting
AI and automation have revolutionized prospect research. Within minutes, sales representatives can access a prioritized list of recommended prospects complete with firmographic details, technologies used, key initiatives, org charts and more. By providing complete prospect profiles in one centralized platform, sales teams can finally focus on selling.
Benefits of Automated Prospect Research:
- Identify 2x More Qualified Leads: Uncover the most likely buyers based on ideal customer profile matching.
- 80% Faster Research: Instantly access prospect details versus hours spent searching manually.
- 360-Degree Prospect Profiles: Complete firmographic details, org charts, current tech stacks, key initiatives and more in one view.
- Prioritized Prospect Lists: Focus on tier-one prospects first based on likelihood to buy scores.
Best Practices for Prospect Research
When implementing an automated prospect research solution, follow these best practices to maximize adoption across your sales team:
- Integrate with Existing Tech Stack: Choose a solution that seamlessly integrates with your CRM, sales engagement, and marketing automation tools for a unified experience.
- Prioritize Ease-of-Use: The best adoption comes from tools that are intuitive for sales reps to use independently.
- Enable Self-Service Access: Allow your sales development reps to unlock on-demand prospect research versus relying on ops.
- Track Research Behavior: Leverage insight into research activity to identify coaching opportunities.
- Conduct Ongoing Training: Continually train your teams on how to utilize prospect data in selling scenarios.
The Future of Prospect Research
The prospect research landscape will continue to be enhanced by emerging technologies like data mining, predictive analytics and intent data. As a Sales Ops leader, stay on the cutting-edge by taking advantage of these innovations:
- Data Mining: Solutions that scan the web to construct detailed prospect profile databases versus relying on manual entry.
- Predictive Analytics: AI that scores prospects based on historical deal data to reveal your best customers.
- Intent Data: Uncover accounts actively researching products demonstrating early buying signals.
- Personalized Insights: Receive customized recommendations on ideal prospects that align to your territory or industry.
By implementing an AI-driven approach to prospect research, Sales Operations Managers can empower their sales teams to focus their time on selling activities that drive revenue.
Getting Started with Automated Prospecting
As a Sales Operations leader exploring an AI-powered prospect research solution, follow this framework:
- Document Prospecting Pain Points: Start by aligning with sales leadership and representatives to quantify the challenges and bottlenecks faced with current prospecting approaches. Key questions to ask are; how much time reps are spending on manual research, what prospect details are missing that hinder sales conversations, how can forecasting be improved with better qualified lead sources.
- Build an Ideal Prospect Profile: Leverage your historical deal data to construct a profile of your best customers. Detail firmographic traits like industry, employee size, tech stack as well as behavioral attributes like recent funding events, leadership changes or product usage signals. This model will power prospect recommendations.
- Prioritize Ease-of-Use Sales: teams are more likely to adopt new technology when the user experience is intuitive. Prioritize solutions with easy CRM integration, Chrome extensions for web research and mobile compatibility. The system should require very little ramp up time or training.
- Start with a Pilot Group: Before rolling out a new prospect research system company-wide, start with a small pilot group. This allows you to work through any issues and build advocates of the tool. Target sales reps who frequently complain about lead quality to quickly demonstrate value.
- Encourage Ongoing Usage Drive: Consistent usage by setting the expectation that sales reps research each new prospect through the tool before outreach. Also monitor usage data to identify low-activity users for additional coaching. Consider tying tool adoption to quota attainment.
Lead Enrichment Using Relevance AI
Watch this tutorial on how to enrich leads using Relevance AI. We give you a walkthrough on how to do it using a basic template that you can customize and expand to your needs. We'll also show you can do it in bulk.
