To increase your turnover, you need to acquire new customers and develop a partner network. To achieve this, you must start by creating a quality BtoB prospecting file. Discover, in 3 simple and concrete steps, how to proceed.
You have rejuvenated yourself enough during the holidays and you are now more motivated than ever to develop your business? So you don’t have a minute to waste to find new customers! From now on, your marketing actions must be targeted, relevant and well coordinated. Indeed, despite all your efforts, if your BtoB prospecting base is of poor quality or if you do not know how to optimize it 100%, you risk moving away from your goal, or even missing it. Concretely, you must define your target, build your prospect base and optimize it through a PRM.
Step 1: (Re)Define your target
First, you need to determine which buyers you can satisfy and exclude which ones you can’t. Do this before you even identify your potential buyers (personas). Indeed, it is important that you think about your buyer profiles (or ideal buyer profile) before embarking on the creation of your buyer personas (target). It is important to qualify these two concepts.
The buyer profile
As a reminder, the buyer profile designates the companies that best match your offer. To identify them, you can ask yourself questions such as:
- Who really needs my offer?
- Which industry or sector of activity should be approached first?
- Are your best customers in a certain specific industry or from different industries?
You can measure the size of these companies based on the number of employees, customers, revenue, etc.
The buyer personna
The buyer personna, on the other hand, is a fictitious representation of your target customer. Naturally, you need to be as sharp as possible when you define it. You need to consider accurate data including demographics, purchasing behavior, motivation, goals, etc.
Note that in BtoB, your targets often have different problems and expectations. However, to produce results, you must ensure that your contacts file lists your targets in a way that classifies them according to common issues. This will help you create a personalized sales pitch. Remember, a personalized campaign is a guarantee of profitability of your marketing efforts. And the more you refine your selection criteria, the more successful you will be on this point.
It is a fact that in BtoB, it is generally preferable to approach senior decision-makers : founder, general manager, CEO, etc. However, sometimes your best interlocutor is placed lower in the hierarchy. This can be, for example, a department manager (marketing, finance, purchasing, etc.) or a C-level employee, etc.
So, once the sector of activity is selected, you must target your prospects appropriately. Ask yourself specific questions such as:
- What problems will you solve for your buyer personas?
- Where do your targets go to get information?
- What types of social networks do they use?
- What does a typical day look like for your persona?
- Etc.
The answers to these questions will be used to create and enrich your database of qualified BtoB prospects.
Step 2: Build your BtoB prospect base
Before deciding on anything, know that you have two options:
- build yourself a base of qualified prospects,
- or buy a BtoB prospecting file.
Create a base of qualified prospects yourself
Are you convinced that you are better served than by yourself? Or do you simply not yet have a sufficient budget to delegate the preparation of your commercial prospecting and buy a premium tool? , because you can actually create your own file of qualified BtoB prospects.
There are usually 6 fields that you should basically put in your prospecting file:
- Company Name
- Name and surname of the contact
- Contact position
- The email address,
- The phone
- Link to LinkedIn profiles
You should customize and complete this list according to your prospecting strategy.
You can then collect data and list it from your targeting. It can be interesting to refer you to your best existing customers to identify similar targets and focus your efforts there.
To stand out from your competitors and generate new leads, you need to please your targets. Your prospecting plan must therefore be based on a qualitative and up-to-date file. In other words, your database should be dynamic, not static.
You also have free tools like good old Microsoft Excel or Airtable that can serve as a platform for your commercial prospecting file. You also have the SIRENE database, LinkedIn or the Hunter extension of Google Chrome to extract the email addresses of your targets.
Nevertheless, to keep your contact file up to date, you will have to do everything manually, which is not at all convenient.
Buy a BtoB prospecting file
There are many BtoB prospect databases that you can buy or rent on the internet. And the question of buying leads or a contact file is precisely one of the biggest dilemmas of marketing and sales managers… Indeed, these files can have 3 major disadvantages:
- sometimes poor data quality (obsolete or incorrect contact details, position already replaced, etc.)
- high prices do not necessarily rhyme with quality (difficult to navigate),
- Prospecting companies that don’t know you can hurt your brand image.
In any case, you do not necessarily have to do everything by hand. Sometimes the best decision is to delegate your sales prospecting to a good marketer and provide them with the right tools.
Step 3: Integrate your database into a PRM tool for maximum results
Today, there are PRM (Prospect Relationship Management) tools that allow you to save time and efficiency. A good lead generation and management tool can be a very profitable investment, as it helps you optimize the management of your lead file, and improves your conversion rate.
We particularly recommend the integrated PRM of the Magileads solution. You can import your database from Google or LinkedIn in a few clicks. You can also enrich it with the base of 20 million qualified BtoB prospects that the platform makes available to you.
What’s really interesting about this tool is that it allows you to Create a complete sales funnel to conduct omnichannel prospecting from A to Z. Concretely, you can target your prospects, note their engagement, personalize your messages and test them with the method AB Testing, conduct your Prospecting campaign and evaluate your strategy through KPIs.
You can thus ensure that the prospecting file on which you have invested so much really brings you new customers.
