Step 1: Find and Screen Leads

What is “fit?”

When it comes to sales, most companies have a customer "sweet spot." Perhaps you do well in certain geographies or industries or you sell most successfully to companies of a certain size. You may even have a “patch” that’s defined by some combination of these attributes.

“Fit” is about sorting the promising leads from the noise. Later in the sales workflow you’ll prioritize prospects. But for now, you’re just eliminating the ones that you aren’t very likely to pursue.

Where do you get your leads?

When it comes to leads, there are three categories that align to different roles in the sale process. Each category uses Sales Intelligence differently during the prospecting stage.

Inbound

If you’re in an inbound sales role, you likely get your leads from the efforts of a Marketing or Demand Generation team. Unless your company has a well-honed marketing automation system to pre-screen these leads, you’ll need to assess the leads yourself to eliminate those that aren’t a good fit.

Sales Intelligence has a wealth of company data that can help you quickly assess fit. Rather than search for each company individually in Sales Intelligence or your CRM, you can add the companies to a Watchlist to quickly scan basic attributes such as location, revenue and employee count. Click on a company for a more detailed view or click the “x” at the right of a Watchlist entry to remove a company that’s not a good fit.

If your role includes actually closing deals, you can keep this Watchlist to get email alerts on each company so that you can look for a buying trigger.

If you’re qualifying Opportunities that will be closed by someone else, you can use the Watchlist as your “to call” list.  Remove a company from the Watchlist once you’ve made contact. If you’re not monitoring these companies over time, you can turn Alerts off for this Watchlist so you don’t get daily emails.

Outbound

If you’re in a hunting role, you can find and screen leads in one step using the Sales Intelligence Company List feature. Simply enter the parameters that indicate a good fit.

Save the list criteria so that you can re-run it periodically. At Demandbase, we’re constantly updating our data so you’ll get new results each time you run the list. 

Researching an Individual Company

Account Manager (or Named Account)

In this role, you’re prospecting for cross-selling and upsell opportunities within pre-determined accounts. It’s not prospecting in the traditional sense, but you are looking to broaden your footprint in the account, find champions at higher levels of the organization, and break into new geographies or company divisions.

The People List feature allows you to create a list of employees based on title, job level, job function, location, and contact info. For instance, if you typically sell to directors and VPs of Marketing, you can create a list of everyone who has an appropriate title within your accounts.

The trick to building a People List for only your accounts is to first create a Watchlist with those accounts.  Then you create a People List from your Watchlist by using the My Saved Lists option on the “Build a List” home page. (Note that your Watchlists are denoted by an eye icon next to the list name.)

When you have your list results, click on the names of the most promising prospects, then click the Follow button to add them to your Watchlist so you can monitor them over time.

Another way to find new contacts within a specific account is to use the interactive filters on the company's People Tab. You can review and locate employees who might be good sales targets in that company.