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Step 4: Connect with Sales Intelligence
Getting in the door
Now that you’ve identified a hot prospect who has a buying trigger, and used your pre-call research to create a timely, compelling pitch, it’s time to make contact. Unfortunately, it’s extremely challenging to get the attention of a prospective buyer in today’s hyper-competitive market where a typical decision-maker gets dozens of sales solicitations a day.
What are the Sales Intelligence Connections?
One of the most powerful features of Sales Intelligence is the ability to consolidate your professional network, which may be dispersed across various places, into a single location where the information is always at your fingertips.
Sales Intelligence allows you to combine professional contacts from LinkedIn, Gmail, Outlook, and other sources. You can supplement this information by entering your education, past employers, reference customers, and contacts that you flag as Connections within Sales Intelligence.
Sales Intelligence continuously works to verify a company’s current employees, ensuring you can find relevant people, their level in the company, and what department they’re in.
Insider Tip: If you find an outdated contact record, or that the person has moved on, let us know by clicking the “Wrong Info” flag on their profile page. This lets our content team know what’s wrong and we’ll let you know within 48 hours if we can verify the correction.
Your expanded network
The more Connection information you provide, the higher your likelihood of having connections into a target account. You have access not only to your direct connections, but also to those of your colleagues who use Sales Intelligence.
Your private network
Sometimes new Sales Intelligence users are hesitant to add their connections because they feel like they will be adding them to the Sales Intelligence database and thus subjecting their contacts to a barrage of sales calls. But that isn't how Sales Intelligence's Connections feature works.
When you add your connections to Sales Intelligence, NOTHING gets added to the Sales Intelligence database unless you explicitly request it. Sales Intelligence was designed with privacy concerns in mind.
How it works:
- Users provide us their contact list from Gmail, Outlook, or LinkedIn.
- Sales Intelligence matches their contacts against the executives in the Sales Intelligence database. If their contacts exist, Sales Intelligence creates a link to review the information in the "People You Know" tab.
- If any of their contacts do not exist in the database, Sales Intelligence does not add those people in the database because that would be a violation of the user’s privacy rights.
The "People You Know" tab on the Connections Settings screen shows connections added from LinkedIn, Gmail, and Outlook. Names already in the Sales Intelligence database have links that go to the information we have for the person. The names of your private connections do not have links. Instead, they have a "+" button that allows you to add them to the database if you choose to.
Your colleagues will see that you have a connection to your private connections, but they cannot see contact information. They have to ask you for a referral if they want to reach out to someone who is your private connection.
To add or not to add
So why might you choose to add your private connections to the database? The main reason is that unless they are in the database, you can't add them to a Watchlist, check their social media, or see their work history in Sales Intelligence. So, add your private connections to the Sales Intelligence database or keep them private. The choice is yours.
The big setup
There are three steps to setting up Connections in Sales Intelligence.
- Import your contacts from other systems.
If you use LinkedIn, that’s typically the biggest source of connections. So start with that one.
Sales Intelligence will show how many contacts it has imported from each system, for instance, “354 of 489.” The first number is the number of your contacts that were in the Sales Intelligence database. The second number is the total number of contacts Sales Intelligence attempted to import. The difference between the two is the number of contacts in your private network.
Note that when importing contacts from Outlook, only your personal contacts are imported, not entries from corporate address books. If you want to add additional employees from your corporate address book, use Outlook to add them as personal contacts first.
- Add your personal education and employment information
One of the most frequent and useful types of connections is when you or a colleague have worked at the same company as a prospect. To see these connections, you’ll need to enter your prior work history.
If you don’t remember your employment dates, you can leave them blank. You’ll still see work history connections. Don’t forget to add your Education too.
- Add your personal reference customers
Company Reference Customers are added by your Sales Intelligence administrator. But you can add your personal reference customers that aren’t part of the corporate list.
How to use Sales Intelligence Connections
Sales Intelligence gives you two ways to improve the odds of successfully engaging with a customer.
Find a warm introduction
The most powerful tool to get in the door is always a personal introduction. Sales Intelligence makes it easy to ask a connection to introduce you. Click on the name of the mutual connection, then click the “Ask For Referral” button to open an editable email addressed to the connection.
View Executive Details
If you can’t find someone to make an introduction, you can use the Executive Details feature by clicking View More option.
In the Executive Details page, you can view a contact's firmographics information, latest blog posts, social media feeds of an executive and other options to start business conversations.