Company and B2B blogs aren't news outlets. Content marketers don't report breaking news or tap into the news cycle. Instead, they have very concrete goals: attract the right readers, generate leads, and ultimately, have an impact on company revenue.

Books have been written and debates held on what is the best way to run companies’ new business development. And with an increase in the volume of new tools and technologies, the debate seems to get all the more complicated every year.

When you buy a coffee machine or dishwasher, or even a car, reading the user's manual is a great idea to make the most of all the features.

When you invest in a CRM platform, your strategy is your user's manual. It ensures that the technology delivers on its intended purpose, leveraging customer and prospect data to achieve business outcomes. It helps you align multiple customer-facing teams to use one platform, maintaining a centralized database across your sales organization.

Think of any company in the world. What type of company is Tesla? And Apple? What about Spotify?

Most likely, you can use basic firmographics to describe those companies. You know their industry, their location, and probably, have a rough idea of their number of employees and revenue. That's good enough... or is it?

In today's world, basic firmographic data doesn’t often reflect clear differences in needs or current situation. This is the reason why modern salespeople are increasingly relying on other data points when defining their ideal customer profile and focusing on sales prospecting.

Firmographics, a type of company information, has significant value to salespeople who target companies in a specific industry or a chosen size-range as it allows them to quickly filter promising prospects out of a longer list of potential customers. However, firmographic data doesn’t reveal enough details about a company's organization and current situation to help you find those hidden gems you should go after right now.

If you’re a salesperson in the forefront, you combine firmographics, technographics (data showing a company’s online profile and tech stack, etc.) and trigger events. 

In this article, we’ll go through what firmographic data is, when it’s useful during sales prospecting and when it simply doesn’t provide you as a salesperson with enough information to help you distinguish a rock-solid prospect from a mediocre one.

No matter how good your product or service is, it won’t always be the right fit for every potential customer. That's why lead qualification is such an important step in the sales process. By qualifying your leads, you are able to figure out which companies your organization would create the most value for. This allows you to focus your sales efforts on the companies that are the most likely to benefit from your solution. Simple enough, right?

Here's the thing: Lead qualification takes time, and time is a scarce resource. To avoid unnecessarily wasting time on vetting potential customers, you could automate the lead qualification process. That’s what we do here at Vainu, and we have affectionately dubbed it the Vainu Method™ for lead qualification.

To maximize your sales potential, the leads that are the most likely to buy have to be a priority. The Vainu Method will take you through the lead qualification process, inform you how to automate its most time-consuming steps, and explain why you shouldn’t be afraid to disqualify a lead that’s not worth your time.

Technology leaves footprints that other technologies can track and follow. While looking for new sales opportunities, these footprints can tell you a lot about a company’s current needs and help you determine whether it’s worth it for you as to spend your time cultivating that lead or not.

If a company is using a technology that your software integrates seamlessly with—or if they show an obvious positive attitude to modern technology—they are more likely to welcome a sales call from you. Insights about a company’s tech stack and website technology not only helps you find out whether a company is likely to need your solution or not, it can also help you tailor your pitch better.

If you’re struggling to find new sales opportunities, consider these five tried-and-tested modern methods the next time you prospect.

“Data-driven” is a popular term in the business world these days and it makes sense why: data is the helping hand that decision-makers have been needing. Data helps you troubleshoot your organization, understand your performance, and make better business decisions. It can’t come as too much of a surprise then that data is also of huge benefit for salespeople! By using the right data, salespeople will know whom to contact, when to contact them, and why to contact them. Knowing these things is part of what makes data an invaluable resource for the modern salesperson.

What was a terrible lead yesterday, is a solid opportunity today. What happened?! 

Businesses change. All the time. Subtle shifts, like the hire of a senior-level employee, or earth-shattering changes, like a merger or a funding round, create a window of opportunity. The types of changes that lead to a sales opportunity are commonly known as trigger events.

Trigger events are your sixth sense in sales prospecting, but how can you distinguish between meaningful company changes that create new sales opportunities and noise? How do you turn data into actionable insight?

That's a good question. The trick is to figure out what happened at a company right before they booked a meeting with you, requested a demo, or became your customer. Tune into the right channels and detect relevant company changes and you’ll contact a prospect when they need it most. 

Here’s how you create a simple dashboard to visualize the most effective trigger events. You'll only need a spreadsheet and trigger event data feeding into your CRM.

🚨 We've included a handy template to help you get started. 

Today’s buyers don’t take kindly to spammy salespeople giving unsolicited cold calling with offers that fit their business poorly. That's why putting some thought into your sales prospecting makes sure you're spending your time wisely and making more sales.