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For years, teams have attempted to improve prospecting by increasing volume: more accounts in sequences, more touches, and more automation. But the more we look at real...

Succeeding in B2B sales in 2026 requires more than traditional skills like empathy, persistence, and relationship-building. Today's top-performing sales professionals...

This is already our 11th year predicting what’s next in B2B sales. When we started listing these trends back in 2015, we didn’t know we were creating an annual routine...

AI has officially arrived in sales. Teams use it to write cold emails, prioritize leads, and forecast revenue. Every month brings new tools promising smarter automation,...

Sales teams are drowning in AI tools promising to revolutionize their outreach. From automated prospecting to intelligent lead scoring, the market is flooded with...

As businesses face increasing pressure to align teams, optimize processes, and leverage technology, capabilities in Revenue Operations has become a key enabler for...

Data providers tend to oversimplify the data enrichment process.

Traditional sales prospecting is incomplete in the fast-paced modern era. It ought to be backed up with technologically-equipped sales tools that are innovative and...

We've been in the company data game for a while—over ten years, to be precise. And in those ten years, we've never dipped our toes in the contact data waters. However,...

Armed with the right tools, any sales representative can sell a product worldwide effectively regardless of travel capability. Likewise, technology allows companies to...

As a company data provider, we (obviously) have quite a bit of data about companies. This data can be used for any number of things, but more often than not, it's used...

As a company data provider, we (obviously) have quite a bit of data about companies. This data can be used for any number of things, but more often than not, it's used...

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” That's one of the most important quotes in business. At least if you want to be data-driven—and who doesn't, right?

Do...

Being on a call with a prospect and realizing they’re not a good fit, won’t get much value from your product or service, and are unlikely to buy anything from you...

If you're a sales rep, the pressure of hitting your sales quota month after month is probably a pretty familiar feeling. Prospecting, engaging, and converting leads is...

With more than 100,000 concurrent customers and a host of accolades to their name, Salesforce is a giant within the CRM software industry. Offering a full range of...

Hot take: LinkedIn Matched Audiences is better than LinkedIn’s audience builder. 

Less-hot take: It’s better for us, and maybe it’d also be better for you.

Excluding Peter Pan and the Lost Boys of Neverland, everyone grows up. Even us, a brand. We recently decided to take a close look at ourselves and ask the very...

SalesOps, RevOps, and Sales Enablement teams have significant influence over their organization’s financial outcomes and sales results. One of our new features in Vainu...

Most sales and marketing teams want to be data-driven. They want to run ABM campaigns, apply modern lead scoring models, and automate many parts of the sales process....

Most companies define their ideal customer profile by using the “Big Three'' firmographic data points: Industry, company size, and location. Moreover, these data points...

It would be highly unusual to hear a company proclaim the fact that they do not make any attempt at filtering companies or segmenting accounts, and rightly so. By...

After 8 years of focusing on companies in the Nordics, we’re happy to be launching Vainu Global, our global company database. Vainu Global is the easiest way to find ICP...

Finding companies that have an interest in buying your product or service is a big part of B2B business. As you can no doubt imagine, this process would be a slow trudge...

If you ask Google, how many SaaS companies are there in the world? The answer that pops up most frequently is around 25,000. This is by no means a small number, but if...

When it comes to growing their pipeline, salespeople will generally invest most of their time in prospecting. And, in an effort to prospect successfully, those...

LinkedIn is an incredibly popular—and powerful—tool for B2B sales and marketing initiatives, and their Matched Audiences presents a unique way for you to target a...

The most visited websites in the world are—of course—well-known websites for most of us. In the Top 10, we find websites such as Google, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, and...

How many SaaS companies are there in the world? How about in the Nordic countries? And how many of them focus on sales and marketing technology? And how about HR tech,...

Not all businesses are the same. This simple statement isn't especially controversial, yet it's surprisingly powerful. The statement implies that, since not all...

The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that the yearly global spending on digital transformation will reach $2.8 trillion in 2025. For the uninitiated,...

Despite being one amongst dozens of available CRM solutions, Pipedrive has managed to amass 50,000 paying customers spread across more than 140 countries. Whether that...

In the case of HubSpot, the numbers speak for themselves: they've surpassed 100,000 paying users and have more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Considering...

Since its founding in 1975, Microsoft has grown to become a household name, offering an array of software products for computing devices, including its CRM solution,...

Thousands of people are heading towards Pasila, Helsinki this week to join Slush, one of the largest startup events in the world.

At Vainu, we analyzed 1,000+ startups...

Account-based marketing is becoming increasingly popular as a customer acquisition tactic among B2B companies.

At this point, most early adopters of the tactic will...

Growth or revenue creation can be fueled by two mediums: selling to a new customer or selling to an existing customer. We’ve written about using data and analytics when ...

Obviously, knowing what something is is important. However, the practical value often comes from knowing how to do that something, not simply knowing what that something...

Prospecting is seldom the favorite part of the sales process. It’s often considered hard and time consuming. In fact, prospecting it’s often identified as the hardest...

Nine out of ten marketers diss gated content. And yet, nine out of ten marketers use gated content as a way of bringing in leads.

While reportedly first being coined in 2006 by HubSpot, you can find examples of inbound marketing through history, even before the emergence of the internet. The common...

The most successful sales organizations are the ones working systematically. To do that you have to have clearly defined goals, sales KPIs (key performance indicators,...

It’s B2B sales 101. Using standard industry classifications for market segmentation is commonplace. Need to sell to the finance industry? Use SIC code 6199, and you'll...

Salespeople often obsess over growing a big, beautiful sales pipeline. “Fill pipeline with hot leads” or “fill pipeline with best-fit prospects” are recurrent tasks at...

While CRM software is powerful on its own, integrating it to other tools across your sales tech stack expands its functionality and makes your job much easier. Ideally,...

After decades of hunch-based, adrenaline-fueled cold calling and Hail-Mary revenue generation, we’ve recently entered an entirely new era. An era steered by intelligent,...

Entering a new, unknown market is like being the new kid at a new school. The possibilities are endless when it comes to making new friends, or in the business world -...

Awww… first dates. They’re a mixed bag—you never quite know what you’re going to get. One day, sparks fly and you feel like you’re on the cusp of a whirlwind fairy-tale...

A fun way to think about sales is as a quest. I know that might sound a little odd but, if you just bear with me, I promise the metaphor will make a lot of sense. In...

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...

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...

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...

Expanding your B2B business to a new country can be daunting. Obviously, you need a solid market entry strategy, but also you need to develop a deep understanding of how...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

Most of us use the industry data field in our CRM and marketing automation. It’s an important piece of information. We often create segments and lists by using that...

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...

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...

Imagine if Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email would work like this: to read new messages, you first have to load all messages, and then, compare them to the previous batch...

Sales teams that struggle to meet their goals may not be short on prospects–more likely, they're short on actionable insights about these prospects and the businesses...

"When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one". The rationale behind this statement is relatively easy to grasp—if you don’t personalize your messaging, people won’t...

You’ve probably heard the term ‘data’ before. You’ve also probably heard that this thing called ‘data’ can help you make better and more informed decisions, as well as...

It may be stating the obvious, but data is an indispensable component of a modern, successful sales team. Data-driven sales pros can avoid pursuing bad-fit prospects,...

Go to Amazon, and you’ll see a long list of personalized websites with recommendations just for you. Open the Netflix app, and you’ll find suggestions for your next...

Do cold calls still work in 2021? The truth is sales calls are unavoidable. To grow a business, people need to approach different organizations to offer their products...

We might live in an ‘automation era’, but that doesn’t mean all things get from point A to B by themselves. It’s up to logistics companies to provide all the...

Many things have changed this year. The pandemic has forced many sales organizations to rethink their strategies, tactics, and goals. Now that you’re busy setting goals...

Nobody likes ads. And yet, we’ve never seen—and created— as many ads as we do today. If nothing else, the internet gave us the omnipresence of targeted ads.

Technology...

Look, generating lists of prospects fitting your target industry, company size and title is easy. But calling blindly through prospect lists with a generic pitch just...

It's a sign of the times. Everyone has easy access to data on pretty much any company (and anything) in the world today. That's not the problem. The real problem with...

It’s well documented that target marketing campaigns, like account-based marketing (ABM), deliver better results and higher return on investment. The rationale is very...

What do top salespeople want? Besides success and eternal glory, that’s it. Salespeople want to know who they should be selling to, what they should be talking about,...

Data has become a commodity. For marketers, too. If that’s the case, how can marketing pros wear their data expert’s hat for five minutes and be better marketers? Read...

Marketers want to be heard. They want to deliver a message with maximum impact. Fat chance without a thorough and comprehensive knowledge of their audience. Do you even...

Inbound leads versus outbound deals. Easy choice if you ask most sales professionals. Many will say they prefer incoming leads, such as demo requests and so-called...

Ask a librarian how they classify books and you better have some free time. Grab a coffee, sit down, the reply will be long. Library classification is a precise,...

Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.

There’s little to no rest in sales. Every week, month, or quarter the countdown starts over, and you (or your team) are racing to hit...

Love them or hate them, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have matured into incredibly complex systems. Countless features and options help companies and...

Looking to sell in Europe? Find a company list and reach out, right? Well, not exactly.

Information has become our most valuable commodity. Skimming the top five results...

Good marketing requires a solid relationship between you and your prospects. Good sales, too. Hardly breaking news, I know. But with B2B sales moving into digital...

Behind every successful motion picture, there’s an entire team of people responsible for different tasks, working towards the joint goal of co-creating the next...

For a few years, account-based marketing (ABM) has been the hottest topic in the B2B world. Companies are concentrating on acquiring specific high-value customers with...

In sales, being lucky is in your hands. Your expertise, networks, and contacts will boost your luck-o-meter, but when the stars are not aligned—and usually they aren't,...

People are crazy and times are strange, things have changed, says an old Bob Dylan song. But even in the midst of crisis, in these singular, turbulent times, sales...

The modern Formula 1 car is an elegant piece of engineering: A complex machine capable of racing at over 200 MPH at ease. But the car is also an intelligent and...

You’ve worked hard to craft a beautiful website, you’ve created thoughtful content pieces for your target audience to interact with, and you finally start seeing a...

When the going gets tough, the tough test new ideas. In the recent weeks of economic downturn, many business owners have been forced to look for alternative ways to...

Real-time sales is not just about speed. It’s about real conversations, too. We’re often asked, what do you mean when you talk about real-time sales? In this blog, we...

You had everything figured out. Your goals for 2020 were set, your sales playbook was locked in, and you’d even trained the team and got them operating smoothly.

How do you continue selling in the current situation? Will companies invest or scale back their sales activities? What effect do all-remote sales teams have on...

A crucial part of a live performance happens behind the scenes. The word of the stage manager, the sound crew, the costume designer, and many other roles shape what...

A long and firm handshake. This gesture is used to signify the end of a long sales process. At that moment, the prospect and the salesperson developed a solid...

The secret of successful sales and marketing alignment is simply constant, effective communication. But this can't happen when both teams speak different languages....

S is for superhero. And, S is for smarketing. The alignment of sales and marketing teams around common goals is a talent of a more earthly nature than spider-like...

It quickly became a canonical sequence in film history. In it, Mel Gibson, on a horse and with his face painted blue for battle, delivers a heartfelt, motivational...

You can only reach out to so many prospects per day. If you fail at sales prospecting, and pick the wrong ones, you’re going to be wasting your time on leads that won’t...

Sell. More. Faster. That’s the ultimate goal of any sales organization. In practice, this means round-the-clock pressure for salespeople to hit their quota, close more...

Sometimes, in our endless hustle and our striving to succeed, we get lost. We focus on the things we think matter for our short-term results, and make compromises on the...

Across industries, salespeople lose between 60 and 90 percent of their potential deals after the first contact. The reason for the big drop-off after the prospecting...

A common cause of death among salespeople and marketing professionals is death by quicksand. Figuratively speaking, of course. And by quicksand, I mean being buried by...

It's an understatement to say that there's no shortage of information on pretty much any company in the world today. However, as we all know–quality beats quantity...

In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, a canned sales pitch is more likely to lead to the person on the other side of the line hanging up on you mid-sentence...

Looking to crush your sales targets? 

One way to make your challenge easier is finally taking advantage of sales automation. Automate the repetitive and frustrating...

It’s just selling, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ve heard this question a few times after you’ve mentioned you work in business-to-business sales. Such an assumption makes your...

In sports, many teams use a playbook to chart out potential in-game scenarios, outlining the teams' strategies, tricks for avoiding common impediments, and tips for...

If you’re an angler, you might be interested to know that the newest estimates say there are about 3,5 trillion fish currently living in the world ocean. If you’re a B2B...

Sales calls where salespeople read from generic cold calling scripts convert at an abominable rate: Less than 1 percent. That means if you make 100 calls, you’ll only...

If you search for “wordplay” on Google and your humor is as bad as mine, you can easily waste a good part of your afternoon reading jokes on how a scarecrow kept getting...

In North America, Vainu has been partnering with some of the largest institutions in the commercial banking, insurance, and telecom sectors to solve the challenging task...

Salespeople and gold miners have a lot in common. No, I don’t mean the tireless ambition, the deep-rooted desire to be successful, and the unstoppable drive for precious...

The terms prospect, lead and buying signal are all well-known to B2B sales professionals, but their differences can be unclear. In part, the reason is that different CRM...

We all know that time is money, and that’s especially true for small businesses. As a matter of fact, 82 percent fail due to cash flow issues. Keep in mind: cash flow is...

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is the rising star of the B2B world. The rapid surge of marketing and sales tech has pushed forward the development and implementation of...

This blog acts as a general introduction to account scoring and offers a few ideas on how to build your very own account scoring machine. At the end of the blog, you're...

Vainu has initiated a collaboration with Telia to develop a new B2B sales solution enabling Telia to prioritize the most fruitful accounts according to available data....

A successful B2B salesperson is an expert in handling uncertainty and one needs to have a stable sales process to succeed. In this blog, we'll introduce you to an...

Many professionals say sales prospecting is the most challenging step in the entire sales process. It requires crazy good research skills to find not only the prospects...

Customers come in all shapes and sizes. The type of company data you look at and the methods you use to make sense of it should depend on the nature of your business and...

Often when we talk about sales prospecting we talk about outbound sales prospecting. This is the process of finding new companies that match your ideal customer profile,...

Networked society has given buyers easy access to more information about endless solutions and purchasing alternatives. Most B2B sales professionals think this...

In this article, we’ll dig deeper into types of company data and analytics. We'll also look at why company data is valuable for sales professionals and go into the...

Companies’ websites are pure treasure chests for salespeople; there are more jewels to collect than just the actionable insights from website technologies,...

Sales prospecting based on guesswork is not only tedious but also expensive. Experienced salespeople can expect to spend 7.5 hours of cold calling to get ONE qualified...

Nothing is harder to sell around than a prospect unwilling or unready to buy. A company that checks every box in your ideal customer profile doesn’t hold weight if the...

A sales rep’s productivity is easily measured by how many meaningful conversations they have in any given day. It’s possible to spend half as much time on the phone and...

Whether it’s to monitor marketing or to keep track of customers, technology in B2B sales these days cannot be escaped. The technologies that companies use leave digital...

You probably haven’t missed the term sales intelligence. But just because most people have heard about it doesn’t mean that most sales professionals use enough sales...

Knowing you are focusing sales and marketing resources on the right companies isn’t all that easy, but one thing is certain: You can’t know if you haven’t defined a...

The qualifying acronym BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing) that IBM revolutionized sales with over ten years ago has fallen out of favor recently. A significant...

We have been fortunate to have lot of success in Vainu when it comes to sales prospecting, thanks to our own prospecting platform. Our B2B sales teams are able to...

For most companies, there are millions of sales prospects available. For decades, salespeople have struggled to prioritize certain prospects over others.

Fortunately,...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to a machine that can complete a task in a smart way, one that was previously performed by humans, and which needed human...

Are you still sales prospecting with static prospecting lists from one of the many list providers out there? If you answered yes, it’s seriously time to step up your...

In competitive and growing industries — like in the software as a service (SaaS) market — it can be nice to benchmark yourself and review high level trends to determine...

Scaling has probably been one of the most rewarding – but also challenging – things I’ve had to do as the co-founder of Vainu. While the rush of bringing on ambitious...

Are you one of those sales reps that spend only one-third of your day actually selling? Does the rest of your day go to administrative tasks that could have easily been...

Nothing is harder to sell around than a prospect being unwilling or not ready to buy. A company that ticks every box in your Ideal Customer Profile doesn’t hold weight...

Every Sales Manager has seen the two sales prospecting extremes: those that spend way too much time really understanding a prospect (her favorite football team is...

As a salesperson, time is your greatest asset; make sure you spend your time wisely on the accounts that are most likely to use your services. In order to do this, you...

HubSpot published its State of Inbound 2017 business report last week. The report gives comprehensive insights to plan your future marketing and sales strategies as the...

Prospecting takes a lot of time out of a SDR’s day. Depending on the source, prospecting is estimated take up between 24 percent and 50 percent of a salesperson's time!...

Technology is eating the world. To not be on the menu next, modern B2B sales professionals have to find innovative ways to capitalize on all of the company data at their...

There are many tell-tale signs that a company's hiring needs are increasing. In this post we list 14 tried-and-tested buying signals that staffing sales professionals...

With modern technology, the question is not what you can measure, but what you benefit from measuring. Following the right metrics will help you as a sales executive...

We’ve seen tons of SaaS companies enter the EMEA market with an office in Dublin, Amsterdam or the UK. But how about the Nordics? With a digital background, widespread...

You've heard the term social selling by now, but are you entirely sure what it means? This B2B sales technique is the art of leveraging your social networks to find the...

Challenge: Staffing firms, recruitment agencies and other companies are looking for companies increasing their head count.

Today: People manually go through LinkedIn,...

All recruiters have received the following cold email:

“Hey [insert first name],

No one ever said finding new B2B sales leads is easy. It's not enough to find companies that match your Ideal Customer Profile, you also have to know when they are ready...

For years, companies have been using historical market information to obtain a detailed view of potential sales prospects. However, these insights can get skewed by...

Having a hard time finding new leads? If you haven’t already, try using the website technologies found on a company's website to go hunting for hidden gems. Prospecting...

As the invitation to a company’s housewarming party lands in your mailbox it’s already too late. The company has moved and you as a real estate agent have missed your...

While modern marketing methods are the foundation on which creative agencies are built, their sales prospecting often leave room for improvement. Inbound marketing will...

It might not be your favorite part of your job – but it’s one of the most important parts. I’m talking about prospecting. By putting effort into finding relevant...