Mikko Honkanen

With the end of the year approaching, we’re continuing tradition and predicting the coming year’s most important trends affecting B2B sales.

The past decade has treated B2B sales well. Nowadays, sales leadership is commonly a part of the company’s management team and a focus area in the company’s strategy. Universities have introduced sales courses in their curriculum, and talented salespeople are entering the job market more than ever before. It seems sales is doing better and taken more seriously than ever before.

This is the starting point in which we’re predicting next year’s trends—and here they are:

A company’s industry, number of employees or location doesn’t reveal much about its needs and interests. This type of company information is often referred to as firmographics. It 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 forefront you combine firmographics, technographics (data showing a company’s online profile and technical tool-box, etc.) and insights from buying signals when sales prospecting.

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

Fortunately, modern technology makes it easier than ever before to master sales prospecting. Though it’s taken a long time to reach the point we’re at today, we are now at a point where predictive and prescriptive lead scoring technology can recommend the right companies for you to reach out to, the right time to approach these companies and the right way to get in touch with them.

This article is the first chapter in our ebook: The Ultimate 60-Page Guide to Sales Prospecting. Here we take a look in the rear-view mirror and review the history of B2B sales prospecting.

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 new team members or opening offices in new countries never gets old, getting to the point where our organization had a process in place for how to scale has been, admittedly, a challenge at times.

Perhaps what is the most important thing to do — and what takes the most precision — is finding that right mix of the right people to help accelerate your company’s growth and carry your vision forward.

The Internet — it is the Wild Wild West of information. As anyone who has spent time on the Internet knowns, there are statements delivered as facts that circle the World Wide Web all the time that contain no real facts behind them. People get suckered into believing these statements all the time. We’re all guilty of it.

Over the past year, my colleagues and I have noticed a number of myths present in B2B sales and marketing discussions. Some of them are spread across LinkedIn, others on blog posts. Here are some common B2B sales myths that many people believe in. These are myths that have been pushed by experts in the field and I’d like to analyze them more closely.

All recruiters have received the following cold email:

“Hey [insert first name],

Staffing is one of the most competitive industries in many parts of the world. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 20,000 agencies competing on 16 million hiring assignments.

At Vainu we are building the world's most modern company database. All companies' digital footprint is growing fast thanks to many macro trends such as digital communications, social media, big data technology and open APIs provided by governments and other data collectors. Our customers use our Vainu platform on a daily basis to find better leads, to understand their customers better and to find new types of company insights.

When people ask me what I do, I often struggle to form a coherent and brief enough answer. The phrases “I’m in sales” or “I work at this Finnish startup Vainu” just don’t seem to cut it. What I’d love to do is give an in-depth presentation, introduce all the team members and present the newest features in the software. Apologies to all my friends whose dinner parties and afternoon coffee table discussions I’ve hijacked.

This week Helsinki is the focal point for the global startup community. Slush, the leading Nordic startup event, brings more than 1700 startups and 15.000 attendees together in Helsinki.