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 salespeople will generally be looking for something specific, targeting companies based on certain characteristics.
In our experience as a company data provider that has helped hundreds of sales organizations find more and better leads, we’ve found that there are three company characteristics that pretty much every salesperson will refer to when describing what they’re looking at when prospecting. They probably won’t come as a surprise to you, but those company characteristics are:
- Location
- Industry
- Company size
Now, there’s nothing wrong with these data points—they’re tried and tested data points. That said, their popularity isn’t necessarily only due to them being meaningful characteristics to focus on. It may also in part be because they have been the most readily available data points historically. The reason for their widespread availability is that many countries have a local authority that collects this sort of basic company information when a company is registered.