Mikko Honkanen

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.

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 Baidu. No surprises there.

Comparatively, the Top 10 most visited websites in specific categories such as SaaS, FinTech, E-Learning, and Cryptocurrency, or the most common CMS, Analytics, and E-Commerce technologies used by the world’s most popular websites are probably less well known for most of us. However, that needn't be the case. This kind of specific information doesn’t have to be less well-known or harder to get a hold of.

In fact, we’ve recently added data concerning the 7 million most visited websites in the world to our company database, which makes it easy to get a hold of this kind of detailed website information. This dataset, combined with our proprietary industry data, allows for the effective analysis of website popularity across many different sectors. Let’s take a look.

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, AgriTech, or LegalTech?

Standard industry classification systems, such as SIC and NAICS, couldn’t give us an answer to these questions, so we did the only rational thing one can do in that situation: We built our own industry classification taxonomy. We wanted a system that was able to segment and analyze companies on a granular level, and we’ve got just that with Vainu Custom Industry.

So, how many SaaS companies are there in the world?

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 joining the conference and picked some interesting verticals and companies to keep an eye on.

And that’s another year nearly gone—time sure does fly! Just like its predecessor, 2021 probably hasn’t been what we were hoping it would be. Nonetheless, even these trying times won’t stop our annual tradition of predicting the most important sales trends of the upcoming year.

As you well know, many things have changed over the course of the year, but one thing remains the same—sales activity hasn't stopped. As has been the case for a while, creativity and resourcefulness are becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing teams to excel.

A renewed focus on the role of the salespeople and the tools and technologies that can help them do what they do best. That's the premise in which we're predicting next year's sales trends—and here they are:

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 already have an ABM orchestration platform, such as HubSpot, Demandbase, Terminus, 6Sense, Triblio, or Madison Logic, implemented.

It should go without saying, but one of the key success factors for an ABM program is the specificity of your target account lists. Ultimately, the size of your list can vary depending on your specific program. Still, it’s always a good idea to make sure that your lists include the companies that possess the highest potential value for your organization, whether that be the 10, 100, or 1,000 companies.

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 industry information as one of our search and B2B segmentation criteria. But how often do you end up with endless target lists that include companies that have nothing in common?

This post will cover how to use custom industry categories to create hyper-targeted B2B segments. In other words, you’ll learn how to sell more by selling to fewer.

Let’s get to it.👇

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 of downloaded messages and figure out if there’s anything new.

Wouldn’t make any sense, right?

And yet, that’s what you often do to find out what changed in your CRM data.

For decades, companies have employed interns, junior analysts, consultants, and data researchers to try to make sense of their CRM data and keep records up-to-date. It was—still is in many cases—a constant flow of files back and forth between systems and people. The era of FTP servers, as one might call it. Not a simple process, but it allowed data analysts spot changes in any data point. For salespeople, such analysis is critical because it helps discover new sales opportunities.

We’re well into the 21st century, so yes, there’s a better way. Let’s take a look at one easy way to keep track of changes in your CRM data, and do it without exporting and importing files.

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 straightforward. ABM concentrates most resources on the highest-value prospective customers possible, using highly targeted, personalized campaigns to win over particular accounts.

As attractive as it sounds, ABM might not be worth your time without the right setup. And, that includes heavy reliance on data. In this article, we’re going to see how you can segment your target audience and create small account clusters so you can drive sales with targeted marketing.

Let’s get into it.

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, systematic method for coding and organizing library materials so people can find its books quickly and easily.

Successful business-to-business sales and marketing activities also require a methodical classification of accounts and the decision-makers within those accounts. When you group companies according to specific attributes, you can uncover unique ways to identify the particular needs of each group. You’ll serve each group of companies better.