Social Media Fuels Paradigm Shift in B2B Prospecting
Table of Contents
The recent times have witnessed a paradigm shift in B2B prospecting methods. Gone are the days where business development professionals would make a few hundred calls in a week and end up in striking a conversation with just 3 or 4 prospects. B2B prospecting now is no longer “just” demographic based. It is now more of “activity or persona based“.
With the growing influence of social media, it is imperative for business development professionals to realize that there are multiple data points available about your prospect. The catch here is to use these data points effectively and transform them into opportunities. This means you need to understand your prospects in totality even before you contact them.
Where to Find Data Points?
LinkedIn – It is needless to say that LinkedIn is one of the most valuable resources to find your target prospects. You have access to information about their professional profile, their achievements, and what they are looking for – new vendors, solution to specific problems, feedback or reviews, partnership invitations and so on. You can also investigate the groups that your prospects are a part of and examine their activities – what kind of discussions are they usually part of, what questions/ comments get posted by them in these discussions, how active are they in these discussions. Such things give you a good starting point for a conversation with your prospects.
Blogs – You need to take time and see the kind of blogs your prospects author or be a part of. That should give you a fair idea of what they are probably in need of. For all that you know they are waiting for you to go to them and tell them you can solve their problem
Videos – YouTube is another platform where you can find information about your prospects. Look at their videos, try and analyze what their business is all about. Once you understand, send them a video or collateral that you think can help them achieve their business objectives.
Industry News – Subscribe yourself to the industry news. Keep abreast of the market happening, trends and forecasts. You may suddenly find news items those talks about a change in management or inclusion of a new offering in your prospect’s company. Use this at a start point to kick start a dialogue with them.
Twitter- One of the biggest advantage of Twitter is you know when your prospect is available for a quick chat. If you see a tweet from your prospect, it is the time you should quickly tweet back. You are sure to remain on your prospect’s fresh memory.
How to Prospect Better?
Let me also give you some quick points on how you can prospect better
- Emphasize on quality. There is no point in making 100 calls and ending the day without a single success. Instead make fewer targeted and well researched calls and succeed. You need to spend the rest of time researching your prospect.
To know more read my blog on prospect research - Don’t stop at title based or location based searches. Go one step further and do an activity based prospecting.
- Create multiple small clusters instead of one large cluster and tailor- make the message for each cluster
- Leverage Social media effectively to start conversations. Continue the dialogue on their business emails.
To know more about this, read my blog about B2B prospecting on LinkedIn
How eMail-Prospector Pro helps you in B2B Prospecting?
eMail-Prospector Pro gives you all the above talking points pertaining to your prospects. You can find information about your prospects’ social / web presence, patents, awards, news items, press releases and many more. The flagship feature of this tool is it can get you the business email address and phone number in a single click. In case you have a list of prospect companies that you want to target, our tool can get you the complete company profile and also the decision makers within these companies.
