Finding Insights About My Prospects

Let’s cut to the chase – you’re here because you’ve been Googling ‘Finding insights about my prospects’. 

You’re not alone. 42% of salespeople say that they don’t have enough information before making a call. When you’re reaching out to tens or even hundreds of prospects a day, finding out what makes each person tick can be a daunting prospect. 

That said, it’s also really important to equip yourself with as much knowledge as possible. Without the right insights, you’re going to struggle to connect with prospects effectively. Scheduling some research into your (already packed) calendar may seem like a hindrance, but ultimately it’s going to save you time later down the line. Instead of slogging through each sale, you’ll be closing more deals, using fewer resources and scaling your processes. Sounds pretty good, right? 

The best bit (don’t say we don’t treat you) is that finding insights about prospects doesn’t even have to be that difficult or time-consuming. And we’re going to walk you through the process step-by-step: 

• Why Knowing Your Prospects Matters
• Key Insights to Gather About Prospects
• Where and How to Gather Insights
• How to Use Prospect Insights Effectively
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track

Any questions? No? Let’s get going.

Why Knowing Your Prospects Matters

Knowing your prospects speeds up your sales processes, sure. But more importantly, it means you can be confident that every deal you chase is the right deal – for you, and for your prospects. 

Selling products to the people who actually need them is the key to efficient, scalable sales – but with 50% of current prospects not being right for the offering, it’s clear that not every sales rep gets this right. If you’re selling a product to someone who doesn’t need it, you’re just setting yourself up for a long, difficult sales process, failure to close a deal or churn later down the line. That’s a lot of time wasted – time that could have been spent going after people who are a better fit.

Hopefully you’re sold (sorry) already but, just to hammer our point home, if you know your prospects and sell to the right people you’ll experience: 

Higher Close Rates

Knowing your prospect’s specific pain points allows you to offer a solution that truly resonates with them, which increases your chances of closing the deal.  

Let’s take an example. Say you have a prospect and you can send one of two emails to them. The first email’s subject line says something generic like ‘FIRST NAME, free for a chat?’ The second says something like ‘FIRST NAME, want to solve INDUSTRY PAIN POINT’? 

Both these subject lines are personalized, which is good – personalized subject lines increase open rates by 22% – but only one of them is ultra-personalized. And that’s what’s going to get you results. This level of personalization can only be achieved by, you guessed it, understanding the recipient and what they’re struggling with. 

Efficient Sales 

When you have detailed insights about your prospects to work with, your team will only focus on the highest quality leads. 

Think about it – if you have two prospects and you know that one of them really struggles with the pain point your product solves and one of them already has a solution in place, which prospect are you going to prioritize? 

Deep insights about your prospects reduce the amount of time you’ll waste on cold or unqualified leads. And the more targeted your outreach is, the less you’ll need to follow up or persuade them to buy from you. 

Scalability & Growth 

The nice thing about closing regularly and at pace is that you’ll quickly get an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Who you should be selling to, what you should be saying, what pieces of content resonated and didn’t resonate – you’ll soon understand all this and more. You can then apply this knowledge to future sales processes. 

Using insights to target the right prospects ultimately will lead to faster business growth. Think about it like a flywheel. The more you understand, the more efficient you are and the higher your close rates. The more you scale, the more people you can speak to, the more you understand….and so on and so forth. 

Key Insights to Gather About Prospects

Now you know why it’s so important to gather insights about your prospects, and what results it should get you. But what do we actually mean when we talk about insights? Let’s take a closer look. 

Demographic Information

We’re easing you in – let’s start with the really basic stuff first. You’ll want to know your prospects’ job titles, company size, and the industry that they work in. 

You need to do this for every single person you think might have a say in the decision.  Just to make things, you know, nice and simple – your point of contact may introduce you to everyone, or you might have to figure it out for yourself. A B2B buying process has on average 7 decision-makers – so if you’re working with significantly fewer people than this, we’d recommend going away and doing some research. The last thing you want is to find out that you haven’t connected with a key stakeholder. 

Behavioral data 

Keep an eye on behavioral data (your prospects’ online behavior, in other words) and you’re basically getting an insight into what your prospects are thinking and feeling, what they’re struggling with, and so on. 

What content are they consuming? How are they engaging with your website or product information? 

47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before they even speak to a sales rep. Say a prospect of yours downloads a couple of your whitepapers – that’s a good indicator that they’re considering a conversation. Or, perhaps they’re further along in the process and you spot they’ve visited a competitor comparison page multiple times. That’s a good signal of buyer intent, as they’re clearly weighing up their options. 

Pain Points and Challenges 

This is last on our non-comprehensive list – but it’s definitely not the least important. Understand your prospects’ pain points and challenges, and you’re gaining valuable information on how to start a conversation with them. As a sales professional, you want to make sure you’re positioning yourself as a trusted advisor who wants to help – and you can’t do that better than showing you understand their pain and (gasp!) have the solution. 

A quick note: you’ll get a good sense of common pain points and challenges pretty quickly – but remember that each individual’s experience will be different. Understand exactly what they’re trying to solve, and you’ll be able to make sure your solution is the best fit.

Next up on our ultimate guide to finding insights about your prospects – where to find them.

Where and How to Gather Insights

No need to get your magnifying glass out – if you know where to look, you can find prospect insights in loads of different places.

Social Media 

As a B2B salesperson, LinkedIn is going to be your first port of call. Have a peek at your prospects’ profiles to find out professional insights (like if they recently got promoted) and track activity (for example, if they’ve joined in a conversation about a piece of industry news). 

Make sure your own profile’s in shape and you’re interacting with your prospects, too. After all, 84% of top-level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions – this isn’t an opportunity to sleep on.

LinkedIn can go a very long way when it comes to insights – not only the insight you get from your timeline, from the conversations you have in LinkedIn messages, and what you can find on their profiles – LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a treasure trove of B2B data, and data leads to insight.

Website Analytics and CRM Data 

We touched on this briefly above – but it’s such a good source of insights about your prospects that it’s worth repeating. Track interactions with your website (like visits to your pricing page or downloads of a report, for example) to figure out where to angle your next interaction from. For example, if your business has a report all about a problem in your industry and your prospect downloads it, you could ask them if they have any questions or add in some further insight. 

Onto your CRM: this should, as a given, be tracking every prospect interaction. That’s emails, calls, social media interactions – you name it, it should be on there. Having a complete picture = knowing everything you can = understanding how best to move the conversation forward. 

Lead Enrichment Tools 

Lead enrichment tools aren’t something to shy away from. They’re your key to even deeper insights, such as: 

Firmographics: in other words, details about the company they work for like size, headcount or revenue. 

Real-time market data: has a new piece of legislation passed that’s going to change the way the industry works? Is the space generating a lot of media and investor interest? 

Competitor insights: don’t shy away from these – if your prospect’s using one of yours, you should understand how to approach the conversation (if you know this tool has a weak spot, for example) and have a sense of what’s important to them. 

If you’d like a recommendation for a lead enrichment tool, have three! Surfe *ahem* is a killer tool for your arsenal. Use it for firmographic insights about the companies you’re targeting, see who’s working for them, and find their contact details in just a few clicks. 90% of companies use two or more lead enrichment tools – but you really could get away with just using Surfe (it’s that good!). 

We also like Uplead and Clearbit, which bulk out your contact list with data points upon data points (for example, seniority, department and team) to support your messaging.

How to Use Prospect Insights Effectively

By now, you should have a pretty solid grip on what useful insights about your prospects are and how to find them. 

Give yourself a pat on the back for getting this far – but we’re not done yet. What kind of sales business would we be if we didn’t tell you how to actually use them?! 

Personalized Outreach

Say goodbye to snore-worthy outreach peddling the same old message over and over again. Use your new insights to craft emails, calls and marketing materials that, yes, mention them by name, but also directly address pain points and business needs. 

Tip: if, during your research, you find that you have a mutual connection with the person you’re trying to reach out to, be sure to use them. Emails mentioning a referral have a boosted response rate of (drumroll please) 536%. Far too good to miss out on. 

Timely Engagement 

All these deep insights and personalization should, if you’re doing it right, lead to a response from your prospects. When this happens, make sure you jump on it straight away. We can’t stress this enough: companies that respond within an hour are seven times more likely to engage meaningfully with decision-makers. 

Lead Nurture 

You don’t want to bug your leads, but you also need to make sure that you’re staying top-of-mind (or, at the very least, near the top of their mind. Engage prospects with content, calls and social outreach. When the time comes for them to explore solutions, they’re going to think of you. This is a fact: nurtured leads generate 50% more sales-ready prospects at a 33% lower cost.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track 

As you can see, there’s so, so much you can do with good insights about your prospects. So much, in fact, that it can be a little difficult to figure out what’s working and what’s not working. That’s exactly where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come in: 

Lead Response Time: this is basically how quickly you manage to come back to a lead – whether it’s over social, email or on the phone. Remember: response time is critical in conversion rates. 

Email Open and Response Rates: these metrics will tell you how your email personalization is going. Higher rates indicate you’re on the right track – if they’re on the lower side, you might want to check in and see if you can find new or deeper insights to work with. 

Lead Qualification Rate: how many of your leads make it to qualification after you’ve gained insights on them? Keep this in shape, and you’re making sure that you have quality prospects entering your pipeline from the get-go. 

Conversion Rate: this is how many of the leads who receive your expertly tailored outreach become customers. High conversion rate means you’re killing it, and vice versa. 

Let’s Wrap It Up!

We hope that gave you a well-rounded insight into what it takes to find insights about your prospects (woah, that went a bit meta). 

Be specific about what you want to find out, use select tools and sources to help you, make sure you’re applying them in the right way and keep track of what is and isn’t working, and you’ll soon be on the way to sales success. Just don’t forget about us when somebody asks you how you’re so efficient and why you’re scaling so fast, ok? 

 

FAQs About Finding Insights About My Prospects 

How Do You Gather Prospect Information? 

You can gather prospect information by taking a look at LinkedIn. As a B2B sales professional, it’s going to be your best insight into their recent activity and professional background. Your website analytics and CRM data should be your next port of call – these are valuable sources of buyer intent data and may also indicate what your prospect is most interested in. Lead enrichment tools are another huge help. Use them to find out firmographic data, real-time market data, and competitor insights too. 

How To Research Your Prospects? 

One way to research your prospects is to focus on gathering information under these three categories: demographic information, behavioral data, and pain points and challenges. This methodical approach allows you to gain a well-rounded understanding of your prospects and informs you how to direct the conversation. 

How Do I Find the Perfect Prospect? 

You can find the perfect prospect using Surfe. Its clever ‘Company Lookalikes’ tool allows you to find new businesses that share traits with your favorite clients. From there, you can find out who works there and pull their contact details in just a few clicks.