How to Build High-Quality Prospect Data?

Author: Bryan Scott(Amarjit)

For profitable and quicker ROIs, you need premium prospect data by your side. Both your sales and marketing teams can leverage prospect data to reach potential customers – for effective and quick lead generation efforts. But do not fill your sales pipeline with more prospects than necessary or you can strain your marketing budget.

Think about it – when you have more prospects in your sales pipeline who do not fit your ideal customer profile, you only waste sales time and resources. However, when your sales pipeline is full of qualified, well-vetted prospects, you are rewarded with faster conversions and a shorter sales cycle.

With an excellent prospect database, you can:

• Create highly personalized campaigns
• Boost customer service
• Acquire new customers
• Append data to access other data fields
• Use effective tactics for profitable returns

Who is a Prospect?

A prospect is a potential customer who has demonstrated that they are preparing to buy your products or services via two-way communication. Prospects fit your ideal customer profile, have the means to purchase your products or services, and are authorized to make the final purchase decisions.

However, many confuse prospects with leads and often use the terms interchangeably. But prospects are different than leads – they are as similar as apples and oranges.

Lead Vs Prospect

A lead is someone who has provided contact information and opened a business opportunity. However, not all leads become prospects and buy your solutions. Unlike prospects, leads only present potential sales opportunities. They are not “prepared buyers”.

Even if someone has shown interest, they may or may not buy your solutions and become customers. In the sales process, your first score leads then nurture them to become prospects. Finally, you move the qualified prospects through the sales funnel. But to make sure the sales process is smooth; you need high-quality prospect data by your side.

A prospect database can provide you with useful contact information and relevant data fields about your ideal prospects. You can easily store, manage, and retrieve prospect data for various sales process criteria. Moreover, a high-quality prospect database supports better segmentation for easy targeting.

Want to build a killer prospect database? Use these tips to make a start.

Define Your Ideal Prospect

You should start your sales process by defining your ideal customer to streamline your marketing efforts – know what solutions to offer, when to offer, and how to price them. The challenge? How to define.

Begin by analyzing your best customer profiles. Use them to segment your customer database and find the characteristics and factors that define your ideal prospect. Take clues from your customer feedback to understand the major pain points. Ask questions like:

• What attracted them to buy your solutions?
• What factors influence their purchasing decisions?

Refine the data you have collected to create an ideal customer profile. But at the same time, make sure to be flexible. You can review and appraise your ideal prospect profile based on current industry trends and change your marketing tactics accordingly.

Additional Read: Build a Winning Email Marketing Strategy

Invest in an Effective CRM System

A CRM system is one of the most effective tools for customer acquisition and retention. Use CRM software to store useful customer information – from their buying behavior to pain points. CRM can also help you find new business opportunities with valuable data insights, for both sales and marketing.

Moreover, since CRM is a centralized service, your teams can easily access customer information anywhere, anytime. This allows your teams to work in an organized and collaborative manner. You can easily access relevant information about both old and new customers to create personalized marketing messages for better ROIs.

Avoid Irrelevant Information

From a sales standpoint, not all data fields are important. You must collect relevant information only for enhanced business opportunities. Keep away from irrelevant data to avoid waste of time and effort. Find out which information is useful by working with your sales team. Use data analytics to sort and segment valuable information to identify the best prospects.

Focus on conversation starters – information your sales team can rely on to make compelling sales pitches. For instance, collect information about which products your prospect has shown interest in or their recent business activities. Your sales team can leverage such information for sales calls and communicate in a more “personal” way.

Get Social Online

In 2020, social media is the easiest way to corner B2B success. Know the pain points, interests, and needs of your B2B customers by connecting with them online. Identify and track how your ideal prospects engage with your content or social media channels on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Your sales team can also leverage social selling to directly interact with qualified prospects over social media networks and initiate sales cycles faster. Harness social selling to connect with your ideal prospects using relevant content.

Through social selling, you can enjoy benefits such as:

• Reduced sales cycles
• Enhanced brand visibility
• Higher brand recall value
• New business opportunities
• Foster brand loyalty

Additionally, you can use your prospects’ social media activity to collect raw information and insights. Leverage social media data intelligence to reach and connect with your prospective customers, without incurring any extra costs.

Additional Read: 10 Top Tech Companies In The World: Redefining The Industry

Update Your Database Frequently

Data becomes obsolete quickly, which is why you need to update it frequently – especially since the success of your sales efforts depends on the accuracy of your prospect data. Keep your prospect data free of errors and duplicities by performing routine cleansing drives. Make sure to replace obsolete, missing, and stale data fields with updated information.

In addition, you can use the following tips:

• Segment your database for better organization
• Invest in a good marketing automation tool
• Leverage third-party data appending and enrichment services
• Keep mandatory data fields to improve database uniformity

Use a CRM system, marketing automation software, and lead management software to maintain the accuracy and quality of your prospect database. You can also clean and update the data manually for maximum relevancy.

To meet your revenue goals quickly, you need to back your marketing and sales efforts with high-quality prospect data. Build a premier prospect database and leverage relevant information to identify, connect, and engage with your ideal customer profiles and drive higher sales.