IN THIS CHAPTER

Finding reliable and consistent sources of leads

Looking beyond the obvious

As a new business salesperson, one of the key challenges you face is finding consistent and reliable prospecting data. You can’t just wait around for leads to drop into your lap; you have to proactively search for new potential opportunities.

On the other hand, you don’t want to go rushing around like a headless chicken. You need a structured workflow, and you need to be able to keep the early stages of your pipeline filled up. In this chapter, I look at some of the best resources for discovering potential opportunities. Some of these are specific to the United Kingdom and so are useful to those selling into or working in the U.K., although most other countries have similar resources geared toward them. (Note: In putting together some of these resources, I left out the most obvious starting point of Google as I assume that everyone already knows about it and uses it extensively.)

For a full introduction to prospecting, see Chapter 9.

Keep in mind that you won’t be the only one looking for prospecting data. Assume that your competitors can also see information that’s in the public domain, so try to look beyond the obvious sources and give yourself an advantage.

External suppliers will no doubt offer you chances to get all sorts of prospect data as soon as they get hold of your details. I must get at least four or five emails every week with “offers I can’t refuse” on data, and on occasions I’ve subscribed and bought lists only to find in the vast majority of cases that the data isn’t especially complete, accurate, or useful to me. Before committing to buy new data, ask the supplier to send you a random sample and check out the accuracy for yourself. It’s easy to do a few Google searches and website checks to verify the accuracy of the information. Generally, I find it much more valuable to stick to known and trusted data sources.

Insider Media

Insider Media (www.insidermedia.com) is a U.K.-based business-to-business media company that specializes in providing daily news digests as well as selling lists of data. This daily news digest is an invaluable prospecting resource because it provides timely data that has always proved accurate to me and saves countless hours of scanning dozens of publications myself.

Insider Media is one of the main sources of prospecting data that I personally rely on for solid U.K. business-to-business information. It forms a big part of my daily workflow and feeds a number of potential leads into my line of sight on a daily basis.

Individual stories may highlight new business opportunities by using a bit of lateral thinking; for example, a story may highlight a merger, a new product launch, or personnel changes, all of which are classic signs of a pending change that new business salespeople need to know about and take advantage of. Information can be summarized into your CRM for future use, or it may trigger immediate sales action, depending on the article.

Figure 23-1 shows some news stories from a selected region. The publication produces digests on different regions of the country, allowing you to be selective in your requirements. This figure highlights some potentially interesting news items, including one that shows that a company has secured some significant funding.

You can subscribe to daily digests on different geographical regions. The digests tend to arrive in my inbox by the time I reach my desk in the mornings.

Local Business Publications

Local business publications are available all over the world and provide some great prospecting resources. Figure 23-2 is a good example that highlights a number of opportunities that would be worth further investigation.

A Google search for “local business publications” is the ideal starting point, and you can then narrow your search to include more specific terms, such as the industry that you’re researching. After you identify publications, you can then read both articles and advertisements to try to identify potential prospects to feed into the early stages of your sales funnel. I find that ads are a really good source of prospects, especially because a company that’s advertising is actively engaged in doing something.

You may need to look at local business publications across a wide range of areas to cover your target geographic market, and not just the publications geographically close to you. Depending on the size of your target prospects, you may find that this is one of the best sources of data available to you because many organizations like to see themselves covered in the business press but are often considered to be too small or not noteworthy enough to warrant national coverage. For these businesses, local press is among its target audiences for press releases and stories, and if you’re able to pick up on these they can offer some valuable information to you.

Many local publications are available with online access, although the online versions don’t always carry advertisements, which are another source of prospecting data.

Many publications will be happy to send copies directly to you if you’re out of their distribution area, generally at no cost if you just ask them.

Lists from “The Sunday Times”

Although they are specific to the United Kingdom, The Sunday Times lists are amongst the first places I look when I want to target fast-growing companies or sector leaders. This publication produces many different types of lists at various stages of each year. Some examples include

• Best 100 companies to work for
• Best 25 big companies
• Top companies by revenue
• Fastest-growing companies

Although the data is U.K.-specific, these lists offer a great way for new business salespeople to target the U.K. market irrespective of where they’re physically based. All the lists are available on the Internet and not just in the printed publication. (Head to www.thetimes.co.uk to get started.) Other countries have similar data available; just do a search for quality newspapers and you may be surprised at what you find. In the United States, try looking at Forbes (www.forbes.com) as a great starting point.

Figure 23-3 shows the typical type of information found by using this resource. As you see, this provides a useful summary of current activity as well as financial information.

New Local Business Lists

Many media organizations publish data on new businesses setting up in or moving to their area, and these can offer a valuable data source as anything new can represent opportunity to a new business salesperson. A good way of locating this type of data is to source lists from your local telecommunication company on new business telephone lines being installed, or you can look at local business publications as companies on the move are super keen on attracting publicity. Dun and Bradstreet is a good source for this type of data, too; check out www.dnb.co.uk in the U.K. and www.dnb.com in North America.

You can subscribe to regular updates and set up alerts for anything that acts as a trigger for you. Be a little cautious here, however, because as I highlight at the start of this chapter, your competitors have access to the same data.

Figure 23-4 shows an example of this type of listing (from www.brandnewbusinesses.com), showing a record count and offering the chance to delve deeper into the data.

Often, local business lists like this provide an update option where you can choose to have copies of all new entries sent to you weekly or monthly on a subscription basis. If you can locate a good source and check the reliability of the data as I cover at the start of this chapter, then consider subscribing to one of these information sources.

Industry Publications

Just about every industry that you can think of now has a myriad of journals and other publications focused on it, and these provide two different prospecting resource opportunities:

• Editorials and articles: Editorials and articles give you insight as well as raw data and often contain names and job titles of key decision makers who can sometimes be difficult to get hold of.
• Advertisements: Ads are obviously intended to attract inbound prospects for the advertiser, but they’re also a good indicator of a company being active, potentially growing and potentially having needs that you have a solution for. They’re a valuable source of prospecting data.

Check to see whether your business has back copies of industry publications so you can see the titles available and arrange to subscribe to the most relevant ones.

Subscriptions can be expensive, so you make sure you’ll get the right type of information before you make a subscription commitment. A good way to do this is to phone the publication and say that you work in that industry and are considering a subscription, and then ask for a back issue so that you can understand the type of content and make a decision on the benefits of subscribing. I’ve done that myself many times and have never had that type of request turned down. Remember, you’re a prospect to the publication!

Chambers of Commerce

Your local chamber of commerce can be a great source of prospecting data if you’re looking for local contacts, and don’t be afraid to contact a chamber from much further away as part of its remit is to help people like you. (Just perform an online search with the name of a town or city plus “chamber of commerce” to find the group you need.)

Membership lists, journals, lists of exhibitors, and visitors to events are among the types of information you can expect to find from a chamber of commerce. If you dig a little deeper, you’ll often find offers of help in locating the type of information that you’re looking for. In Chapter 17, I cover networking as a prospecting tool, and events sponsored and hosted by a chamber of commerce are a good source of networking data, too.

Becoming known within your local chamber of commerce can also result in prospecting information being sent to you without prompting, so getting to know your local chamber is worth the time.

Highly Specialized Researchers

If your particular prospecting need is very specialized, then sometimes the best solution is to contract with a specialized researcher, brief him on your requirements, and then leave him to use professional prospecting and research tools to provide you with prospect lists. This tends to be a rather expensive option because outsourcing to specialists always is, but if time is paramount or if you just don’t have the necessary skills available to you, then it may be an option worth exploring.

Any outsourcing supplier is likely to begin with exactly the same resources that you have, so consider telling him in your briefing that you want him to ignore the more obvious data sources and to concentrate on information that’s more difficult to access to maximize your value for money.

A good starting point for finding specialized researchers is www.fiverr.com, but select with care and check references, and before you commit to anything on a large scale, do a smaller test batch first.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) has become the favorite business networking tool and for good reason, because literally millions of businesspeople have created LinkedIn profiles. I find that it’s rather limiting as a stand-alone prospecting tool, but when you use it in combination with some of the other resources that I outline in this chapter, it delivers excellent results.

LinkedIn is especially useful in two situations:

• When you know the company that you want to target but are looking for names and job titles
• When you want to find people similar to a contact that you already have

LinkedIn often changes the ways that you can search for information, but the general search bar is a good starting point, with a search as simple as “vice president finance U.K.” returning lots of hits for you to explore in detail.

Facebook

It seems like the entire world is on Facebook (www.facebook.com), but Facebook business pages can provide a new business salesperson with some very valuable data, including both company and people information.

Facebook now includes what it rather grandly refers to as graphical search. This isn’t a search using graphics as might be suggested by the name but rather a very powerful natural language search capability that can help you locate really useful information. Figure 23-5 demonstrates the use of graphical search in finding information that can feed into your prospecting file. Try typing a natural language search command in the search bar and see what you get (for example, “VP sales in greater New York area”).

An Existing Company Database

Perhaps the greatest of all the prospecting resources available to you, and one that is all too often overlooked, is your existing database or CRM system (which I introduce in Chapter 9). This really should be an absolute goldmine of prospecting data and detailed research information.

Get to know how your system works and push it to its limits in terms of reporting options and selections to see what you can discover. I guarantee that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the findings and some of the prospecting information that has been hiding in plain sight.