Your Customers Darkest Secrets

As sales and marketing professionals we all dream about getting that inside line on a prospect; “Bloggs and Co are changing suppliers and Mr Smith is in charge of finding a new one” But how often does information like that drop into your lap?

The answer is rarely if ever. However that doesn’t mean the information isn’t out there; it just means that you have to go find it!

Gaining business intelligence on your target market is vital to developing and growing your business. It’s the foundation to everything you do; building propositions, marketing plans, Sales Campaigns and ultimately a solid growth trajectory.

But how do you go about getting that kind of valuable insight? Over the years we’ve run thousands of profiling campaigns for our clients and have found that by using a combination of internet and telephone based research we can dig up just about anything about a prospect from behaviours and business strategies to procurement processes and key decision makers.

With more and more businesses opting for intelligence led targeted campaigns can you really afford not to find out more about your prospects?

Which Information to collect?

Profiling is a detailed form of market research and to be effective should concentrate on finding out specific details about known prospects. The first thing to decide is what is the most important information for you to collect? Ultimately it depend on your objectives and specific industry pressures however we typically find that the following headings are a good place to star:

Company Contact Details

Key Contacts – CEO, CMO, IT, Finance

Organisational Structure

Financial Highlights

Business Strategy and Culture

Procurement Process

Current Suppliers

Partnerships and Group Relationships

Understand Structures

Today’s organisations consist of a mixture of traditional management hierarchies, modern horizontal or matrix management structures and complex company to company relationships. This results in increasingly diverse and disparate decision making units and demand drivers, even to the point where two similar companies have radically different operational structures.

It is important to understand this principle and approach each organisation with a fresh sheet of paper so that you can capture its unique structure and how that effects its purchasing cycles.

Primary vs Secondary

In this digital age profiling should always be a combination of web based research and actual calling. One thing is certain however; you will not get all the information you need just from the web.

That being said; get as much information as possible from the web using a combination of google, Linked In, Facebook, Twitter and the prospects own website. Don’t forget to check out the prospects blogs and news pages to find out about any recent deals, partnerships or initiatives.

Hit the Phones

As with all cold calling and telemarking actives you find that some businesses will not disclose the information that you need however the majority will be obliging providing your questions are reasonable and don’t take up to much of their time.

Be calm and be persistent, if a receptionist won’t give you the details you need give it a few days and try again slightly altering your approach, if you’re lucky someone else may answer the phone!

Don’t leave any stone unturned. Decision making units, opportunities and command structures can be uncovered in all aspects of a business sometimes finding the right PA can be more powerful than getting the CEOs email address. By establishing a decision maker’s level of autonomy along with any interaction or common points of decision making you can find the synergies within a business that can be exploited when pitching your product or service.

If carried out in an open and constructive way by someone with a sales disposition a good profiling campaign can be a doubled edged sword and provide you with not only in depth market intelligence but also valuable leads.

Consolidate and Act…Fast!

However don’t forget this data has a limited life time and will change quicker than you think therefore acting on it quickly is imperative. One method to ensure an agile approach is to feed any important information from the profiling exercise to the sales or business development team as it is gathered. This will allow immediate action on any opportunities or intelligence that has been uncovered. Having a quality cloud based CRM such as Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics to capture and share your profiled data increases the efficiency of this process.

Detailed Picture

By taking a structured approach to capturing the right data in the right way you can end up with a detailed picture of your key prospects. Don’t forget that although the web is a good starting place that the majority of your desired information will be not be visible on the surface and that it will take a conversation with a few humans to find out what you need!

Having this level of detailed intelligence allows you to specifically target key prospects using information that is isn’t widely available. This will give you the advantage when it comes to both the timing and positioning of your proposition.

In a world so full of data and information where clients are more clued up than ever it will take that little bit of extra effort to stay ahead of the competition.

To read the full article on Prospect Profiling click on the link. We'd love your feedback on this or any of our artilces please leave a comment or let us know via twitter @GCLDirect