In Business-to-Business Sales, Contact Intelligence Is Vital

If you know your customers’ daily challenges, you can easily explain how you can help them, whether that’s with a product or ad inventory. Most sellers, when they find a business opportunity, lead with email outreach. But a one-size-fits-all approach might not be the best way to identify the best way to reach the most valuable opportunities.

What can you do with a name and a business email address?

There’s a ton of information you can find out about your prospects if you can get a business email address for them. At the very least you’re going to have their company name and website URL. Once you visit that URL you will probably get a sense of what your prospect’s business is and how you might help them achieve their goals.

Everyone email in a company’s business email address directory will tend to follow the same format, too, so once you know one person in an organization, it’s not very difficult to extrapolate that out over the people in the organization you want to reach.

Usually you’ll be looking at some combination of first name (or initial) and their last name (with or without a dot separator). Some companies limit their name-side of the email address to a specific number of characters so there might be some truncation involved, but you don’t have to be Wikileaks to figure out the pattern. This knowledge is particularly useful if you’ve heard about a promotion or new hire in your target organization and want to get on their radar before anyone else.

Unlock their social media accounts

Business email addresses will also help you find the company on LinkedIn, and from there you can find all the employees who work there and begin connecting with them. Maybe not all of them, but you get the idea.

With a name – and a LinkedIn profile picture – you can also find your target’s Twitter account. If your goal is to get to know your prospects, these accounts are plenty. Trying to approach them on Facebook is probably taking your profile-building a little too far

Learning what your target prospect likes to post on LinkedIn and Twitter will give you an idea of what’s important to them. More importantly, their content might give indicators of what practices they value and which they consider a professional no-no.

No crystal ball needed

Everyone has a different communication style. If you understand what kind of communication your prospects are most likely to respond to, you can tailor your messaging to get the response you want. CrystalKnows is a tool that hands you that information. Using the DISC personality profile system, CrystalKnows can tell you if your prospects like brief to-the-point emails or longer messages; whether they’re likely to be very direct with you or if they’ll give you information and expect you to connect the dots; and if they’re likely to get testy with you if you’re a few minutes late for a meeting. It can even tell you if they prefer email, phone calls, or face to face meetings.

So where can you get a list of names and business contact email addresses? In the Mirren/RSW New Business Tools report for agencies, Winmo was voted the most accurate, most reliable and most preferred tool for business intelligence.

Start a no-strings Winmo trial today.