B2B sales are made more difficult because there is so much opportunity; sales teams find it hard to focus their energies, they can end up spread too thinly and don’t maximise their potential.
Smart B2B sales teams use data to power their sales operation.
Data is the gas that propels sales teams forward, harnessing energy in the right areas and equipping sales reps with the tools to close deals.
Most businesses deploy an outbound marketing function that pursues a large number of sales avenues. It is an easy trap to fall into – there are too many prospects to chase and sales teams want to go after anything that looks promising.
While it may make sense to start broadly and try out different markets, for most teams zeroing in on the best client type is essential.
It’s incredible how many different user cases we have for Red Flag Alert driving B2B sales growth. From financial services to insurance and energy, the data garnered by our B2B prospecting tool can be applied in any sector to drive B2B sales.
You can read about how we help energy brokers and insurance companies on our website. In this article we’re going to show you how Red Flag Alert can work in many niches. As an experiment, we put 100 business types and 25 sectors into a hat and pulled two out at random – the task was to quickly demonstrate how two business types in one sector could benefit from Red Flag Alert.
We drew the sector of hospitality and the business types of digital marketing and architecture – now we’ll explain how Red Flag Alert would be the perfect tool to drive growth for businesses in those areas. Neither business mentioned are Red Flag Alert clients – we’re using them as examples to show that when presented with any type of business, our team can quickly determine how using Red Flag Alert will drive their sales.
Let’s take a look at an example. Ignite Hospitality is a branding, creative and digital marketing agency for the hospitality sector, helping hotels and restaurants with brand messaging and digital marketing services.
They have already identified a sector to focus on – large restaurants or chains that operate at the premium end of the market.
Assuming that they’re looking to build their business using outbound sales, data can be a phenomenal tool that will help them to drill down and find ideal clients.
1. It seems that Ignite work with businesses of a certain size and need to charge fees that make contracts worthwhile. In Red Flag Alert you can easily search for company size, driven by factors like turnover or net value. This will help them identify prospects that can afford their service. In many cases it will be clear who are potential clients, but often there are restaurants and hotels ‘off the radar’ that will have the right financial profile – Red Flag Alert will zero in on those clients.
2. Red Flag Alert allows Ignite to look at trends. If a business is growing quickly, they may be reaching a scale where they want to upgrade to a premium agency – a perfect time for Ignite to get in touch. Looking at revenues over time would be a simple and effective way to find these growing companies.
3. Searching by profitability can be an important filter, as finding businesses that are profitable gives a clear indication that a business is performing well. For a premium marketing agency finding these companies can be very helpful. Profitable businesses may be looking to reinvest profits in growth. Conversely, companies with poor profitability may be looking to arrest the trend and see marketing as a tactic to achieve this.
4. More focused profiling can be a really useful tool. For example, looking at businesses with top-line revenue growth and declining profitability may be one way of identifying businesses that are growing but not sustaining profitability. The businesses will want to revert to profitability as soon as possible – again a good opportunity for a marketing solution.
5. A critical measure that Ignite should consider when building their marketing list is the financial health of the businesses they’re targeting. The hospitality industry is notorious for financial distress, especially restaurants, so it’s important not to waste time selling to a business that is in very poor financial health and may not be around for much longer. Conversely, financial health could be an indicator that the business is primed to invest in marketing if they see a new digital marketing approach as the route to salvation.
You can build different mailing lists into a simple email marketing provider like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign. Alternatively, you can plug the data directly into your CRM using the Red Flag Alert API.
Once the list has been built, a campaign can be developed tailored to that list. This is an incredibly powerful feature, because it gives sales teams the ability to speak more directly to clients. For example, if the list is 80 fast-growing restaurant chains with £15m+ turnover and good financial health, the marketing message could be:
The messaging would be different for businesses experiencing a decline in profitability:
We often hear from our Red Flag Alert clients that a consistent problem they face when selling is getting unqualified leads – Red Flag Alert solves this problem.
For every business in the UK, we have a trove of data that gives your sales team the opportunity to qualify prospects. Staying with the hospitality theme, let’s think about how a firm of architects that sells into the hotel sector could use Red Flag Alert to streamline their qualification process:
Let’s use the example of EPR Architects – a high-profile firm that works across a number of sectors, including hotels.
Red Flag Alert can help businesses like this in their qualification process.
Due to their reputation, EPR will likely be exposed to a range of opportunities through referrals, enquiries and tenders.
Because of their industry, quoting to win projects is often time-consuming so they need to be discerning when deciding what projects to pursue at quotation stage. Red Flag Alert is a perfect tool to help them do this.
Our team of B2B marketing experts are on hand to review your B2B data and advise on:
To book a free consultation, please get in touch with our team.