This article offers some thoughts on the changes that the world of sales and B2B business is currently going through.
The commercial relationship turned upside down since March…
What has changed since last March?
The emergence and spread of Covid-19 have strongly affected economic and commercial activities this year.
Physical distance is now a given in our professional relationships, and that changes quite a few things. Trade shows are mostly cancelled or postponed, sometimes maintained but with visitor numbers significantly reduced. In an article dated 16 September 2020, lesEchos reports a 40% drop in activity for trade shows and conferences in the Paris region in 2020.
In this radically new context, prospects and customers are working from home, sometimes for the first time in their professional lives. The main consequences at a commercial level are that stakeholders no longer meet, relationships have to be built and imagined differently, and old-school prospecting no longer works. In this context, it becomes very useful to have several points of contact to stay in touch or to prospect.
On the B2B business side, some companies have become cautious and hesitate to invest for lack of visibility. The uncertainty drags on and sales prospecting is inevitably harder than before…
Now that we have said that… what do we do to bounce back?
The digitalisation of sales prospecting is under way
We are certainly not going to just stand there waiting for it to blow over!
Clearly, our organisations need agility and flexibility. Employees must gain autonomy and responsiveness. At the same time, sales teams need to regain cohesion and energy. Effective salespeople are salespeople who believe in what they do, who want to do it, and who have the tools to face this unprecedented crisis.
The new digital prospecting tools offer precisely the simplicity and flexibility you are looking for in such an uncertain period.
For most companies, the digitalisation of sales prospecting is no longer an option…
Every phase of a “deal” is now initiated and planned by email, by video conference or by phone: the first call of course, but also the possible demo, the negotiation, the meetings with stakeholders, another demo, the closing… The challenge is to maintain a constant desire, to keep your prospects’ attention.
In this context, whoever has a reliable database, one that can be queried on precise criteria, accessed remotely in SaaS and enriched with social profiles and named email addresses, will inevitably be one step ahead.
So we can take a more optimistic, proactive view and tell ourselves that we are going to support the change in this B2B business. Since we are in a period of profound upheaval in our habits, and this is likely to last, we might as well take the opportunity to evolve and modernise our sales approach too.
Sales intelligence brings salespeople an immediate solution
Indeed, simple and flexible tools exist to make life easier for sales teams. They are effective now, right away.
Today, thanks to sales intelligence tools, a salesperson can, from anywhere:
- Identify core-target prospects in markets that remain solid and solvent
- Access email + phone + LinkedIn contact points to reach people at their office or working from home
- Create lists of targeted, exportable contacts to feed into email sequences.
- Stay informed of the risk of failure (receivership, liquidation) or, on the contrary, the ongoing growth (recruitment, revenue increase) of their main prospects or customers
- Update their CRM and the contacts associated with their key accounts
- Invite their prospects or customers to webinars and video conferences when they cannot meet them in person
- Be alerted to changes within the companies they are targeting: appointments, recruitment, relocation, financial failure, fundraising…
Mixdata.com, a tailored and optimised solution
Designed as a sales-efficiency tool, by salespeople and for salespeople, Mixdata.com saves time for business developers, SDRs and BDRs. The tool lets them work with peace of mind, remotely or at the office, and always have the essential data for effective outreach to their strategic accounts.
That is already pretty good, is it not? So chin up!
And what about sales management in all this?
Sales management, for its part, needs to be able to organise its team’s prospect sourcing and always have fresh, new data for a clean and reliable CRM. It will be able to react as quickly as possible when a business opportunity signal is triggered and, of course, monitor everyone’s activity. Mixdata.com makes this possible too…
Sales management therefore has a lot to gain from driving change and the digitalisation of sales prospecting within their teams. Whether to make their salespeople’s lives easier in the current context of distancing, or simply to streamline prospecting and increase sales efficiency ahead of the economic recovery.
Access to a platform like Mixdata.com makes it possible both to prospect better and to size your market more accurately. Salespeople can create as many prospecting files as they want, and marketing can feed the CRM or other marketing/sales automation tools with up-to-date, named data.
A partner in companies’ business development since 2013, Mixdata analyses French companies every day. Mixdata provides a unique targeting tool and detects business opportunities for your teams in their markets.
In total, over 10 million companies in the database, 14 million contacts, 2 million professional email addresses available, 1.2 million websites analysed (including 125,000 ecommerce sites) and more than 800 targeting criteria…
And because encouragement never comes alone, we are offering you your first 10 identified B2B prospects for any demo carried out with one of our consultants. Here you can request more info and a quick demo.
