Manual how to use data to find the ideal prospect

1. Guide to Data-Driven
Sales Prospecting
A comprehensive guide from HubSpot and Vainu

2. Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1
Sales Prospecting: The First Step of Every Successful Sales Process
• What is Data-Driven Sales Prospecting?
• How Data Fits Into Each Step of the Sales Prospecting Process
Chapter 2
What Company Data is and why you Should Care
Chapter 3
Step-by-Step: Inject Data Into Every Part of the Sales Prospecting Process
• Step 1: Define Your Best-fit Prospect
• Step 2: Find Companies Matching Your Ideal Customer Profile
• Step 3: Tap Into Automation
• Step 4: Outreach
• Step 5: Evaluate and Iterate
Conclusion

3. Introduction
Years ago, salespeople were assigned a product to sell and a territory in which to sell it.Then
they would look through phone books and trade magazines for businesses that might be
interested and call them.
Times have changed. Sales prospecting, the process of searching for potential customers,
clients, or buyers to develop new business, has become more complex and––at the same
time––more crucial. Filling your pipeline with the right potential customers, those who are
most likely to succeed with your product or service, is a prerequisite for strong sales figures.
3

4. Over the past decade, prospects have become tougher to reach, more skeptical, and less
willing to open up. Customers have become less dependent on salespeople, as a vast wealth
of information about nearly every available product and service on the market is now easily
accessible online.
A canned sales pitch is more likely to lead to the person on the other side of the line hanging
up on you mid-sentence than an encouraging “please, tell me more”. The fact of the matter
is, most sales prospects never become qualified leads. There’s one simple reason for this:
too much sales prospecting is based on guesswork.
Data is the solution to poorly targeted sales efforts. Information on almost all the world’s
businesses is available online, the challenge lies in finding that information when you need
it. And here’s where sales intelligence comes into play. This type of technology is bringing
all this information to salespeople’s fingertips, ultimately helping salespeople find the right
companies to reach out to, the right time to get in touch, and the best working angle to reach
out with.
In this eBook, we’ll cover the most important hacks, strategies, and technologies that mod-
ern sales professionals need to streamline their sales prospecting and go through, step-by-
step, how you can inject data into every step of the process.
4

5. Sales Prospecting: The First Step of
Every Successful Sales Process
Every sale starts in one of two ways: either the seller finds the buyer, or the buyer is looking
for a seller and picks one. The first scenario describes the typical start of an outbound sales
process; the latter describes the core idea of the inbound sales methodology.
No matter how a prospect enters the sales funnel, the sales process should start with
prospecting, simply because before you can lift the phone and start dialing, you have to
know whom to call. While outbound sales prospecting is about discovering potential
customers that you don’t have any prior history with and then reaching out to them, inbound
sales prospecting is about searching for prospective customers from your pool of leads
provided through marketing efforts to ensure you don’t spend time trying to sell to poor-fit
prospects.
The first connection with a company never needs to be, and in fact, never should be,
completely cold. When you connect with companies that you’ve proactively identified as a
good fit, you’re not really doing cold outreach anymore. Adapting your business to deliver
relevance at scale isn’t just a good idea—it’s essential for salespeople who wish to succeed in
sales, today and beyond. But how should you approach the question? One leap in the right
direction is espousing a data-driven mindset when sales prospecting.
Chapter 1
5

6. A data-driven sales prospecting approach means leveraging company data to identify your
best-fit prospects, finding the companies that are most likely to succeed with your product
or offer, reaching out to them with a personalized message, and replicating success with
other similar companies.
In addition to basic firmographic data, you should look at insights from technographics,
buying signals, buying intent, web priorities, news coverage, and social media presence
to get a full 360 view of an account and truly deserve the data-driven sales professional’s
badge. Processing this amount of data is impossible for the human brain alone. That’s why
tapping into sales technology when adopting a data-driven sales prospecting approach is
crucial. Tools that help salespeople find, monitor, and understand information on prospects’
and existing clients’ daily business fall into the sales intelligence category.
In theory, data-driven sales prospecting should be quite an easy concept to understand, but
in reality, it’s significantly more challenging to put into practice. To help you out, we’ll, step-
by-step, showcase how you put the plan into action–but first, let’s cover some basics.
6
What is Data-Driven Sales
Prospecting?

7. 1. Define Your Best-fit Prospect
In any prospecting session, your ideal customer profile should be your guiding light.
Therefore, before you start prospecting, you have to find your ideal customer profile – the
description of what companies equal a perfect fit for your solution. Internalize the ideal
customer you’re trying to attract, and relate to your customers as real humans. In excess of
knowing your ideal customer profile, you need to create your buyer persona, the person, to
be relevant in your sales.
It’s hard to get a full and accurate portrayal of a company unless you use hard facts. The
same is true for people. When basing your ideal customer profile or buyer persona on only
a hunch, you’re likely to make assumptions you don’t even realize you’re making, and ignore
facts that don’t fit the exact image in your head. Data doesn’t make these mistakes. To get
a complete and accurate overview of your best-fit prospects, you’ll need to take a sufficient
amount of data-points into account and include both firmographics, technographics,
buying signals, and intent data.
2. Find Companies Matching Your Ideal Customer Profile
Sales intelligence technology works around the clock to collect and make sense of
company data from millions of data sources. A dynamic company database allows
salespeople to conduct pointed searches for companies with a specific set of real time
data points. In other words, this type of technology helps salespeople find companies that
match their ideal customer profile to a T in one easy search. With the help of company data
and technologies that make large amounts of data easy to comprehend for salespeople,
sales prospecting no longer has to be a time consuming and arduous task.
7
How Data Fits Into Each Step of the
Sales Prospecting Process

8. 3. Tap Into Automation
Sales intelligence eliminates the previously manual process of locating the relevant insights
you need, while verifying them for accuracy and giving you a complete overview of every
prospect.
Real-time prospect lists update automatically as companies’ characteristics and conditions
change. Most sales intelligence tools come with notification features, alerting the users of
events that can open up a window of opportunity for them within one of their target accounts,
or informing them of when a new company falls into the description of their ideal customer
profile.
4. Outreach
When you only connect with companies when there’s a data-backed reason for you to be
in touch, and tailor your offer according to your potential customer’s current situation and
needs, you’ll significantly improve your sales figures.
All information you need to achieve personalized sales outreach at scale is out there. With
a data-driven approach to sales prospecting, the process should provide you with context
about your best-fit prospect’s interests or prior behavior.
5. Evaluate and Iterate
Every sales process is a learning process and generates additional data that can be fed back
into planning. Measuring well-thought-out sales prospecting KPIs provides sales executives
with insights necessary to assess what activities generated value for the prospecting process
and which wasted time.
8

9. What Company Data is and why
you Should Care
Personalization is no longer an optional, nice-to-do-if-you-get-around-to-it component of
your business-to-business (B2B) sales strategy. It’s essential and it must be well executed.
According to McKinsey & Company, personalization reduces acquisition costs as much as
50 percent, lifts revenues by 1-15 percent, and increases the efficiency of marketing spend
by 10-30 percent.
To master data-driven sales, you need a substantial understanding of company data, and its
different data-sets. In this chapter, we’ll go through essential company data facts and terms.
Chapter 2
9

10. Firmographics
Firmographics, or firmographic data, is to organizations what demographics is to people.
Compared to technographics, firmographic data is more static and isn’t changed often.
Commonly used firmographics include company’s industry, number of employees, and
location.
Technographics
Technographics, or technographic data, refers to insights on a company’s current
technology choices such as marketing automation platform, social media channels, and
website language versions.
Buying Signals
A buying signal is an event happening in an organization that either a) makes the company
match your ideal customer profile or b) gives you a good reason and angle to approach a
company which already matches the definition of your ideal customer profile.
Intent Data
Intent data is (web) behavioral data about prospects actively researching products or
services. Intent data is rarely used alone, but instead frequently paired with other types of
company data when doing account scoring.
10
What is Company Data?
Company data is information on a company’s characteristics,
interests, and tendencies. Subcategories of company data are
internal data (from CRM, ERP, NPS) and external data
(firmographics, technographics, buying signals, and intent data).

11. When Data Scientist and Web Developer Dylan Curran last year requested to download all
the data Google had on him the file he got was 5.5GB big, which is roughly 3 million Word
documents. For the last two decades, business-to-consumer (B2C) companies have used the
great amount of data on people available through companies such as Google, Facebook,
and LinkedIn to draw clear descriptions of any natural person in the world, and market
products and services directly to people with specific characteristics.
Whether you like it or not, it’s safe to say that B2C sales and marketing is years ahead of its
B2B counterpart. One reason for this is that it, for a long time, has been harder for
companies with businesses as their audience to get the right data to create sophisticated
segmentation models.
Company data allows salespeople in the B2B context to describe and divide their target
groups in a similar way as B2C companies do with the help of demographic variables. There
are reams and reams of data on companies out there too–the key is finding it and making
sense of it. The majority of raw data doesn’t offer much value in its unprocessed state.
Without advances in technology, businesses wouldn’t have access to near as much data as
smart sales technologies provide or be able to pull powerful insights from this stockpile of
data bits. It is, in other words, impossible to be data-driven without deep diving into
advanced sales technology.
How Company Data Is Changing the
World of B2B
11

12. Only the Amount of Data Adds Depth
Firmographics have significant value to salespeople who target companies in a specific
industry or a chosen size-range. However, grouping companies on the basis of only
firmographics quickly reaches its limits. While it’s a fast way to narrow down a large pool of
prospects, the risk is that the companies within this group will show substantially more
differences than similarities.
For example, company A with $10 million in revenue in hyper-growth mode will be investing
vast amounts into something important to them. Simultaneously, company B with the same
revenue class might be in cost-cutting mode and have entirely different priorities.
Depending on the service you’re selling, you likely want to contact either A or B.
To identify micro-segments in B2B, you’ll need to take a sufficient amount of data-points into
account. With each additional variable you use to differentiate your audience from all other
companies, you’ll increase the similarity of the companies in that group.
Bonus Fact: Strong Local Players in
the Sales Intelligence Space
12
Sales intelligence tools are never better than the data they’re built on. This means local
venders in this software category may be stronger than global players. A great prospecting
solution for the Swedish market requires excellent data on Swedish companies and a great
prospecting solution for the German market similarly requires excellent data on German
companies. At the moment, there are only a handful of global providers but their offering is
often strong only in markets where they focus the most on. One exception is LinkedIn, which
is widely used in many parts of the world, and therefore, it appeals companies searching for
for global solutions for finding the right decision makers.

13. Step-by-Step: Inject
Data into Every Part of
the Sales Prospecting
Process
Now when we’ve gone through what company data is,how it affects modern sales,and where
it fits into the sales prospecting work, it’s time to get practical.
Follow this step-by-step to put your sales prospecting on a data-driven footing.
Chapter 3
13
1. Define Your Best-fit Prospect
Across industries, salespeople lose between 60 and 90 percent of their potential deals after
the first contact. The reason the biggest drop-off in most sales funnels is at the prospecting
stage is that many companies are unsuccessful in identifying the right prospects for their
business. Ensuring that you focus your sales and marketing efforts on the right companies,
and the right people within these businesses is never easy. However, one thing is for sure:
you can’t know if you’ve not defined your ideal customer profile and buyer persona. Data is
a huge contributor to this. Having the right information about the people you’re interacting
with, their needs, and how you could help is crucial.

14. What is an Ideal Customer Profile?
An ideal customer profile is a description of a fictitious account which gets significant
value from your product or service and provides substantial value to your company in return.
That type of customer that costs the least to acquire, stays with you for a long time and has
a strong lifetime value, is less likely to churn and, eventually, become an advocate for your
brand.
In a nutshell, your ideal customer profile helps you streamline your sales prospecting, focus
your sales and marketing efforts on the companies that are most likely to buy from you now,
and sell to companies with the highest success potential of using your product or service.
14
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market
research and real data about people who have bought from you in the past. Buyer
personas provide structure and context for your company, making it easier to map out
content, allocate your team’s time and resources, and achieve alignment across your
organization.
Why you need both an ideal customer profile and a buyer
persona
Understanding your ideal customer profile—their challenges, their goals, their
firmographic traits, and so on–helps you to set a strategy aimed at attracting the most
valuable customers to your business. But at the end of the day (or more specifically, sales
process), there’s a human being, not a company, who signs the deal.
There is a mantra that B2B is H2H (human to human). That is why you need to treat sales to
businesses like sales to humans. The more relevant you can be and the better you can talk
about things that matter to your prospects—the actual people in businesses who stand to
benefit by using your product—the higher conversion rates you’ll have in B2B sales.

15. Step-by-Step Guide: Your Ideal Customer Profile
1. Find out What Characteristics Your Happiest Customers Share
Look at your ten (or so) happiest customers and find common attributes like revenue,
number of employees, type of business, web technologies in use, geography or buying
signals that occurred right before they became your customers. Thanks to modern
technology, you don’t have to do the heavy lifting yourself. A sales intelligence tool can
quickly provide you with an overview of your key customers shared characteristics.
Going beyond company data, you can have your customer success team conduct short
interviews with your most satisfied customers. Ask them how they found your business, what
made them choose to work with you and why they continue to work with your company.
2. Prioritize Companies With a Strong Life-Time Value
Turn to your CRM software for data that helps you find common threads among your most
faithful customers. You want to focus on signing customers that a) stay with you for a long
time, and b) you can up-sell and/or cross-sell to.
3. Look for Ready, Willing and Able Customers
No matter how great of a match your service is for a specific company, these three criteria
have to be filled in order for you to spend time on that account now:
- An ideal customer should be ready to buy what you sell; the decision makers have
to understand that they have a problem or an opportunity and that you can help
them solve it or seize it.
- An ideal customer has to want to make a change and be ready to invest both
money and time into getting up to speed with your product.
- An ideal customer has to be able to buy what you sell now. They have to have the
money and support from the right decision makers to give you a positive answer.
15

16. 4. Document Your Ideal Customer Profile Framework
When you’ve collected the data and identified recurring patterns or characteristics shared
by your best customers, it’s time to input this information in your ideal customer profile
framework.
5. Review and Update Your Ideal Customer Profile Over Time
B2B sales is ultimately about how you affect the bottom line, your solution should either have
a direct correlation with profits or expenses, or you should be able to demonstrate how it
indirectly will affect the organization’s finances. As your company, its offering and the market
evolves, what defines the right prospects for you to go after might change.
There’s no universal definition of an ideal customer profile, not for any company. Every six
or nine months, you should evaluate if the company profile you’ve chosen as ideal still looks
the same, or if you have to tweak the description.
16

17. Insights from company data can not only help you discover good-fit prospects; it can also
help you identify the opposite, a “negative” ideal customer profile. These are prospects that
are highly unlikely to be interested in what you offer now. For example, if you’re working in
real estate sales, you probably shouldn’t bother spending time on reaching out to a
company that just moved to a new office.
What recent organizational events or characteristics indicate you shouldn’t spend
resources on a prospect now depends on the nature of your sales organization and
offering. The fast-track to identifying these signals is to look at what the biggest objections
you receive in the discovery call stage. By taking the time to create negative ideal customer
profiles, you’ll be able to segment out the “bad apples” from your pool of prospects.
17
Disqualify Prospects Whose Constraints are a Deal-Breaker

18. How to Create a Buyer Persona
The first thing you’ll want to do when creating a buyer persona is to do some research on
your existing customers. Since these people actually bought from you, they’re the most
relevant people to look at. In most cases, you’ll need to combine the insights you get from
surveys and interviews with your target audience with data from market research to get all
the information you need to create detailed buyer personas.
How many personas you should have depends on the nature of business, you could have as
few as one or two personas, or as many as ten. But if you’re new to personas, start small. You
can always develop more personas later if needed.
There are tons of buyer persona templates, tools and generators freely available on the
internet. HubSpot’s tool Create my Persona makes it easy as pie to do your persona research
and compile it all into a beautiful, presentable, palatable format.
Bonus tips: Use Insights From
Company Websites to Surface
Good-Fit Prospects
18
Sales intelligence tools are never better than the data they’re built on. This means local
venders in this software category may be stronger than global players. A great prospecting
solution for the Swedish market requires excellent data on Swedish companies and a great
prospecting solution for the German market similarly requires excellent data on German
companies. At the moment, there are only a handful of global providers but their offering is
often strong only in markets where they focus the most on. One exception is LinkedIn, which
is widely used in many parts of the world, and therefore, it appeals companies searching for
for global solutions for finding the right decision makers.

19. Step 2: Find Companies Matching
Your Ideal Customer Profile
No one defaults to prospecting mode. Make prospecting a daily habit. If prospecting is not
in your routine, your pipeline will eventually dry up. Because pipelines are meant to hold a
steady stream of prospects, a good salesperson is constantly prospecting.
The evolution of buying and selling behaviors over the last decade means that salespeople
now have to make data-driven decisions when conducting their sales prospecting. This
transition is one of the reasons behind the rapid growth that the sales intelligence vertical
has been experiencing lately.
19
What is Sales Intelligence?
Sales intelligence refers to a wide range of technologies that help salespeople find,
monitor, and understand information on prospects’ and existing clients’ daily business.
There are two parts to the sales intelligence market: 1) company data, and 2) contact data.
With a dynamic company database, you can conduct pointed searches for companies with
a specific set of real-time data-points, including both firmographics, technographics, and
buying signals.

20. Outbound Sales Prospecting:
Find Companies Matching Your Ideal Customer Profile
By trusting data–or more precisely, your ideal customer profile–you can increase the quality
and efficiency of your outbound sales prospecting significantly. The data points you look at
when conducting your outbound sales prospecting should correspond with the
characteristics you use to define your ideal customer profile.
With a detailed ideal customer profile in place, prospecting is reduced to checking boxes for
prefered company characteristics in a dynamic company database. In a matter of seconds,
the software will provide you with a list of good-fit prospects.
For example, you can use a dynamic company database to search for IT companies located
in a chosen city with over X in revenue, that employ specific website technologies, that have
given a specific buying signal recently, or that are expected to go through a certain
organizational change soon.
20
Inbound Sales Prospecting:
Going from Proactive to Reactive
New leads come in through marketing automation workflows every day. When the
marketing team labels a company as a sales qualified lead and hands it over to a
salesperson, they shouldn’t immediately jump on the phone.
Instead of just being reactive to that person who has expressed interest in your company,
proactive sales reps should dig deeper into the lead’s motivation for doing so to make a real
connection.
A sales intelligence tool can help you filter out prospects matching your ideal customer
profile from a larger pool of leads. By presenting you detailed information about the lead,
the same software can also help you determine whether the lead in question matches your

21. Don’t be afraid to disqualify leads. Many salespeople are reluctant to disqualify prospects
and shrink their pipelines–let’s change this mindset. It’s much more effective to focus on a
smaller number of high-quality leads rather than spreading yourself thin amongst a large
pipeline that may not be an ideal match for your product or service.
Spending some time researching the leads you get from marketing will not only
ensure you that you don’t spend time on the wrong accounts. It will also give you
valuable insights into every lead’s organization, characteristics, and pain-points.
Integrate Your Sales Intelligence Tool With Your CRM
The internet is not the only place you can derive plenty of valuable information about
organizations. There’s a good chance your CRM holds equally important information about
your potential customers, and it’s just waiting for you to tap into it.
Most sales intelligence platforms integrate smoothly with common CRM vendors. Allowing
data to stream between the two systems will make you benefit more from both.The two main
advantages being:
1. No More Time Wasted on Prospecting Poor Prospects
We’ve all been there: You’ve just found what appears to be a great new prospect only to find
out that the account is already owned by your colleague or recently closed. Without CRM
data, you’ll waste valuable time prospecting companies that your CRM will later tell you were
a dead end.
2. Your CRM Will Be Constantly Fed with Up-To-Date Data
Approximately 30 percent of your CRM data becomes stale each year. Integrating your CRM
and a sales intelligence software filled with real-time company data you can ensure your
CRM system is always up-to-date without having to put in hours manually updating basic
company data.
21

22. Step 3: Tap Into Automation
About half of salespeople’s time is wasted on unproductive sales prospecting. Having
researched and learned about your target customers and added a sales intelligence tool to
your tech stack, you’ve already taken a major leap away from falling into that sales statistic.
Take things one step further by tapping into automation.
We live in a time where there’s a megaton of automation at our fingertips. As stated above,
sales intelligence eliminates the previously manual process of locating the relevant company
insights you need, while verifying them for accuracy and giving you a complete overview of
every prospect. However, advanced technology can do more than help you make detailed
company searches. It allows you to sit back and watch your search results update over time
as companies change.
22
Relevance at Scale With Real-Time Prospect Lists
Companies and organizations, like people, are continuously changing and evolving:
new hires, new offices, international expansion … Organizations will fall in and out of your
list of best-fit prospects. In that situation, it’s impossible to make sales prospecting work
effectively manually. Only artificial intelligence and machine learning can handle the volume
of data and do it at the speed that’s required.

23. A real-time prospect list is a dynamic company list that updates automatically as companies’
characteristics and conditions change, bringing relevance at scale. This is possible thanks
to modern sales intelligence and prospecting platforms and other technologies that collect
myriads of information about companies from millions of open and public data sources
every day. All you have to do is blueprint the data-points that make up your best-fit
prospects in a dynamic company database, and the technology will help you surface the
right accounts for you to work now.
Track Buying Signals to Identify the Right Timing to Reach Out
There are moments when your product or service will be needed more and less. Most sales
intelligence tools come with notification features, alerting the users when a company
matching their ideal customer profile sends out a buying signal that can open up a window
of opportunity, or informing them of when a new company falls into the description of their
perfect customer.
Make sure you’ve got a solid plan for how key buying signals are followed by a sales action,
preferably within 24 hours from when you receive a lead.
Step 4: Outreach
It’s time to reach out and establish the first touch, either by email or by phone. This is the
moment that reveals the success of your prospecting process. It shouldn’t come as a
surprise to you that earning and keeping your prospect’s is critical if you want to succeed
in sales. This is equally true no matter if you’re focusing primarily on outbound or inbound
sales.
There’s no such thing as a golden “works every time”-pitch. In the age of informed and
skeptical buyers, salespeople need to level up their pitching tactics. The time you spent
researching earlier will pay off now with the account insights you gathered. Knowing
prospect’s both basic and not-so-obvious characteristics helps you create a tailored sales
pitch to each prospect that resonates with their primary objectives, ultimately turning you
into a relevant salesperson instead of a spammy nuisance.
23

24. Carry out Smarter Conversations With Each Prospect
The prospecting process should have given you information about what characteristics
each of your prospects has that suggest that they will get significant value from your
product or service. Even by just briefly mentioning that you know what’s going on in the
company, you’ll come out as more trustworthy.
Are they using technologies that are relevant to your offering? Are they opening new
offices? Answers to this type of questions will help you deliver a personalized buying
experience for every prospect you work with.
For example, if you’re selling software that integrates seamlessly with a specific vendor,
which the prospect is using, make sure to mention that in your conversation with them.
Whether you use email or phone, keep the following general tips.
1. Personalize
2. Stay relevant
3. Be human
4. Help, don’t upset
5. Underline the reason for your call
6. Don’t overpromise
Step 5: Evaluate and Iterate
After each first touch, keep notes and review: what generated value, what are the
obstacles? The data that the sales process generates needs to be fed back into planning
and used to identify potential improvements.
24

25. 25
Unless you’re working with a very small number of accounts, there’s no way to acquire and
manage this kind of data volume without using technology. Log all information in your CRM
and use sales intelligence to discover shared characteristics and patterns between
companies you have a good track record with. The discoveries should be reflected in your
ideal customer profile, if not, the definition of your best-fit company needs to be tweaked
accordingly.
Improve Sales Prospecting With the Right KPIs
Tracking the right sales prospecting metrics will help sales executives assess what activities
generated value for the prospecting process and which wasted time.
Numbers tell sales leaders which screws to fix, where to invest, who to promote, and who to
demote. But numbers can also be deceptive. Measuring the wrong or additional metrics will
simply take precious time away from the things that matter.
Be Mindful of the Impact KPIs Can Have on Employee Behavior
Selecting the right KPIs for your business is an important part of achieving your strategic
goals. However, it’s not always easy to know what those “right” KPIs are.
Be mindful of the impact KPIs can have on employee behavior. For example, a booked
meeting KPI could incentivize the sales reps to focus on filling their calendar with the
maximum number of meetings instead of booking meetings with those companies that are
most likely to convert through the whole sales funnel and end up becoming happy and
paying customers.
Log all information in your CRM and
use sales intelligence to discover
shared characteristics and patterns
between companies.

26. 26
Select the Right Sales Prospecting KPIs for Your Business
The sales velocity formula can help you find out what sales prospecting KPIs you should
focus on. Most sales professionals are at least somewhat familiar with this equation:
Number of opportunities x hit rate x Average deal size / Average sales cycle = total sales
While prospecting is often associated very strongly with the activity happening at the top of
the funnel (number of leads/opportunities) most companies acknowledge that the quality
of each prospect has a significant impact on the hit rate, average deal size and also the sales
cycle.
Sales results can only be improved if the actions your team is taking on a daily basis are
having an impact on one or many of those factors in the formula. Determine what
prospecting activities can help your team increase its total performance, and you’ll know
what activities you should set as KPIs.
Common Sales KPIs for people who prospect:
1. Number of new companies found
2. Number of new contacts added
3. Number of dials, emails, conversations
4. Number of booked and held meetings
5. Hit rate, all-commodity volume, and sales cycle
6. Lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, lead velocity rate
Keep Things Simple
With the masses of data available to businesses in the digital age, the question is no
longer what you can measure, but what you benefit from measuring. If you’re just starting
out, keep things simple. Focus on a few key metrics and make sure people feel they can
impact their individual KPIs and metrics.
On a strategic level, it’s important to measure the development of your sales velocity and, if
planning to scale the business rapidly, customer acquisition cost and life-time-value might
also be useful indicators to start tracking systematically.

27. Conclusion
By only connecting with companies when there’s a data-backed reason for you to be in touch
and tailor your offer according to your potential customer’s current situation and needs,you’ll
significantly improve your hit rate between every step of the sales process.
Sales prospecting, the process of filling your pipeline with potential customers that match
your ideal customer profile, is possibly the most crucial part of creating a consistent and
profitable sales machine.
A combination of rapidly changing buying behaviors, needs, and expectations is creating a
highly uncertain and disruptive sales environment. It’s filled with changes and challenges,
but ripe with new possibilities too. For sellers looking to meet today’s heightened
expectations, there’s only one answer: relevance at scale. Today’s consumers expect brands
to know them inside out–and use that knowledge to deliver products, services, and tailored
offerings that are entirely relevant when it really matters. However, doing this at a large-scale
takes an incredible amount of organizational agility, and it’s impossible without smart
technology.
27

28. Everything you need to become more relevant in your sales is already out there–the key is
finding company data when you need it. Sales intelligence technology works around the
clock to collect and make sense of company data from millions of data sources. Using a
modern dynamic company database will help you know exactly who you should be talking
with, what you should be talking about, and when you should reach out to them, and put all
the relevant information in front of you during every customer interaction.
The data that the sales process generates needs to be fed back into planning and used to
identify potential improvements. Tracking the right sales prospecting metrics will help you
assess the quality of your ideal customer profile and buyer persona. Following carefully
thought-out KPIs will also help you understand what prospecting activities generated value
for the process so that you can do more of what’s working, and less of what’s not.
All companies need sustainable competitive advantages in order to survive today. These
X-factors that are hard to copy and that provide a sustainable edge over the competitors can
be built around many different things.The ability to build, manage and develop a systematic
and effective sales prospecting process can definitely be one of those things.
28

29. 29
“Everything you need to
become more relevant in
your sales is already out
there–the key is finding
company data when you
need it.”
29

30. HubSpot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a
completely free CRM at its core. They’re powerful alone–but even better when used
together. 60,500 customers in over 100 countries growing their businesses with HubSpot.
Learn more at hubspot.com.
Vainu is a Sales Intelligence platform that makes salespeople relevant in every step of the
sales process by providing them with actionable company data, when and where they
need it. Over 2,000 sales teams across Europe and in the U.S. use Vainu’s data to sell more
in less time–with a better hit rate. Learn more at www.vainu.com.
About HubSpot
30
About Vainu