With the number of individuals involved in a final buying decisions ( influencers ) increasing, coupled with the vast amount of research buyers conduct prior to engaging with vendors, researching your prospects and the stakeholders, their persona and needs is an invaluable exercise.
At some point during a sales training several years ago,I learnt the principle of the “Bow tie effect” and the “Diamond effect”. Admittedly, I can confirm this has no relevance with fashion and in fact, is key to progressing your opportunities. The more key contacts you have within an opportunity at any given time the better as demonstrated below.
Bow Tie Effect
You are working on an opportunity and you have build a great rapport and fortunate to have built a solid engagement with your one and only key contact ( coach/champion ). Suddenly, you cannot reach them through any means, you’ve tried all channels at various times and you begin to doubt your process and the opportunity as a whole. The voice in your head say’s to yourself, how I wish I had someone else to speak with to continue the engagement.
The Bowtie effect as the image shows is having a single point of contact and therefore higher risk, this is depicted by the middle part of the “Bow Tie” being the single point of failure.
Diamond Effect
Contrary to the “bowtie effect”, this time you have multiple contacts within the opportunity. It helps to understand each contact’s objectives, persona, their role in the buying process and therefore knowing who to speak to in case your coach or champion isn’t available.
As you can see, the diamond image above depicts the fact that there are no single points of failure unlike a bowtie.
Mainstream tools some sales professionals leverage with researching
- Google:
Use the Google search page or Google alerts, I would encourage the use of “search operators”in order to save you time. More information here
The great thing with Google is the vast amount of information at your fingertips, the downside maybe your ability/inability to filter and focus on the information that matters.
2. Your target companies websites:
This is a great source for organic information straight from the company you are targeting or are engaged with. You need to immerse yourself in their world and ensure you absorb all pertinent information they’ve shared on their website.
3.Your competitors website:
This is an unlikely source for most sales reps, I find if there are mutual target companies with your competition, there may be either a case study ( if you’re in luck ) or useful intelligence to help you with your prospecting.
4. Your current companies CRM:
This is your lower hanging fruit, in most cases your marketing team or previous colleagues may have uncovered some contacts or recorded useful intelligence in the form of recorded notes or attachments. I won’t always rely on this as you need to treat the information with caution and validate this for yourself.
5. Linkedin & Youtube:
I like putting names to faces, Linkedin allows me this luxury of knowing who I’ll be engaging with. Whether picture or no picture, this tool offers you intelligence on the actual responsibilities of your target contacts, help you build a sense of an influence map and finally an overall view of the company and its services.
6. IT Event websites such as CIO UK and Computer Weekly:
I use this for mainly marketing, industry and role specific intelligence.
7. Insight Driven Websites such as Owler, Duedil and Companies House:
Great for company intelligence, I love the fact it recommends other similar companies which can help you build your territory list.
8. DiscoverOrg:
This tool takes it one step further by offering contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers in some cases. Great for understanding your target companies overview from an org chart, employees, financial and technology standpoint.
9. Facebook:
I rarely use this however, on the odd occasion I may use this if I need to build a profile of the personality I’ll be engaging with.
10. Twitter:
In some cases, you can build a profile of your contacts by understanding their interests. This tool helps if you follow them and get a feel for what they tweet and share.
11. Glassdoor:
This is mostly company centric, it helps me understand the companies values and ethics through the voice of their own employees ( whether current or ex).
12. Lusha:
I came across this tool very recently and I love it!
If you’re after B2B data, this tool leverages CRM and other social tools and offers verified contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers.
These are just a few that I use, not to mentioned there are a number of other tools available, some that are socially entrenched tools such as G2 Crowd, Sprout Social, Reddit and others.
Are there other tools that add value to your research?
Comment on this post and share your research tools.
To Our Growth
Mike
