3 Sales Tools to Build Stronger Connections With Prospects

Alanna Goodman

Alanna Goodman

Content Marketing Specialist

No surprises here: the B2B buyer’s journey is complex, with lots of twists and turns along the way. To gain their prospects’ trust, sales teams need to understand the customer and leverage all of the tools at their disposal to deliver value before their competitors.

Here are three tools to help you connect with prospects and hit your number. 

How to Connect with Prospects

1. Tailor your strategy using advanced intelligence

As you develop your sales strategy, one of the first steps is using a B2B database to gather insights on your target audience. This comes in two flavors: firmographics and psychographics. 

Firmographics provide a detailed profile of an organization. This data is fundamental to communicating well with prospects and supporting critical go-to-market functions, such as audience segmentation, territory planning, and lead routing. 

Firmographics include:

  • Company name
  • Industry classification
  • Employee headcount 
  • Employee growth rate
  • Annual revenue
  • Recent funding rounds
  • Office locations 
  • Technologies installed

Salespeople can use firmographic data to inform their pitch, particularly in early conversations with prospects, and to develop their ideal customer profile for improved prospecting and automated motions. They can also leverage technographic data to glean insights into a company’s tech stack in order to speak to any competitive advantages or system integrations. 

“Firmographic and demographic data are table stakes,” says Mitchell Hanson, director of demand generation at ZoomInfo. “What’s difficult, and where most fall off, is psychographics. That’s where intent data comes into play.” 

Psychographics look deeper into what a company is thinking and feeling, including its priorities and concerns about products or solutions. Referred to as intent data, this type of sales intelligence notifies you when accounts you care about are actively researching topics relevant to your business. It can indicate a prospect’s current top-of-mind priorities, and where they are in their buyer’s journey. 

Let’s say your company sells cybersecurity software and you learn that a prospect company is searching for “best cybersecurity software 2022.” You can infer they have an active need for the solution that you sell — and if they’re searching for things like “average cost of cybersecurity software,” you can assume that price is a concern. 

A combination of firmographic data and intent data can help you better understand your customer so that you can speak directly to their needs, challenges, and concerns. With ZoomInfo Sales, you can identify and reach your next best customer using data-driven insights and buying signals that reveal ready-to-buy companies.

2. Enable a smooth, real-time hand off from marketing to sales 

Understanding your target audience is half the battle. Then comes the hard part: connecting with those leads and winning the deal. 

When a prospect lands on your website, strike while the iron is hot. They’re looking at your products and solutions and (whether they know it or not) creating a mental list of pros and cons. This is an excellent opportunity to field their questions and concerns in real time with chatbots. 

A chatbot is an automated conversational tool that lives on your website and initiates conversations with visitors. They type in their questions and the chatbot delivers the information they need to take the next step in the buyer’s journey. You can monitor this conversation and have a sales rep step in when it makes sense.  

For example, with ZoomInfo Chat, if someone from a target account comes to your website, the appropriate sales rep will be alerted. By cross-referencing ZoomInfo’s database, that rep will receive the prospect’s name, company, recent company news, status of their tech stack, and how many times they’ve visited your website. This chatbot interaction connects the prospect to your most knowledgeable team member who can step in and turn the chat into a meaningful conversation.

The right integrations make this a smooth experience for both prospect and sales rep. ZoomInfo Chat has partnered with Microsoft Teams and Slack to consolidate all chat activities into a single platform. When the chatbot routes a prospect to a sales rep, they’ll receive an alert in their usual business communication platform and can chat with the prospect via Microsoft Teams or Slack, without having to stop what they’re doing to switch platforms.

3. Nurture sales leads with personalization and automation 

While every prospect should feel like they’re the focus of your attention, you also have to cater to a long list of prospects at various stages. Salespeople often use disparate systems for sourcing contacts, reaching out to prospects, and tracking activity, which leads to disorganization and wasted time. In fact, salespeople only spend about one-third of their time selling

A good sales intelligence platform helps you spend less time on manual activities and more time engaging with prospects and closing business. For example, ZoomInfo Engage connects salespeople with prospects better and faster by scaling personalized communication and multi-touch prospecting campaigns. Pre-recorded voicemails, email templates, and analytics that identify optimal days for high response rates can all be leveraged to maintain scalability and personalization in your sales outreach.

And don’t underestimate the power of following up. ZoomInfo Engage automates real-time views of upcoming tasks, so sales teams never forget to follow up with a prospect.