Research Target Leads and Prospects with AI Sales Assistants

Lead and prospect research is an essential step of the sales process as it directly helps you enhance the effectiveness of your sales efforts. With customer’s expectations changing constantly, sales professionals need tools to keep them ahead in the game. In this blog, we’ll explore how AI sales assistants can streamline the sales research process.

Why Lead and Prospect Research is Crucial to Generating More Sales

1. Targeted Outreach: Doing thorough research on your leads and prospects helps you tailor your outreach efforts to their specific pain points. This is much better than giving them a generic pitch. The moment your prospects and leads connect your solution/product with their pain points, you increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
   
   

2. Improved Efficiency: Thorough research ensures that you focus your efforts on leads and prospects that have a higher probability of moving down the sales funnel.
   
   

3. Informed Conversations and Competitive Edge: Having research on every lead and every prospect allows you to stand out from the competitive field. When you talk to leads and prospects about their specific pain points and challenges, it helps cement you and your company as a reliable problem solver. This builds credibility and establishes you as an advisor, thus leading to more engagement and more sales opportunities.
   
   

Manual tools for sales research

There are numerous manual tools available to help sales reps research leads and prospects. Some commonly used tools include:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Identifies potential leads and helps you gain insights into the prospect's background.
  
  

• ZoomInfo/Apollo/Clay, etc: Provides contact details and company information to help you target decision-makers.
  
  

• Clearbit: Enriches prospect data with company size, funding information, and more.
  
  

• Crunchbase: Gives insights into a company’s funding, acquisitions, and market positioning.
  
  

• Google Search: With the right searches, you can get insights into what the company is talking about in the media, any latest funding announcements, trends in the industry, etc.
  
  

While these tools can make research faster, they require manual input and interpretation. These tools help gather essential data, but reps still spend time sifting through the information to get actionable insights.

Why AI Sales Assistants are Better than Manual Tools for Sales Research

An AI sales assistant can automate the sales research process by gathering the right data, and delivering insights directly to the sales reps. It can do this by:

• Automating lead research across multiple platforms such as LinkedIn, company websites, job portals, and industry reports.
  
  

• Curating relevant information about prospects and delivering it directly in any format the sales team prefers (document, Slack message, email, CRM update).

For example, Locale’s AI assistant can crawl through the prospect’s website, their company and employees’ LinkedIn profiles, their job listings, and also news websites, to do in-depth research which would take hours if done manually. After it does all this research, it can collate all the info and summarise it into an easy-to-read research document which is available for the sales team to read through. It can also send the research over Slack or email or just update the CRM properties directly.

What does this research include? We have divided the research into 3 categories - prospect-level research, company-level research & persona-level research. Let’s look at each of them.

Prospect-level Research

Prospect-level research helps you build a rapport. Data points that can be collected for the prospect include:

• Job title

• Department

• Tenure at the company

• Their work history

• Personal achievements or awards

• Social media activity,

• The content they’ve engaged with

• Something interesting that they have mentioned in their LinkedIn bio or their projects

Company-level Research

Company-level research includes information about the company, which industry it operates in, if the company or the industry has any recent news, etc. Here are some data points:

• Size (employee count, revenue)

• About the company

• Recent news (funding, mergers, acquisitions)

• Industry trends

• Competitors

• Current tools and systems in use

• Technographics

Persona-level Research

Persona-level research is the most important part of any research. You get a few bullet points on what problems a person in that particular persona might be facing. Persona research will give you pointers like:

• Key Responsibilities

• Goals or objectives

• Pain points or challenges that this persona might be facing
  
  

Are you ready to transform your sales research process and unlock your team's full potential? Schedule a call to learn more about Locale's research agent.