In just two months, Salesforce will stop renewing Data.com licenses, so hopefully you’re well into your evaluation of Data.com replacements as you develop your migration plan. If you still need some help, you’ve come to the right blog series.
The first and second posts in this series supplied tips for assessing and cleaning your data before you migrate to a Data.com alternative. The third post discussed the importance of keeping your data clean, while the fourth examined possible data gaps you could fill with a Data.com alternative. This post looks at augmenting your data with valuable insights to further fuel sales and marketing success.
Step 5: Boost your Data
We’ve established that you need good data to identify the right targets, but it’s even more helpful when you also have the insights to know when to reach out, what to say, and how to connect with those targets. As you research Data.com competitors, think about what additional insights they may be able to provide above and beyond firmographic and demographic data.
For example, while you need to know the industry, size, and location of a company to focus your targeting on viable prospects, that only takes you so far. Without additional insights into the company, industry, and/or contact, you’re left to cold calling and fairly generic pitching as your only engagement options.
Now imagine this scenario. You work for a company that sells a computer-aided design (CAD) solution and one of your targets is a company that manufactures airplane parts. In doing your pre-call research, you learn that the cost of aluminum – an essential material in airplane manufacturing – is skyrocketing. How timely and motivating your message will be when you reach out to your prospect and your conversation goes something like this, “Hi Pat. I just read about the rising cost of aluminum. How’s that affecting your cost of goods? What would you say if I could help you get more parts out of a sheet of aluminum?”
You win on two levels:
- You earn instant credibility because you know something about what’s happening in Pat’s world that the average salesperson doesn’t bother to learn.
- Your message is timely and relevant, because it will help Pat’s company hedge against the rising cost of aluminum, a very real and present threat to their profitability.
What’s that got to do with replacing Data.com? Plenty.
Your Data.com replacement can make you smarter faster
Think about how you would gather such insights. You could spend hours scouring news articles, reading trade publications, and sifting through websites in search of that nugget of information. Or, you could look for a Data.com alternative that embeds industry profiles and news alerts directly within Salesforce. Such solutions can serve up insights that are specific to your prospects’ industry, region, and other attributes.
Your Data.com alternative can place social insights at your fingertips
Insights from social media can also be extremely valuable. Maybe a contact tweeted about an upcoming event and what they expect to learn. Or, maybe they posted a link to an interesting article. A contact’s social media posts can offer plenty of conversation openers to warm up a cold outreach.
Finding the correct social media accounts and searching each network separately, however, takes even more time. Unless your choice for a Data.com replacement pulls those insights directly into Salesforce.
Social media is also chock-full of connection data. You might learn that your CFO was in the same sorority as a senior contact at one of your target accounts. Or, maybe one of your colleagues previously worked at a company with someone at your target company. Connection data – your social graph – is rich with potential paths to a warm lead.
A good Data.com alternative will pull social content, including your social graphs (and maybe even those of your colleagues), into your CRM, highlighting potential connectors and saving you hours of time-consuming manual research.
Your Data.com replacement can help you grow existing accounts
Industry insights, news, and social media can also help you grow existing customers. Think about how busy your account managers (AMs) are. They’re pulled in a myriad of directions to fight fires, monitor account progress, and keep customers happy. That work frequently takes over, reducing the time they have to expand those accounts. But your Data.com replacement could fuel customer growth by delivering real-time insights to your AMs – insights that serve both as a tickler to check-in and turn those check-ins into valuable conversations.
Social updates and company news can alert account managers when an account champion is promoted or moves to another company. That’s always a good time for an AM to introduce themselves to the replacement and a great opportunity to reach out and congratulate the champion on their new role, while also offering assistance and diplomatically probing for new opportunities.
The good news is, some Data.com competitors can augment your Salesforce data with news, social insights, industry profiles, and even social connections to give your sellers a competitive advantage. These are things you should look for as you evaluate alternatives to Data.com.
What’s next in your evaluation of Data.com competitors?
Change is never easy, but you’re now in a position to make a choice. Use Data.com’s retirement as an opportunity to get more from your Data.com replacement.
In our next post, we’ll wrap up this series with some final thoughts to consider as you evaluate alternatives to Data.com. If you need to pick up the pace in your search for a Data.com replacement, you’ll find tips in our full Data.com Migration Planning Guide. Or, if you’d like to talk with a data and sales intelligence expert, let us know and we’ll be glad to help.
READ PART 6
Image credit: Ivelin Radkov