A Call for a New Sales Process
This private national staffing firm, specializing in placing craftspeople and skilled tradespeople, wanted to try something new with its sales approach. The company started a small team, described as being like an in-house startup for sales, with the vision that the team would be more effective working with actionable business-to-business data integrated into its customer relationship management system so it could identify new opportunities to grow through both new and existing customers.
The aim was to better identify likely prospects and find relevant contacts at those companies so the team could precisely target industries, which include shipyards, construction, renewable energy, and manufacturing. With approximately 200 distributed market service teams, the company uses a high-quality contingent construction labor force to supplement a contractor’s core workforce and better match varying workload levels to workers.
The new sales team soon realized that its members were still doing a lot of manual entry, and that defeated the purpose of standing up the team. Plus, the team was getting mixed results from its data, making prospecting inefficient. Having to spend time checking industry lists, using cumbersome search filters, and even physically identifying construction sites made it challenging to achieve the kind of sustained growth the team wanted.
The company’s national sales manager said, “The multiple systems and cumbersome information-gathering process the team was using caused us to reconsider our CRM approach.”
The team switched to Salesforce for its CRM, which provided more ease of use and gave it more modification capabilities with more automation.
Need for Seamless CRM and B2B Data Integration
Even with a new CRM system, the firm still needed the ability to quickly build prospect lists that included names, titles, emails, and direct-dial numbers and to be able to filter by company size, industry, revenue, region, and technologies used. After some exploration, the team realized all of that was available in D&B Hoovers. The fact the Dun & Bradstreet sales acceleration platform also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce offered the team a powerful and effective sales prospecting tool, giving the sales team direct access to comprehensive global B2B data in the Dun & Bradstreet Data Cloud, presented through Salesforce.
With the combined power of D&B Hoovers and Salesforce, this national staffing firm can more easily populate account records, which then are updated and enriched with Dun & Bradstreet data. The sales team can build its prospecting lists in D&B Hoovers and then send them to Salesforce, creating new CRM records that also include deeper account insights, such as contacts, triggers, and reports.
The combination of D&B Hoovers and Salesforce gives the sales team insights it can use to help develop sales campaigns and prospect for companies that best fit its ideal customer profiles.
Finding the Next Customers With D&B Hoovers
The team uses a robust set of filters in D&B Hoovers to find companies with attributes similar to those of its existing customers as well as to identify other opportunities in targeted geographic areas. “It’s all about quickly getting our people to the right accounts and to the right people within those organizations who either can influence the decision or ultimately are the decision-makers,” the national sales manager explained.
The team said some of D&B Hoovers’ research and prospecting tools for the team that have been particularly effective include:
- Saved Searches, which allows sellers to easily come back to previous searches for ideal customers instead of starting from scratch.
- SmartLists, which provides the team with dynamic updates about target companies.
- Closest Industry Peers, which helps the team find look-alikes based on its existing customer lists.
- Company hierarchies and the Decision Matrix, which help the team see who at a company is likely to be in a buying group so it can focus sales efforts on the people with purchasing authority.
Having access to D&B Hoovers’ data and capabilities has helped the team automate work that previously required more manual attention.
Less Time on Manual Work Equals More Time Selling — Driving Growth
In the fast-changing construction world, the firm’s sales team could earmark geographic areas for possible sales, identify multiple specific opportunities in the area with the right potential buyers, and optimize the team members’ time spent winning accounts.
D&B Hoovers enabled the team to use real-time business intelligence and seamless connectivity capabilities to help shorten its sales cycles, build pipelines faster, and generate higher returns on marketing investment. The team’s strategic approach has paid off in remarkable results — productively finding new clients. “We’ve been growing like a weed, and we continue to add head count as we go market to market and just can extend the reach. We started with three salespeople, and we’re now approaching 50, so we’ve learned a lot as we’ve grown.”
“We have to do very different work to get through the different layers of folks and to get to the right person and to work through that process. So, what we found is having a discipline around prospecting is important for us to continue building our business, and this tool enables salespeople to make the most of their time.”
The team expects to expand even more as it continues to discover more strategic benefits of the D&B Hoovers and Salesforce integration. “Compared to what we’ve used in the past, these are fantastic tools. Integrating D&B Hoovers with Salesforce has also enriched our team’s experience with Salesforce. The combination has definitely been a force multiplier for our team.”
We like to share our customers’ successes and inspire other teams that face similar challenges. Due to the sensitive nature of some customers’ businesses and their data strategies, we respect their privacy and do not identify them by name. Similar results are not guaranteed. Dun & Bradstreet does not validate accuracy of customer statements made in customer stories or spotlight articles.