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Warning: You Might Stop Beating Your Head Against a Wall by Reading This

All sales development representatives—not to mention anyone who’s ever bought a list—know the worst part of targeting companies is list curation. This is a time-consuming research task relished by exactly no one.

Any marketer or person who has worked with sales development tools longs for a magic wand—a fantastic research tool for sales development teams that will make list curation go away.

How can b2b companies use big data and the tools that harness big data to dig up relevant prospects?

Fortunately, Gal Har-Zvi, co-founder and CEO of Unomy, knows about a dozen ways to turn a list of 100 (or 100 million) into the perfect 10 or 15.

Listen to Rick Holmes pick his brain about creative ways to cut through the list to get at companies and locate specific people.

Finding relevant prospects

This is what everyone in b2b wants to know—how to find relevant prospects without the chore of list curation.

One thing that is rarely talked about is building hyper-targeted lists. And, this is what all account-based marketing starts with: searching on a list.

The novice or uninitiated might start out by plugging in a job category, say, finance. All of a sudden, they’ve got 139 contacts in whatever tool they’re using, but they’ve got no idea whether these are actually relevant.

But say you start with companies on a business list and want to slice and dice until you’ve found the 12 people who actually matter. Gal’s company, Unomy, specializes in this.

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“You don’t want a list of 50 companies, and this is a good way to find additional companies without losing focus.” – Gal Har-Zvi

He launched a fast-growing new product about a year and a half ago that hundreds of customers in the U.S. are discovering really helps whittle things down to relevant prospects.

One awesome successful tactic used within Unomy to get to companies that you wouldn’t otherwise see? Using really specific job titles. (Forensic accounting, not just finance.)

“A technique that is unique and successful,” Gal says, “is using our unique Chrome extension to scrape the companies from any page.”

This is how Gal explains it: the sales development representative or person who is building the list is not limited anymore to the vendor’s filters. It’s a major problem, by the way, in buying a list—you’re kind of stuck with the way the data was arranged when you got it. But not anymore. You don’t have to go to a dashboard and contort the vendor’s database using filters like revenue, size, or industry. Instead, you just zip online and search for any list to apply Unomy’s tool to get information about companies.

“So, for example, you can type in a list of companies who attended latest Dreamforce conference, or Fortune 500 companies, or any portfolio page of a venture capital,” Gal says. But there’s more. Go to a website for a trade show and (poof!) you’ll have all the companies listed on that page.

Or think outside the box, go to a competitor’s site, and look at their use cases. “The idea is you can find any list online and use our Chrome extension. In one click, it will scan the page to identify all the companies, match them to our database, and show you their comprehensive profile.”

"No more tedious researching companies one by one! You can use our filters to leave only a list of decision makers at relevant companies,” Gal says.

Sorting relevant prospects

The most obnoxious part of handling lists is sorting through it, curating it, trying to sift through lists to arrive at the stuff that matters to you. Basically, it’s a slog.

What if you could add a layer of semi-automation by using a tool to source 1) the companies that go on your list, then 2) contacts that really work?

You’d have a dream come true. “This is one way to think of the outside of the box and find relevant companies using any search word you can think of,” Gal says.

Sure, you can also use the filters in a standard way to slice and dice the companies to find relevant contacts. But remember, you’re not tied to standard filters or search material like company size and location. You can be specific, really specific. You could look for

  • specific technologies
  • website popularity
  • sales triggers (companies that got funded recently)
  • specific team size (companies with 20 or more salespeople)
  • website keywords

You can be very targeted in your prospecting, which will save you immense amounts of time. Once you have your list of companies, you can easily get the contact information of the people working at the companies, down to just the forensic accountants, if you want.

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“The idea is you can find any list online and use our Chrome extension. In one click, it will scan the page to identify all the companies, match them to our database, and show you their comprehensive profile.” – Gal Har-Zv

Here’s another great application for companies: Keyword context within web pages.

So there are lists out there with five million companies indexed by the 10 most dense keywords. If you’re in a new industry or a niche industry, you could really avoid one of the weaknesses of using other constructed databases.

If you use the Unomy functionality for keyword presence, a filter you can apply, you can look for a specific keyword on a website or a company description. It’s important because you only want a certain quantity. “You don’t want a list of 50 companies, and this is a good way to find additional companies without losing focus,” Gal points out.

Other constructed databases are constructed from lists of prospects other companies want to sell to. So you’re looking to pare down and sort a list of 100 people who could be perfect, but 100 is just too many.

The faster you can curate these lists with better tools in your arsenal, the better off your marketing team will be.

Contact Gal Har-Zvi on the Unomy website or at gal@unomy.com.

 

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