What is Fit?
When it comes to sales, most companies have a customer sweet spot. Perhaps you do well in certain geographies or industries, or you sell most successfully to companies of a certain size. You may even have a patch that’s defined by some combination of these attributes.
Fit is about sorting the promising leads from the noise. Later in the sales workflow, you’ll prioritize prospects. But for now, you’re just eliminating the ones that you're not likely to pursue.
Where Do You Get Your Leads?
When it comes to leads, there are three categories that align to different roles in the sale process. Each category uses Sales Intelligence differently during the prospecting stage. Refer to the following table for a quick guide by role.
| Role | Inbound | Outbound | Account Manager |
| Primary Lead Source | Marketing department | Demandbase | Named accounts |
| How to Use Demandbase |
Paste leads into a watchlist for screening. Remove companies that are not a fit. |
Build a company list to find and screen in one step. Before exporting, browse the list and remove any companies that you can tell are not good prospects. |
Add accounts to a watchlist. Build a people list using the watchlist as a filter to find new prospects in your accounts. |
| Tips |
Use your watchlist as a to call list. Remove companies as you make contact. Turn alerts off for your watchlists so you don't get unnecessary emails. |
Paste the companies in your exported list into a watchlist so you can monitor them over time. | Follow the most promising prospects to add them to a watchlist so you can monitor them over time. |
Inbound
If you’re in an inbound sales role, you likely get your leads from a marketing or demand generation team. Unless your company has a well-honed marketing automation system to prescreen these leads, you’ll need to assess them and eliminate those that are not a good fit.
Sales Intelligence has a wealth of company data that can help you quickly assess fit. Rather than search for each company individually in Sales Intelligence or your CRM, you can add the companies to a watchlist. This allows you to quickly scan basic attributes such as location, revenue, and employee count. In a watchlist, you can click on a company for a more detailed view or click the x at the end of the row to remove it.
If your role includes closing deals, you can get email alerts on each company on the watchlist so that you can look for a buying trigger.
If you’re qualifying opportunities that will be closed by someone else, you can use the watchlist as your to call list. Remove companies from the watchlist once you’ve made contact. If you’re not monitoring these companies over time, you can disable email alerts for the watchlist so you don’t get daily emails.
Outbound
If you’re in a hunting role, you can find and screen leads in one step using company lists. Simply enter the parameters that indicate a good fit.
Save the list criteria so that you can rerun it periodically. At Demandbase, we’re constantly updating our data so you’ll get new results each time you run the list.
Researching an Individual Company
Account Manager (or Named Account)
In this role, you’re prospecting for cross-sell and upsell opportunities within predetermined accounts. It’s not prospecting in the traditional sense, but you are looking to broaden your footprint in the account, find champions at higher levels of the organization, and break into new geographies or company divisions.
People lists allow you to create a list of employees based on title, job level, job function, location, and contact info. For instance, if you typically sell to directors and VPs of Marketing, you can create a list of everyone who has an appropriate title within your accounts.
To build a people list for only your accounts, create a watchlist with those accounts first. Then you create a people list from your watchlist by using the Start with a List option on the Build a List page.
When you have your list results, click on the names of the most promising prospects, then click the Follow icon to add them to your watchlist so you can monitor them over time.
Another way to find new contacts within a specific account is to use the interactive filters on the company's People tab. You can review and locate employees who might be good sales targets in that company.