What Makes a Deal Close Fast?
Sales professionals that exceed their number quarter after quarter have a secret. They focus their effort on the deals most likely to close quickly and they nurture other prospects until the time is right.
What makes a deal close fast? You’ve already screened your leads to make sure they are a good fit. Two other factors tend to accelerate a deal.
- There's a compelling event, or buying trigger, driving the sale.
- You have a strong connection to someone in the company that can make introductions and be your champion.
Customize Your News Feed
Agents gather news stories from over 40,000 sources and sort them into sales-relevant categories. Before doing anything else, it’s a good idea to optimize the news that Demandbase One for Sales (formerly Sales Intelligence) provides so that it’s tailored to your business.
Turn Off Unneeded News Categories
From the Manage Agents page, you can disable agents that are not a trigger for your business. Turning off the flow of irrelevant news stories helps avoid information overload and makes it easier to find critical news stories that can impact a sale.
Add Custom Agents to See Stories with Relevant Keywords
Demandbase One for Sales includes 18 predefined general agent categories that represent cover sales trigger events. Additionally, you can create your own custom agents to include news articles with keywords that are specific to your products or services.
Using Insights to Prioritize
There are several ways you can view insights, or new stories, about a company.
- Browse news from the Overview section of the Company tab. When you're focusing on a single company, you'll see company insights in the Demandbase One for Sales window of an account or opportunity page in your CRM.
- Add the company to a watchlist and get email alerts with the latest news. In addition to getting a daily or weekly email with the latest company news, you can also review the watchlist page to look for companies with a high number of agent results, or news stories. If you have tailored your agents, this can be an indication of an important event.
- Use an agent as a filter when building a company list to show only companies with news stories in specific categories. If you use the agent filter when building a company list, you can find, screen, and prioritize leads in a single step.
Gather All Company Data
The Company tab provides all the information available for a company, including:
- Address
- Company description
- Financials
- Industry information
- Family tree (subsidiaries and acquisitions)
- Revenue
- Employee count
- Website
Use Connections to Prioritize Leads
Similar to buying triggers, having a connection at a company can help accelerate a deal. The Overview section of the Company tab provides a snapshot of your connections at a company. For a more complete view, go to the People tab.
You can use connections as a filter when building a company list to help you find high priority leads.