Building a Prospecting Movement: How to Brand Yourself Like a Pro

The main responsibility of business development is to generate a pipeline of new business opportunities. For teams looking to win new customers, this work is essential.

As the G2 Investor Solutions team prepared to bring their product to market, they simultaneously ramped up their demand generation efforts. In this context, the team had to develop an outbound prospecting movement in order to generate a pipeline. As the first Business Development Representative (BDR) to join this business unit, I was in charge of creating a process that was both scalable and repeatable.

Using an iterative approach involving many experiences and many lessons learned, I was able to create this process from scratch and generate a predictable pipeline for the team.

By running targeted and structured email campaigns, I educated potential investors on the power of G2 data, delivered content illustrating the problems they can solve with our tool, and explained why it was in their interest to make an appointment. As a result, the broader investor landscape began to take notice of G2 Investor Solutions and flocked to the platform in order to gain a competitive edge.

Whether this is your first survey or you're a seasoned vet, it helps to have a plan of attack. Read on for some proven best practices and strategies to get you started.

Sourcing and prioritization of accounts

In many situations, you may find that your existing account list is incomplete or contains too much noise to be useful. Your list of accounts may be missing key firmographic information, such as employee size or recent fundraising. Or you may have to start from scratch with no list of accounts.

With the tips below, you can develop a strategy for maintaining an accurate and reliable list of accounts.

Avenues for Supply Accounts

In order to scale a business development movement, it's important that your account list includes prospects within your ideal audience. The tips below will help you find accounts that will be receptive to your outreach and need your product.

Recurring alerts: Properly leveraging popular tools like Crunchbase and Google is fundamental to creating a process. To implement these alerts, it is necessary to first isolate a few factors: the industry you are targeting, the number of employees of the prospects, the date of the last funding and any other factors important to your search. With this information, you can set up recurring alerts from these tools, so you get a new batch in your inbox as often as you want. Newsletter subscription: Whatever industry you are targeting, there is likely a newsletter tailored precisely to your area of ​​interest. By subscribing to newsletters, you can be kept up to date with changing market dynamics and new entrants into the space, which will not only help you find new accounts, but also spark ideas for the content generation as part of your outreach. Account Prioritization Mechanisms

Not all accounts are created equal, and different prospects will be at different stages of their buying journey. Prioritizing accounts and providing timely outreach will give you a significant advantage and lead to higher response rates. Using the mechanisms below, you can identify which accounts to prioritize.

Use current events as triggers: Generally, the more personalized the awareness, the higher the conversation rate. To that end, a powerful lever to pay attention to is the level of customization (and the building blocks required to reach that level). By referencing current events and industry trends, you can prioritize accounts that have recently had major announcements or important events. This way, you can ensure that every prospect you contact will receive outreach tailored to them, making your communications more impactful and improving metrics.

Include highly relevant and personalized content in the copy to grab the reader's attention.

Social Media Presence: Simply put, this technique aims to prioritize accounts based on their social media presence. Companies with active profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and their...