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Ask HN: How you all do sales research?

6 points by quoteexcec ↗ HN
My friend who does enterprise sales manually ctrl-F keywords on news, company reports and earning calls etc to see if the management of the target companies had publicly shown interest in his solution or problem so he can quote them in his call.

Any of you do something similar in sales? Any other sales prep routine you have?

10 comments

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wslh
Hi! What do you mean with sales research? Creating a list of prospects before qualifying them? A typical sales funnel?
quoteexcec
Hi!! Different stages of sales, including prospecting. My friend literally drops the quotes during conversation/presentation/proposal. I am generally curious if you do anything similar or some other tricks!
wslh
I mean you can follow databases such as Crunchbase/TechCrunch, monitor social media, and extract information using LLMs or less sophisticated technologies such as keywords, and entities search.
quoteexcec
Do you automate that process? Also how often do you do this 'monitoring' or 'search' at your company?
paulcole
How far along are you in building your sales research process startup?
quoteexcec
Just started to explore this idea space. Built a super simple MVP to keyword search over earning transcripts. Are you in sales? Need more feedback and info in this space.
paulcole
What you need is sales experience yourself.
wslh
Yes, simple custom in-house development. Everyday. Clearly this is just one source of information, many people contribute daily news and opportunities in our Slack.
quoteexcec
Wow, that sounds amazing! Seems like you are really on top of your game. Where do people usually find the news and opportunities that fell out of your monitoring system?
ameliap24
I work in sales too, and what I do is use a leads list and leverage AI tools that track activities or posts from the contacts on that list. I’ve integrated this data into my emailing tool, so I can see when a contact has been active and adjust my outreach accordingly.

I use leadbird.io, but I’m sure there are other tools that do the same. Honestly, I haven’t seen a significant boost in conversion just by using these tools so I guess it all comes down to being targeted and relevant when reaching out. If a customer sees the value in your product, these tools can be helpful, but sometimes it just adds noise. To each their own, though! You can also outsource this process if you prefer not to handle it yourself.