Why It’s a Critical Job in the Sales Process
Understanding your prospective customer’s business is the foundation of effective sales. Great research is crucial because, as the saying goes, “Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Without solid research, your sales communication can feel generic and uninformed. Today’s buyers are sophisticated, informed, and time-poor. Showing up without meaningful insights into their business and pain points can kill momentum in the first meeting. Your team has worked too hard to secure that meeting for it to go to waste.
Poor research makes it difficult for prospective buyers to differentiate your offering, and worse, it can leave them feeling disengaged or frustrated. Customers don’t want to educate salespeople—they expect them to come prepared. Thorough research establishes credibility, positions you as a trusted advisor, and helps you identify pain points and tailor your pitch effectively.
Blockers That Hold Salespeople Back
Several challenges prevent salespeople from excelling at customer research:
- Information Overload: The sheer volume of available data makes it hard to identify what’s truly relevant.
- Outdated or Incorrect Information: Relying on inaccurate data can undermine your efforts and credibility.
- Time Constraints: Research is time-consuming and often viewed as optional rather than essential.
- Unclear Goals: Salespeople may not know what data to focus on or what tools to use.
- One-Off Approach: Research is often treated as a one-time activity at the start of the sales cycle, leaving opportunities for ongoing insights untapped – and potentially exposed by a competing sales teams is up to date
What Best Practice Looks Like
The best salespeople excel in customer research by following these three habits:
- Conducting Thorough Desk Research at the Start of the Deal Cycle:
- Gather insights from company websites, news articles, LinkedIn profiles, and industry reports.
- Review annual reports, earnings calls, or other publicly available financial data to understand performance, trends, and challenges.
- Research industry innovations, market moves, and competitor activities.
- Use tools like Sales Navigator to summarize relevant account data quickly.
- Overlay findings with your product or service’s value proposition to identify value or challenge statements that demonstrate your knowledge of the customer.
- Continuing Research Throughout the Deal Cycle:
- Use automatic news alerts to stay informed about key developments in the customer’s business.
- In relevant situations, supplement research with value-added activities like conducting a “mystery shop” or an end user interview to learn how people experience their products and services. For example, a mystery shop of a retail outlet might be helpful to provide more context to the need for an upgraded POS system. Or you could interview store staff to learn how the current system is impacting their job performance.
- Synthesizing Research for Impactful Communication:
- Translate findings into tailored customer communications, from emails to proposals.
- Develop probing questions for deeper discovery during sales conversations.
- Prepare for impactful meetings by integrating research insights into dialogue with the customer.
How AI Can Help Salespeople Excel at Customer Research
Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize customer research by enabling salespeople to perform this job better and more consistently across deals. AI offers superhuman capabilities for handling desk research by:
- Effortlessly analyzing large volumes of data from sources like company websites, news articles, and financial reports, and summarizing key insights in seconds.
- Providing real-time alerts on company news, leadership changes, or market movements.
- Consolidating information about key decision-makers, including their roles, recent activities, and preferences from LinkedIn or social media.
- Generating summaries of industry trends and benchmarks to provide context for prospecting.
AI also helps tailor suggestions on how your solution aligns with the company’s pain points and goals. It can even recommend insightful questions to facilitate more impactful conversations.
Important Note: AI is not a substitute for the salesperson’s judgment. While it does the heavy lifting of gathering and summarizing data, the human salesperson must engage with the content, apply situational awareness, and translate insights into actionable strategies.
By taking care of the grunt work and prompting salespeople with suggested actions, content, and questions, AI allows them to focus on what they do best—connecting with customers and advancing the sales process.
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