The Importance of Prospect Research
Researching sales prospects before picking up the phone or sending an email will help you determine whether or not they are a good fit for your company’s products or services. Proper prospect research can also help you determine whether or not your contact is a decision-maker at his or her organization. Since the average B2B purchase now involves 5.4 decision-makers, it’s essential to understand each company’s structure and where within it your contact fits. Good B2B prospect research can also provide a wealth of information that will help you better connect with the prospect and increase the likelihood they’ll want to buy.Top Prospect Research Strategies



Microsoft Office
Yes, you read that right. You can use Microsoft Office for prospect research. How? Well, if you’ve ever installed Office (or used Office 365), you were asked to register your software. As part of that registration process, you provide information including your name, title, email, company name — essentially a lead profile. If you ever receive a Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or other Microsoft Office document from a prospect company, discovering this information is as simple as right-clicking and selecting “Properties.” While you may or may not get a useful contact out of it, you should at the very least discover the format the company uses for their email addresses (i.e. first initial and last name, first name period last name, etc.), which will help you reach your decision-maker, assuming you’ve identified them using LinkedIn, Twitter, or another social network.General Search
Ever heard the joke from your IT department that their real skill is being better at Google Search than you are? It’s not entirely a joke; knowing how to search is just as important as knowing what or where to search. For example, let’s say you wanted to create a blog post on using LinkedIn for prospect research. So, you search “LinkedIn prospect research.”
