“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
– Abraham Lincoln
In sales, preparing well is key to winning.
That’s why you need to:
- Research your target companies
- Find out if they have a problem
- Find out if you can solve it with your product/service
- Research your prospects
In the next few slides, we will show you how to find key company information such as:
- Correct domain names
(Using the right sources) - Revenues
- Funding
Why is this important?
Because sales is hard.
So, unless you have the right information about your target companies, you’re shooting in the dark.
Ready? Let’ go!
Before that, some context:
In our previous chapter, we learnt:
- How to find companies?
- How to scrape thousands of company names from a URL
- How to copy + paste them onto a spreadsheet
Now, let us build on what we learnt earlier.
Quick reminder:
We’re looking for US-based SaaS companies.
15 Steps to find the company names?
Step 1: In this step, we’ll find the right company domain names.
Search for the company in Google to view its website.
Step 2: Now, we need to add the company domain to our original spreadsheet.
Step 3: Then, we need to confirm if the company is a US-based company or not.
For that, we’ll check for their registered address on Crunchbase.
Step 4: How do we figure if a company is a SaaS company or not?
We will look for their:
- Product page
- Pricing page
- CTA for product demo
- Any other indicators…
On their website, they have product and pricing pages. They invite website visitors to book a demo too.
Which means they sell a SaaS product. 👍
But, we won’t take chances. To be sure, we will visit their product and pricing pages.
Their pricing page talks about per user pricing, custom plans etc. 👍
Their product page also talks about the benefits/features – which confirms that they are a product company 👍
So, we’re good to go!
Step 5: Then, look for the company’s LinkedIn page. Ideally, you’ll find the link for it in the footer section of the website.
Click on it to visit them on LinkedIn.
Step 6: Visiting their LinkedIn page will tell you about the people who work there.
(You’ll need people info for your outreach campaign.)
Then, copy their LinkedIn page URL and paste it against their name in your spreadsheet.
Step 7: Now, we will need to find their revenues.
For that, we’ll use databases like ZoomInfo, Crunchbase, and Owler.
For simplicity, we’ll check ZoomInfo.
It says, the company revenues are <$5 Million.
We will add their revenue numbers in our spreadsheet.
That way, we know that we’re chasing the right companies.
Pro tip
Finding revenue information tells us if the company is earning money to meet its expenses like employee payroll, tech license fee etc.
So, if a company does not report revenues, it may not be an ideal prospect (unless there are other reasons to sell to them).
Step 8: We’ll also find if they have raised any funding. Many SaaS companies raise funding and make it public.
We found from Tracxn that this company has raised $6.22M in funding so far.
We’ll add the funding information on our spreadsheet too.
Notice how our spreadsheet is slowly becoming a solid database.
Pro tip
If a SaaS company has raised funding, chances are they are looking to grow fast.
Plus, it also shows that a group of investors have done their due diligence on this company before investing money.
So, make sure to find companies that have recently raised money.
Now, we have a good database of target companies to pursue.
In the next chapter, we’ll look for:
- Executive information
- Their work history, their roles, designations, etc.
- What make them ideal prospects?
Stay tuned!
Conclusion
So, in this blog, we’ve figured how to scrape companies from a list in an URL and port it to a friendly spreadsheet that lets you do more with it.
But, it doesn’t stop there.
You’d still need to get more information about the company to know if they’re the right fit or not.
Then, you need to research executives, decision makers, their email ids etc.
There’s a long road ahead and we’ve just taken the first few steps.
Here’ the entire journey broken down for you:
- Part 1: How to get thousands of company names for cold outreach in 5 mins?
- Part 2: How to find valuable information about target companies for your outbound marketing?(Covered here)
- Part 3: How to find the right executives in target companies for outbound marketing?
- Part 4: How to find and verify validity of executive email ids in target companies?
- Part 5: How to write outbound emails that get you responses?
There you go, you have the complete guide to kickstart your outbound marketing.
