Data undeniably helps sales. Without any information about potential buyers, you won’t even get moving. With high-quality, relevant data you improve both precision and efficiency – and you lift your brand and your team’s motivation. Sales becomes responsible and fun when every outreach is logically justified and grounded in facts.
So what should you expect from a company data platform today?
1) Company Data 1.0–3.0: where we’re coming from
1.0: The phone book.
Manual hunting: Yellow Pages, call rounds.
2.0: Databases.
Build target groups by company basics (industry, revenue, location). A big leap from 1.0, but the narrow set of data points also narrowed your thinking.
3.0: The internet & open data.
Databases started to enrich: job posts, news, web technologies, social media. You could ask new kinds of questions:
- “Find companies that are hiring B2B salespeople.”
- “Find companies that just raised funding.”
- “Find companies that have a chatbot.”
Creativity flourished, but you were still limited by whatever fields the database exposed, plus human time and patience.
2) Company Data 4.0: individual and AI-directed
The 3.0 problem: even an enriched database only gets you so far. You end up with a list of “maybe” companies and still have to validate whether they’re actually a fit for your product or service.
The 4.0 fix: ask for what you really need and let the machine find the signals and build a justified conclusion.
Examples of the right questions:
- “Does this company currently have office space?”
- “Has the company been investing in brand? Is their marketing story-driven or mainly feature-driven?”
- “Would this company need welding equipment in its operations?”
Often the answer – or at least a probability you can act on – lives in the company’s footprint: financial statements, website, news, job ads. Modern sales tech – like Zefram – expands everything gathered from open and public sources with the exact data points that matter to you.
The outcome: you save serious time and radically improve your argumentation. Every company you contact gets a message tailored to their situation, with reasons that make sense to them. Less outreach, higher conversion, less waste.