How Innovative Sales Teams Identify High-Value Leads – Manufacturing Industry Challenge

Introduction

To adapt to and grow in a changing business landscape, sales professionals in industrial manufacturing must navigate complex processes, such as meeting increased customer expectations, leveraging technology and AI in sales strategies, and engaging in more sustainable practices. One of the key challenges to growth remains constant: identifying all the high-value businesses in your total addressable market (TAM) that are relevant to your products. As always, but especially in the current environment, it is critical for sales teams to have the correct target customers on their radar.

To ensure that your sales organization is always aware of all the relevant businesses of every size located in your TAM, innovative tools and strategies are essential.

One example customer from the manufacturing sector identified 10,000 new, viable leads in its TAM that ultimately resulted in a double-digit conversion rate increase and millions of dollars worth of new business in its pipeline.

In that vein, this focused blog post highlights the importance of data and how it detects all the high ROI prospects within a territory you delineate. This aligns with how your sales organization operates, with different salespeople or sales teams responsible for specific territories or market segments.

Identifying relevant high ROI businesses in your TAM

The cornerstone of successful marketing & sales efforts is the accurate mapping of all the potential customers that meet not just basic but specific criteria relevant to the manufacturer. When salespeople have incomplete, incorrect information or superficial information about potential customers in a specific territory, they waste their time on irrelevant leads and miss out on real and good opportunities.

Information about SMBs is lacking. One part of the challenge in identifying all the relevant businesses in your TAM is the changing landscape of opening, closing, and moving businesses, particularly in the current inflationary climate. Complicating the task even further is scarce data about SMBs – small and medium-sized businesses – which comprise more than 90% of all businesses and are incredibly relevant to manufacturers. 

This information gap is glaring when it comes to categorizing a type of business, something that should be straightforward. Is it a warehouse or a small-scale tool manufacturer? This is often where the size of the business comes into play. Accurate information about SMBs is hard to come by. Typically, they are not legally required to publish reports of their activities or revenue; they may not have websites and perhaps only show up on Facebook or LinkedIn, or nowhere at all. 

The drawback of insufficient data. This information gap is why it is so hard to locate, for instance, all the metal cutting workshops in a territory, a specialty which includes many small businesses. It very frequently leads to them not being classified correctly or consistently in industry classification sources like the NAICS code. 

Thus, the lion’s share of the information problem stems from insufficient data points. There are many more factors beyond, for instance, company size and revenue, that are required to identify businesses in your TAM.  Many companies typically use only very few, limited and elementary types of criteria to properly characterize their addressable market.  Thus, to discover information about businesses that could be good prospects, other and varied sources of information must be accessed. 
The right data is essential for identifying all the target customers in your TAM. Back to the example above, to properly classify the industry vertical or category to which a business belongs, a good predictive prospecting solution uses not only the NAICS code but cross-references and validates the industry classification and adds the business category, segment, and other data from additional sources, to ensure that all relevant leads are identified. This is one of the key ways of learning about all the potentially relevant businesses in your TAM.

Without the right data, marketing & sales teams are unaware of all the businesses in their territory that exist and that are relevant prospects. The view of the territory is foggy.

Thus, to identify metal cutting workshops relevant to your business, looking at specific keywords on their website or other public-facing sources, the machinery used (e.g., TrueBlend Metal Cutting Machine, Granulator X Series Metal Cutting Machine, Rapid 600 Metal Cutting Machine), employee skill-sets (e.g., CNC milling or turning operators), or specific products they provide (e.g., jet engine parts, knee replacement implants, or wind turbines) can all be excellent indicators that this is a relevant prospect for your business. And they go above and beyond basic facts, such as company size and revenue, to provide you with highly informative data.

Keep in mind that the process of identifying the businesses in your TAM should be conducted regularly. As mentioned, new SMBs may open and some close and at the same time, your business may change too so it’s important to always have an up-to-date picture of your market.

Summary

In the ever-evolving landscape of industrial manufacturing, identifying high-value leads and understanding the total addressable market (TAM) is paramount. The challenges of insufficient data and the scarcity of information about small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) all contribute to the complexity of uncovering high ROI prospects.

The insights and strategies discussed in this blog post offer a comprehensive view of navigating these challenges, ensuring that all relevant prospects are identified, and an accurate market picture is built. By embracing these insights and leveraging the right tools and strategies, businesses can uncover high-value leads, leading to increased conversion rates and substantial new business opportunities.

As we delve into the importance of accurate data and the role of predictive prospecting, it’s essential to understand why these concepts matter to manufacturing leaders. To further explore the significance of predictive prospecting in the manufacturing sector and how it aligns with the goals and needs of industry leaders, read our guide on the impact of predictive prospecting on manufacturing go-to-market strategies.