How to use Vainu for sales prospecting

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Any successful sales team starts with filling the pipeline with more than enough opportunities. In the end: sales is a numbers game.

Vainu’s company information platform helps salespeople easily spot, group, filter, and create target groups of accounts that fit their ideal customer profile best and export them to their CRM.

Looking for scaling SaaS companies? Or perhaps family-owned SMB’s that use a certain type of software? Vainu got you covered: with 100+ filters the most ideal prospects are right at your fingertips.

In this guide, we’ll go over a few basic prospecting searches. Also, we’ll go over the basis of prospecting and outbound sales processes to have you set up for success right away.

TLDR? Scroll down for a step-by-step example of a fruitful prospect search.

Data-driven B2B Sales Prospecting: where to start

Any scaling B2B with a CRM in place will reak the benefits from automating and systemizing their prospecting process.

By systemizing the process of identifying potential customers and adding them to the CRM as the first step of the outbound funnel, the prospected target audience will match your ideal customer profile and will be more likely to turn into leads and business.

Also, by doing so, teams save a heaping amount of time normally spent on lots of digging and gruntwork.

So, before you start prospecting with Vainu, it makes sense to have two things in place:

1. Your ICP: an idea about the characteristics of the ideal customer for your business or product
2. A (basic) outbound funnel and plan for how to proceed with the soon to be sourced leads

1. Determine ICP

In any prospecting session, your ICP will be your guiding light.

An ICP is a fictitious description of your most perfect customer on an account level (versus buyer persona; which is on a personal level). This type of customer costs the least to acquire (low CAC), stays with you for a long time (retention is high), has a strong lifetime value (LTV), is less likely to churn, and, eventually, champions your brand and will bring you referrals.

Defining an ICP will also help you to not waste time on (inbound) prospects who don’t need you. Don’t be afraid to disqualify a prospect.

Considering the ICP: what do the most valuable customers have in common?

There is a multitude of characteristics to extract, these are the most common:

• Industry, financial situation, location
• How do they describe themselves? Are there any common such as sustainability, diversity, or innovation?
• In what type of circumstances did they buy your product? Are they growing and hiring people or shrinking and do they suffer layoffs? Did they just move or launch a new product?
• Are there any technologies they are using? Or in general; is their business digitized or not?

2. Basic outbound funnel

Most B2B companies have both an inbound and outbound funnel.

• Inbound being creating ads and content for an audience to discover and educate themselves with.
• Outbound is when you target a specific group of companies that are an obvious fit for your product or service and approach them directly.

An outbound funnel consists of 5 stages:

1. Identifying accounts – using Vainu and the determined ICP
2. Setting them up for outreach – importing the accounts into your CRM
3. Outreach – medium/channel, pitch, cadence, and, dedication
4. Convert to leads – add meetings to agenda including an invitation for the prospect
5. Hand-over to the next stage – include all sourced info into CRM so the next person can provide a great customer experience.

Where Vainu fits in

Use Case

With Vainu, users have access to a country’s full registry of organizations, with real-time updates and trigger-based alerts.

With Vainu, users create lists of target accounts to use for sales or marketing activities. After creating the lists, the user exports them to their CRM with one click.

Once added to the CRM or selected as target groups, a user can set alerts for (specific) changes within that target group. You can even create workflows that are set off by these sales triggers, allowing you to open up deals and set off tasks or sequences based on a company’s situation.

For whom

Vainu users generally work from their CRM daily, aiming to create a very customer-centered sales and marketing strategy.

Therefore, it makes sense that Vainu’s best performing and happiest clients are the ones who work with one of the big 5 CRM’s: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Dynamics 365, Salesforce of Superoffice.

A smaller group of their customers simply make use of the data and set up an API-based integration.

The platform

Use 100+ filters to search for best-fit prospects → Whether you’re looking for companies hiring actively, moving offices, or using a certain tech stack–you’ll find them all with Vainu.

You can build a list of best-fit prospects by manually searching for relevant information through Google. However, reading countless About us pages can only get you so far, and you would miss less obvious attributes. Plus, the amount of time you need will hurt. Simply put, building a prospect list manually is the slow, painful death of a salesperson. Vainu does it for you.

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Static data doesn’t cut it anymore. Companies and organizations, like people, are continuously changing and evolving: new hires, new offices, international expansion… There are moments when your product or service will be needed more than at another time.

Organizations will fall in and out of your list of best-fit prospects. Thus, it makes sense to use real-time prospect lists instead of relying on static lists with data that can (and will) become stale and outdated.

With or without connected CRM

The purpose of powering your CRM with Vainu data is to make sure you have instant access to the most accurate company information for prospecting, account research, and marketing activities such as creating ABM target lists. This will result in more relevant, timely, and converting sales and marketing efforts in the end, with lots of time saved by skipping manual work.

Vainu supports these CRM systems: Dynamics 365, Hubspot Sales, Lime CRM, Pipedrive, Salesforce, SuperOffice and Upsales. Aside from these an API integration is also quite easily set up but is somewhat less plug and play.

In short: Vainu’s simple (yet customizable) integration is great for saving your time on more important matters, such as, well, your customers and prospects.

Make a search: step by step

Here’s how you can create a new company list in Vainu. Follow these steps and find new prospects that match your criteria:

1. Click the list icon on the navigation bar on the left. Then click the “+ New List” button!

NOTE!: If you wish to create a list from an Excel/CSV file, please select the “Upload list” option and follow our guide here: Start from an Excel file

2. After you have clicked the new list button, you will see a default list of companies.

You can now start using filters by clicking the plus (+) icon under the list name. Vainu creates a random name for the list which can be edited by clicking on the name.

3. Select the filter you would like to use, select the option/scale inside the filter and then click “Apply filter”. After this, you can close the filter by clicking outside the box or by clicking the filter name.

4. If you wish to add a new filter, just click the plus icon again and select the filter you would like to use next.

5. After you have added at least one filter, you can save the list and access it at any time.

Think of your ideal customer profile when using the search filters. Luckily, the possibilities of narrowing down your search are endless, and you can, for instance, use some of the following criteria:

• Profile: Industry, actively hiring companies, registered for export.
• Location and financial information: Draw an area on a map, use postal codes or cities and find companies according to revenue or the number of employees.
• Information found on companies’ websites: Technologies, language versions, or keywords used to describe themselves, like for example ‘sustainability’.
• Recent signals or happenings: Recruitments, M&As, and significant investments, which are recognized in companies.

Vainu Custom Industries

Vainu Custom Industry is a modern way to profile companies based on what they do, often more accurate than standard industry codes.

Vainu has built its own AI model that uses website content and extensive training data sets to determine unique industries for each company.

The picture below shows the difference between Official Industry and Vainu Custom Industry:

It is usable as: 1) filter in Vainu, 2) exported CSV, 3) access with API.

Once activated, Vainu Custom Industry is available in the platform as a search filter and visible in the company profiles. The data can also be exported in the CSV files and is accessible through our API. This way you can bring the information to the Marketing Automation tool or CRM.

The model is based on companies’ real website content and trained and validated by our in-house data research team every day, most of the companies get 1-7 custom industries depending on how rich their website is.

Export searches for use elsewhere

Export to Excel

With the Export feature, you can export a list of up to 200 companies. You can easily export prospect lists from Vainu. First, you need to save the list you wish to export and then click the ‘Send to…’ icon and choose Excel/CSV to export.

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With the basic export feature, you can export up to 200 companies/export. Export includes these data points: Name, Business ID, Address, Contact information, Status, Form of company, Industry, Social media links and figures,  Financial figures (employee count, turnover among others).

When you click the Export icon a new pop-up window will open. If you need to get more information on the personnel working for a certain company, select a ‘profession class’ to get all names relevant to the selected employee group. You can select one or more ‘profession classes’. When you have selected to export profession classes it will result in duplicate rows on export, because each row represents one employee. Contact information, if available, can be found in the last columns.

Export to other systems

You can choose from a variety of platforms where to export companies and signals. First, make sure that you have connected your CRM or Slack account in Vainu settings before trying to export. Exporting companies and signals is super simple! There are 3 ways to do it:

1. Export companies from your search results By clicking on the icon on the company card, you can export the information to your chosen platform, such as Pipedrive, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Upsales, SuperOffice, HubSpot or Slack.
2. Export a company from the company profile You can find the same export icons on the company card in the top right corner.
3. Export a signal in the Signals view You can find the same export icons when Viewing Signals.

Pricing and subscriptions

Vainu is a subscription-based service. You can check out www.vainu.com/pricing for the latest overview of subscriptions and costs.

To learn more about Vainu and have specific questions answered, request a free demo through their website.

Or see our full review on Vainu;