A Role-Based B2B Prospecting Guide

This is something many people may be familiar with, so here's the TLDR if that's you: Know who you're talking to in order to get to the decision maker, make a note of the job titles or roles these people hold. This list is key in building a wider search.

Many B2B prospecting methods don't start a conversation with the decision maker in a company, but rather have to either go through a gatekeeper or be referred in by someone else in the company to the ideal customer. It's important to know who these people are in order to build a precision prospecting strategy to start up conversations at prospective client companies at scale. Make a list of these initial contacts, noting their job title.

This may require a bit of work but if your CRM has a good record of contacts across an opportunity you may be able to look at your Closed Won list and work your way back to the first meaningful contact for a given opp.

These initial contacts are key in building out a predictable and consistent strategy for continually pulling out qualified leads. However, many are probably thinking right now about how many emails they send and conversations they have that just go nowhere. This brings us to our next step: Knowing who not to talk to.

Again, TLDR: Keep a list of the conversations that go nowhere. Again, keep a list of roles and job titles. We will use this to narrow our search and filter out bad eggs.

Being picky about who to talk to is not a bad thing when it comes to building an outreach strategy. Bulk Email can be fruitless and talking to anybody who will answer the phone can lead to hours wasted on conversations that were never going to go anywhere.

Unfortunately learning the line between who is and who is not worth talking to is largely a trial and error process. Use what logic you can, but for the most part you're going to need to review the conversations you're having and understand exactly why some are fruitless where others aren't.

Most of the time a good portion of this filtering boils down to (you guessed it) job titles. Make a list of all the job titles that you know won't lead to meaningful conversations.

No TLDR for this one! Boolean queries get complicated. That's why we built a tool to be able to simplify them. There will be links with each query to see it in the query builder.

At this point you should have two lists, a "goes somewhere" list and a "won't go anywhere" list. From here we need to boil those down into individual words.

Let's take an example set of job titles for people more or less in the Product department:

Boiling these down there are a few keywords which tell us we're likely to have a good conversation and some that will tell us we won't, but some of these are ambiguous. For example we definitely want to talk to product managers, but there are exceptions. We may want to talk to product specialists, but only if they are senior, and not if they are "product support specialists".

All of this is confusing enough to keep in your head, but writing it in the oh-so user-friendly boolean syntax can be an absolute nightmare. Let's break down an easy way to keep track of it and use the boolean query tool to visualize it.

You'll probably start out with a word to narrow to the correct business sector, for this example that word is "product".

Next we need a list of words from our "will convert" list. We want titles that match any one of these words, so we add them in an OR block:

Pretty good so far, we've already factored out engineers and analysts by omission. Not everything can be removed by omission though, there are some specific titles that have the keywords we want, but others we don't. To remove those from our lists we need to add their keywords to a NOT block.

We've done alright but we've lost a title off our good list: Assistant Director of Product Development. The current setup throws away any role with the word assistant, which is not really what we want.

At this point we have to make a choice: Do we specifically not want this one "assistant" role, do we only want roles where "assistant" and "director" appear together, or are there a set of cases where "assistant" is fine, but everything else should be thrown out.

Let's look at what each of those options might look like, starting with specifically eliminating one role.

The obvious first approach to this might be adding the whole role to the NOT portion of the query:

This achieves our first circumstance where we specifically do not want that role, however many roles can be re-worded and mixed around, or sometimes have minor words added. For example a certain paper supply company may have a role "assistant to the product manager", a role you might consider the same. Instead we want to eliminate the case of all of the key words appearing, but not necessarily in that order:

"product" is not needed here as we've already said that we are only working with roles that have "product" in them somewhere.

Now let's take a look at two more queries:

These queries are a bit like a double negative. With the "assistant" section we can think of it as being in a new query, one we're going to throw away all the results of. This is why we can now instruct it to give us all the roles which have "assistant" but do not have "director" or "executive".
A rewording of that may be throw away all roles which have "assistant" unless they also have "director" or "executive".

This is a simple example with only a handful of titles, once you apply this to a LinkedIn search you'll quickly find new ways you will need to limit your queries.

Plug your query into sales navigator's 'Title' search field along with any parameters you might want to use, and voila, you have a targeted list of people to reach out to.

With a targeted list of contacts in hand the only thing left to do is reach out. This is a whole topic for discussion itself but I'll leave a couple of basic points about this specific strategy.

Know the relationship between who you are talking to and who you want to be talking to

In the event you're reaching out to someone in hopes of a referral to a decision maker, it's easy to overlook the person you're directly talking to. If you're asking someone to reach out to their lead or manager, give them something valuable; something that may score them brownie points. They may not be the decision maker, but they can easily be an advocate.

Keep it simple

Everyone should know that your first touch points like this shouldn't be big marketing emails with lots of graphics. It's important to keep that mindset throughout: Even the content, intent, and structure of the message should be as simple as possible. Set the reason for the conversation, ask for one thing, and ask it clearly. You know, basic Inception rules.

With targeted lists like this it is really important to keep everything clean and organized. If you don't have a clean flow from prospecting to outreach you can quickly lose track of what lists are targeted to what. A good databasing system with manual tagging will work, any automation you can apply will make that even easier.

Some prospecting tools like Tofu have settings to automatically label prospects and put them into lists. I would suggest labeling them in case you want to re-target these prospects later.

When you build out your actual sequences don't forget to limit the number of contacts per company you are reaching out to; bombarding a company with emails can get you flagged as spam and potentially build a negative image of your company.

I've assumed so far that you have a list of companies ready to target, but there are pieces of this strategy you might want to keep in mind when building that list.

Titles can be Industry-dependent

This may be obvious, but make sure the companies you're targeting all have the roles you are looking for. Look out for words like 'Consultant', 'Analyst', or 'Director' which may indicate very different roles from industry to industry.

Company Size

Depending on the roles you are targeting, segmenting your list by company size can be vitally important. Obviously there are roles that exist at larger companies that are nonexistent at smaller ones, however what a role entails at a large company may also be vastly different at a smaller one. Keep in mind as well the number of people that may have a title at a company of the size that you are targeting. Small companies will likely need a wider approach than larger ones.

Competitive Information

Any way you can segment based on competitive information is going to be incredibly helpful. Think of a few products you may be replacing at the company you're selling to; how you approach that conversation could probably vary quite a bit depending on which product you are replacing. An entirely different approach applies to when you're not replacing any product.

There's no general step here that applies to everyone, but consider how these conversations might go and what information you can use to segment your lists to shape those conversations ahead of time.

Hopefully this gives you a few things to think about or a new perspective on something you've already incorporated in your sales prospecting plan.

In short, for those jumping straight to the bottom:

• Target companies as tightly as you can
• Keep a list of which job titles are converting (or referring) and which are not
• Use those lists to build a boolean job title search on Sales Nav (or other prospecting sources)
• Keep everything organized to smooth out the process
• Reach out in a way that's focused and keeps everyone happy