A Guide to Research-Based Prospecting in 2023

Research Tactics for SDRs

There’s a lot of discourse around the value of research in the sales development world. Is it worth the opportunity cost? Does it make sense to minimize research to maximize activity? Can prospects tell? Do they even care if my rep has done their research? Valid questions – managers want their reps to spend time on revenue-generating activities, after all.

It’s easy to get lost in a research rabbit hole. Then…BAM! Hours have flown by without a single activity to show for it. Tsk tsk.

But if you’ve ever been in a situation where a prospect bashes you for not knowing anything about them/their company, you know there’s value in preparing at least the bare minimum.

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Let’s break the fourth wall real quick. I thrived on research as an SDR. Without it, I felt blind. I was truly, in the most basic definition of the word, cold calling my prospects – and I hated that. I needed to know something about my prospect before picking up the phone or composing an email – otherwise, I was just like the rest of the mindless robots reaching out. So I put a premium on research in my SDR days.

But this guide isn’t about me, it’s about you.

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What are your initial thoughts? Are you a ‘cold calling purist’ who doesn’t need to do much research to see success? Or do you need to know everything about your prospect before reaching out?

Chances are, you’re somewhere in the middle…whatever that means.

So…what’s an SDR to do? How can they balance research and activity to ensure they’re focusing enough on both camps?

Let’s hear it straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth.

We sat down with demandDrive’s own Greg Cammarata to talk about his research process. We’ll cover things like how he pulls in new accounts, his process for mapping those accounts to find decision-makers, where he finds information on those contacts to help personalize his messaging, and what it looks like when he ties it all together.

Before we dive into Greg’s process, let’s take a step back and ask:

What Does ‘Research’ Even Mean?

I’ll set the stage for you: Buyers have changed. It’s simple as that.

They’ve probably heard of your product, know the space, or have talked with a competitor of yours. They’re more educated than ever before.

That means calling them up out of the blue and ‘solution-selling’ someone on features they don’t need (and already have a working knowledge about) is out of the question. Everyone is doing (something like) that, so you HAVE to stand out.

When an SDR goes above and beyond to show prospects they’ve done the work to learn about their business and their unique goals/challenges, it paints them as a more credible resource. You’re proving that you know more about them than they thought you did – and that’s more than enough to separate yourself from other SDRs.

The best way to do that is through personal messaging (or relevant at the very least), a working understanding of their responsibilities, and a solid grasp of the various value props your solution can provide.

“Show me that you know me.”

That means top-performing SDRs are:

• Leveraging LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, and other data tools to map out accounts and piece together who cares about what. From company hierarchies to job descriptions to social posts, you can paint an idea of what your prospect cares about – and tailor your messaging based on that.
• Monitoring industry news and trends on social sites like Owler, Twitter, Crunchbase, etc. to get an idea of what’s happening in the lives of their prospects and how that could impact decision-making timelines.
• Getting introspective about their own solution and the value it can provide. They’re digging into the “why” of their outreach and answering questions like “what problems am I trying to solve?” and “why would a prospect care about my solution?”

Ultimately, the goal of research is to build a deeper understanding of your target accounts, industry, and goals & challenges of your prospects. With that, you can have more productive conversations with prospects and build a more consistent and healthy pipeline.

In short, you’re looked at as a resource and consultant instead of another SDR trying to sell something.

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Want to dive deeper? Check out a few resources below that further highlight the importance and impact of research:

-What’s the decision pyramid?
-Dive deeper into the 3 r’s of decision making
-Get a recap of our SDR symposium on research tactics

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Ok, now that we know what ‘research’ looks like and why it’s important, let’s dive into how Greg – a practitioner of outbound prospecting – executes his process.

We’ll cover:

1. His goal for net new accounts to pull in on a daily/weekly basis.
2. His process for mapping those accounts and pulling in relevant contacts.
3. How he executes account & industry-level research – and why that’s important.
4. Moving that research to the contact level and the importance of personalizing your messaging – to a certain level.
5. Wrapping it all up into a cohesive, repeatable outreach strategy.

Watch our interview below 👇

Apologies for the audio/video delay. Curse my poor internet connection! – AJ

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Dang, that was some great stuff! Greg brought up some solid tips on building out & optimizing a research process. There are a few major points I want to highlight and further develop to round out the discussion.

Let’s Dive Deeper

What does your process look like for pulling in new accounts? How many are you bringing in each week? Does that change, or do you try and keep it consistent?

When you decide how many accounts to pull in for a week, you have to base it on a few factors:

• What’s the focus of your campaign? Are you working the quality angle, or do you need to fill your top of funnel with as many leads as possible?
• What does your typical research process look like?
• How comfortable are you with the process you’ve built?
• Do you have a lot of other campaigns going on right now?

Any of the above can impact the bandwidth you have for pulling in new accounts for the week. For example, if you’re really comfortable with your process and the goal is to touch as many new prospects as possible, then maybe you aim for +50 new accounts. But if you’re doing a lot of research into a target account list built by your marketing team, you might be more comfortable with +25 new accounts.

Early on, you’ll have to run a lot of trial and error to find that sweet spot of net new accounts. But the more you do it, the better you’ll be at neither overwhelming nor underwhelming yourself. That process becomes second nature, and knowing how many accounts to pull in starts to look less like a complex math problem and more like simple pattern recognition.

💡 Pro Tip: The faster you build a framework for this, the better. Can you pull in accounts on an ad-hoc basis? Sure, but it’s a lot easier (and less time-intensive) when you can do it consistently. The best way to do this is to really understand your account criteria (trigger events, ideal profile, intent signals, etc.). The better you are at identifying and uncovering those criteria the more efficient you’ll be at pulling new accounts.

A great way to ensure you’re pulling in enough accounts is to set up some type of automated lead generation function. Tools like Visitorqueue allow you to see who’s been on your website but declined to leave any information behind. These are great accounts to segment and build campaigns around, as they (should) already know who you are and what you do AND they’re easy to add to your account pull process.

Once you have the accounts, what’s your next step? Do you start mapping them out by person, or learn more about the account?

Diving into account-level research often uncovers the right contacts to get in touch with, so I guess the answer is a little bit of both. Realistically, it starts with research on the account and then naturally flows into contact-level research.

The research should also build on itself. Here’s what that means.

• Start your research by gaining a basic understanding of what the company does. Resources like LinkedIn, Owler, and the company website are great for giving you a 10,000 foot view.
• Take that knowledge and start looking up relevant articles, promoted content, social posts, etc. – the goal is for you to see what this company is talking about and what they care about right now. Without a basic idea of what they do, this step becomes pretty difficult.
• Start to think to yourself: based on what I know about the company and my solution, why would they want to talk with me? Start building up use cases in your head based on what you’ve uncovered so far.
• You’ll notice that through your content research you’ll start to naturally uncover the right contacts. You might come across their social posts or maybe they were mentioned in an article – either way, by doing the account-level research you often give yourself a bit of a head start on the contact-level research as well.

Start big, go small.

How do you go about researching account-level information? What sources are you going to the most? 

There are a ton of options out there for finding out account-level information. We mentioned a few above, but here’s a more comprehensive list of the sources we use:

• Owler is great for company insights, news, trends, competitors, and general information. It’s a ‘big picture’ type of resource that gives you a little bit of everything you need to know before reaching out to an account.
• Feedly is great for getting curated information on your target accounts & industry sent directly to your inbox. It’s a great way to automate some research on trigger events and company trends.
• Google Alerts is like a slightly watered-down version of the above. Google will scour the web for any news on a topic of your choice and deliver it to your inbox. Great for keeping up with major industry trends and big company news.
• Crunchbase is known for having quality insight into funding, acquisitions, and other financial news – but it’s branching out into a more comprehensive research platform. There are lots of signals/triggers you can search for to help you build out a profile on your target accounts & industry.
• LinkedIn is vast, but it contains useful information if you know where to look. You can glean useful information from company profile pages – what the company does, how they talk about themselves, and what content they’ve posted recently. You can also use the search function to find news articles and posts related to your ICP/industry/topic of choice.
• And when in doubt, just look at the company website. Great places to find relevant information are their news section, product page, and “about us” page. All of these will help you piece together an idea of why this company is a good fit for your solution, and what a unique value proposition would look like.

Same question for contact level research. Where are you finding the best information? Is it better to personalize an email, or just keep it relevant? How deep into research do you typically go?

The nice thing about starting with account-level research is that you end up doing some contact-level research at the same time. All of the resources mentioned above can help you find more than just account-level information – they can be used to glean information on stakeholders and decision-makers as well.

Once you have an idea of who could be good prospects to reach out to, your next best bet is (in most cases) LinkedIn. This is where you can confirm what you’ve found in your account-level research.

The nice thing about LinkedIn is that all profiles look pretty much the same (structure-wise), so you now where to look for relevant information no matter who it is. Checking their summary, job description, and posts will help you understand if this is an appropriate contact for you to prospect. Digging into their hobbies, volunteer work, and education history can help you personalize the message a bit more.

That being said, you don’t want to go too deep into personal contact research. Not only can it be a time suck, but it can also paint your message as inauthentic. For example, if you notice that your prospect LOVES fishing, but you hate it, you probably shouldn’t make the hook (pun intended) of your message fishing related. Prospects can tell if you’re being disingenuous when reaching out, and that could harm your relationship before it even starts. More than anything, just be a human when reaching out to people and you’ll be better off.

💡 Pro Tip: A good rule of thumb for how you construct a message is 20/70/10.

• 20% should be hyper-personal to the prospect – hook them by showing them that you know them. Use the verbiage and language they use on their own LinkedIn profile to stand out!
• 70% should be a give – get that relevant information you uncovered during your research process and tie it into your value proposition. Pique their interest.
• 10% should your CTA – and make it interest-based! Asking them for time right off the bat is usually a no-go (it’s a precious resource!). You’re better off framing the situation and offering to share insights/content that could help them with their day-to-day.

What about industry level information? How important is it for you to have an understanding of industry trends and news? Where do you find that information?

Having a solid understanding of the industry you’re calling into will pay dividends for SDRs. When we talk about being a credible resource, it goes beyond knowing information about the prospect or account – you have to “talk the talk.” And when you talk to decision-makers about how they run their company, it really helps to sound like an expert.

Industry-level research can also impact your account and contact-level research. Keeping up to date with trends and news stories might impact the trigger events you look for or the right prospects to talk with.

Plus, when you know a lot about your industry, you naturally feel more comfortable talking with decision-makers and stakeholders. And the more comfortable you are, the more human you are.

In terms of how you uncover industry trends & information, there are a few ways to go about it.

• Industry-level research is often a byproduct of account-level research (just like contact-level research as mentioned above). You can set up alerts and comb through Crunchbase/Owler/LinkedIn all the same. It’s also a byproduct of the conversations you have with prospects. Make sure you’re listening to them & taking notes – anecdotal information from your outreach can help you understand what’s going on within certain industries and how it might impact your accounts/contacts.
• Industry-specific newsletters are a great way of keeping up with big news stories and staying on top of trends. And there are TONS of them. If you just Google “[industry] newsletter” you’re bound to find more than you bargained for. Most of them have example stories & past publications for you to browse, that way you know what you’re getting into before subscribing.
• Every industry has a crop of thought leaders worth following. Whether it’s on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, heck even TikTok, you can find people talking about what’s going on within the industry you’re calling into. Follow them to see what the top minds are talking about and use it in your outreach. There’s no easier way to build up that credibility than to show you’re plugged into the industry. Bonus points if you create your own content to add to the discussion!
• Online communities have been on the rise as of late, and for good reason. They’re great places to share insight with peers, learn from leaders, and grow skills through workshops and events. It’s inevitable that your industry has a community or two out there with some valuable information & connections floating around, so take advantage of them!

Let’s wrap it up with a cohesive look at your process. How do you ensure that what you’re doing is repeatable and scalable? What advice would you give to someone who’s trying to build their own research process?

Realistically, you won’t know your process is going to work until it does. And that means you really have to focus on experimentation. Tweaking the number of accounts you pull, how much research you do, where you find your information…all of it can impact the overall success of your outreach.

What we highlighted in this guide are foundational skills – they’ll work at pretty much any organization. There will obviously be a few tweaks here and there depending on your universe, style, and goals, but overall this is a great place to start.

At the end of the day, think about it like this: If you do quality prospecting, it’s going to work.

Don’t get lazy and ramp your research down or generalize your messaging – if you want to succeed as an SDR you have to put in the work. That means building and optimizing your process every day until it becomes second nature.

And once you find it, be consistent. Nothing kills productivity like inconsistency.

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Want to keep the discussion going? Feel free to shoot me a message about your opinion on research as an SDR!

And if you want to get in touch with our sales team to learn more about how we build these processes for our clients, Contact us.