B2B Lead Generation: How to Find More Prospects Just Like Your Best Customers

“Where can I find more like you?”

We’ve all said it, whether in reference to a star employee or reliable vendor. And most of us have said this about our customers. Where do we generate more B2B leads that possess the same set of needs for our products and services as do our best customers? We know they are out there, but how do we find them?

It is (and literally can be) the million-dollar question.

Lookalike Audiences & B2B

As a B2B marketer, you might have tried a Facebook lookalike advertising campaign. Just pop in your URL and Facebook’s machine learning algorithm will match up your user data with a brand-new set of potential customers that share similarities with your current customers.

This is a strategy often employed in B2C marketing to much success. But it doesn’t work quite as well with B2B. Why? Because individuals just don’t volunteer enough information about their professional/business behaviors to effectively inform a lookalike-generating algorithm.

They may have scattered enough data points across the web that relate to them as individuals, but probably not as much as relates to them professionally. We may know that they like to buy running shoes, but the latest vendor they contracted with or machinery purchase they made at work? We’re not likely to find this out.

Maybe you’ve given a Facebook lookalike audience a shot anyway with a B2B campaign. It’s all about experimentation, right? And you may see that people have clicked. They might have even waited for your page to load. And you think: who are these people? That’s just the problem, isn’t it? You’ll never really know.

B2B prospecting is complex. You’re looking to develop a long-term partnership. You want to understand the business needs of your B2B prospects and be able to generate meaningful solutions. To do this, you need to have a comprehensive understanding of their business.

Wouldn’t it be great to know how many employees your prospects have? Their revenue? The exact size of their facility?

Solutions for New Customer Discovery

IndustrySelect’s Customer Match function provides a solution not available anywhere else. True, there may be other vendors that can generate B2B lookalike audiences, but you’re still relying on an algorithm and a set of faceless “prospects” to market to.

But what if you had a database of lookalike customers that included real information like name, title, phone number, email address, products manufactured, annual sales, exact location and more? You know, information you can actually do something with? Customer Match can provide you just that.

What’s more, Customer Match can enhance your current customer list with additional insights. Wouldn’t it help if you knew more about them? Say, their annual sales or their top competitors? Do they have subsidiaries you didn’t know about? Customer Match can provide you with that information.

How does this actually work? IndustrySelect Customer Match generates a custom database for you by analyzing, enhancing and multiplying your current customer list. How? First, we take a current list of your customers* and match them against our massive database of industrial contacts, extracting a detailed analysis of who your customers really are.

We’ll provide a report that contains a wealth of data on your current customer file, including average employee count, popular SIC codes (sub-industries) and most common regions that your customers are located. From there we will send you an enhanced customer file that contains a unique IndustrySelect Company ID. You can click on the weblink to instantly view a detailed customer profile on IndustrySelect.

Imagine if you had a profile like this on your customers.

How does this help you? The first step to uncovering new prospects is learning what attributes make up your current customers. Our enhanced customer data can help you update your customer records and discover new sales opportunities, create marketing personas, and develop a customer-centric approach by providing a deeper understanding of your best customers.

But what about finding new industrial B2B leads based on your current customers?

Customer Match will then take that analysis of your current customers and match it against IndustrySelect’s database of 500,000 industrial companies and one million executives to find a new set of prospects for you based on your best customers. We’ll give you full access to these company profiles in the form of a custom database which you can share with other members of your sales team.

Are you an IndustrySelect subscriber and want to check out Customer Match? Contact us for further details and to get started at no obligation.

New to IndustrySelect? IndustrySelect gives you live access to MNI’s database of 500,000 industrial companies and one million executives, providing up to 40 data points to help you identify and pre-qualify the best leads. Data is researched firsthand by MNI, the industrial information provider since 1912. Want to join the club? Click here to try out a free demo.

*Don’t worry, your customer file remains confidential and will not be used for any other purpose than to provide you with the best data possible.