Top 11 Tools to Improve Your Value-Based Selling

Value-based selling is an approach that focuses on understanding and reinforcing the reasons why your offer is valuable to the customer.

By implementing value-based selling in your cold outreach, you increase the likelihood of a positive response or interest from the lead and greatly increase your conversion rate for two main reasons. One of them is that you can personalize your outreach and show that you studied the company. Another big one is that you identified their pain points or their goals and your pitch resonates with the leads and focuses on their very specific needs.

Chasing the quota, sales managers often sacrifice social listening and focus on loading their pitch with more perks instead of researching their leads to customize and tailor their outreach. However, this approach frequently is not sustainable – more “burnt” leads, fewer sales closed, and lower close rate. Lowering the prices or making special offers doesn’t affect how the customers perceive the value of your product and doesn’t generate the demand for your product at the end of the day. The value does.

This approach to selling implies understanding very deeply the customer’s needs, and showing how your product can solve it for them.

Value-based selling is especially valuable and critical if you are focusing on targeting Fortune 1000 companies

As Sarah Brazier, Account Executive at Gong, put it, use social listening to find out what are your customer’s goals for this year (transcripts of the board meetings, interviews, company blog, etc) and tie your product to their goals in your outreach.

What kind of intel can you gather on companies?
• Quarterly reports
• Transcripts of the board meetings
• Executive interviews
• Company news
• Executive hires
• Job openings
• Funding updates
• Partnerships and expansions

There are a number of tools that can assist you in researching the insights that you can use to personalize your sales pitch and tie the value of your products or services to the customer’s strategy.

Here is the shortlist of the tools for social listening that you can use to gather the intel on your target accounts:

1. Owler

This is one of the most popular tools used by many C-level executives for researching prospects and tracking news on their targets. Owler traces 13 million public and private companies’ profiles and sends push alerts with real-time updates. You can follow the latest company updates, partnerships, interviews, and other important insights on your key targets and reference them in your outreach.

Key benefits

Lots of data
Owler has a lot of useful info on the companies: competitors, press releases, financial data, news, press releases, job growth, and other data.

Detailed search criteria
Look up your potential target accounts using filters like industry, annual revenue, number of employees, headquarters location, top competitors, press releases, financial information, etc. Turn on alerts on important updates for your target accounts like new partnerships, layoffs, restructuring, and even IPO rumors.

2. Signum.AI

This platform utilizes advanced behavioral tracking mechanisms, analyzing client engagement such as social media interactions and keyword mentions, to identify prospects displaying purchase intent. By integrating automated email outreach, it enables businesses to tailor value-driven sales strategies, effectively engaging with potential buyers and maximizing conversion rates for sustained profitability.

Key benefits

Extensive and accurate data and insights
Offers comprehensive and accurate data insights, equipping businesses with the necessary information to refine sales strategies, enhance customer engagement, and maximize conversion opportunities effectively.

The ease of use
Seamlessly integrates precise data insights with intuitive functionality, ensuring effortless navigation and implementation for businesses, thus maximizing the efficiency of their sales strategies.

3. Feedly

A tool that helps sales reps to get exclusive insights on their leads. An AI-based assistant called Leo investigates hundreds of thousands of various info sources, from the articles and news to the blogs and comments that correspond to the sales teams’ goals. With Feedly, one saves time for both researching and explaining what does interests you the most and what does not, as the AI learns from users’ feedback.

Key benefits

Features for convenient investigation
With Feedly, it’s easy to investigate news collected, as you can prioritize topics, keywords, and trends, mute the types of news you do not want to get, generate a summary of articles, etc.

Integration capacities
Organizing, curating, and sharing the news gets convenient due to the full range of integration options. Thus, Feedly connects to a vast number of platforms and apps, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, email providers, et cetera.

4. LinkedIn Profiles and Sales Navigator

One of the essential tools used by B2B sales professionals that allows them to turn the best platform for business communication into a vital weapon for your outreach. Among all, Sales Navigator is used for researching the information, finding the decision-makers at companies, messaging to them, and tracking their activity and connections. With such a tool, sales reps get access to the broader nets, going far beyond their circle of connections on LinkedIn, and gain deep insights into the prospecting companies’ employees’ profiles without even connecting.

Key benefits

Multiple filters
Taking the whole set of filters, there is no alternative to Sales Navigator in terms of variety. One can filter the prospects by company titles, roles within an organization, industry, company size, and other criteria to do sales prospecting.

Integration options
For the sales teams, LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers the opportunity to connect with prospects through your company’s network and integrate with CRMs and the relevant platforms, which makes the whole process more effective.

Tools to investigate companies’ financial reports

There are no more reliable sources on the companies’ financial performance than the official companies’ reports. The Annual integrated report and the more detailed 10-K report are essential to keep a close eye on. Released once a year, these documents provide information on the financial activity of a particular company and can be easily accessed.

Here are the options on how to acquire this information:

5. EDGAR database by SEC

As the financial reports are required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), they can be found on the website of SEC. All the documents are collected in the database EDGAR that you can search through and find the needed report.

6. CheetahIQ

The 2020-released tool aimed at facilitating the searching process for salespeople. Although the tool is also used to look for various info on businesses like news and jobs, CheetahIQ is specifically useful for analyzing the financial data of the companies of your interest.

Key benefits

Essential financial info
All the financial data of a particular company can be found via this tool, including the 10-Ks reports, earnings transcripts, relevant news and even podcasts.

Straightforward interface
The interface is very clear and all the information is divided into separate well-viewed sections. Before opening the piece of info found, one can familiarize themselves with the short description which also can save time for exploring the whole info.

Tools to track important news

7. Google Alerts

One of the most straightforward tools to track brand mentions, keywords, and phrases. Once setting Google Alerts, you will get the email-notification on every case of indexing the needed businesses or pieces of information such as queries for a particular service or news on a particular company’s activity.

Key benefits

Free
You are personally notified of any mention of the company or a precise query of your interest for paying nothing. Moreover, you can choose how often to receive them updates, and what scope of the information to get (the most relevant sources or all of them).

Easy to set up and use
As only you come up with the relevant and precise keywords and collocations, you will spend a couple of seconds to set up the alerts.

8. BuzzSumo

One of the time-proven tools for social listening. BuzzSumo helps sales professionals to conduct social media research — track brand mentions and industry updates, monitor articles, news, and social posts, trace the competitors, and identify the most compelling content.

Key benefits

Deep analysis
The tool helps to both identify the top-content and get the extensive analytical data with plenty of social and search metrics on why such a piece of content performed the most, and vice versa.

Insights on a content strategy
As it discovers the best performing content on social media, BuzzSumo helps to work on content and marketing strategy and gain more traffic. For sales reps, it helps to offer the prospecting companies the relevant services to improve their content.

9. Companies’ social media accounts and websites

While searching for advanced tools to track companies’ activity and news, salespeople may forget about the basic but important step — to follow the social media accounts, particularly LinkedIn and Twitter, and checking the official websites. The fresh news that is posted on by the companies first-hand is the reliable information that anyone can trust and count on when positioning the product and services and working on their value. For example, every large company keeps the audience aware of its financial activity and funding by posting updates, press releases, transcripts, et cetera. on its official website. The only thing you need is to go to the “Investor Relations” page and investigate the info. Tweets in their turns can notify you of the key info or event happening that very day or even minute.

10. Glassdoor

One of the most popular job and recruiting sites worldwide. Glassdoor offers millions of the latest job listings provided by employers themselves, a large database of company reviews, CEO approval ratings, salary reports, et cetera.

Key benefits

Extensive recruitments and working conditions data
While investigating the companies’ anonymous reviews, one can understand the pros and cons of the target companies and focus on offering solutions on improving brand attractiveness, services, and performance. Thus, it’s an excellent platform to get insights on what companies lack and what they are searching for.

User-friendly interface
Both visually and functionally convenient interface making it easy and pleasant to both search for and analyze the information collected.

11. Crunchbase

A tool helping to identify and track innovative companies in your target sector and find emerging trends and analyze changes across industries. Crunchbase is especially useful for collecting investment information and conducting an in-depth market analysis of the industry.

Key benefits

A solid financial info
With Crunchbase, salespeople can get a snapshot of a company’s data like total funding, employee count, revenue, and investment information and acquisitions, and well as industry and sub-industry trends.

Filters and search procedure
One can search the company by category, name, funding type, and other criteria, and then save and categorize the companies chosen for analysis.