4 questions you should know the answers to before you go to a prospect
Having a conversation with a potential customer is an important part of the sales process.
However, preparing the conversation in an effective way is not always easy. Fortunately, there are a few tools you can use to prepare for a conversation with a potential customer.
These two tools are essential here: LinkedIn and openthebox.
Both are complementary. This is because Openthebox gives you information that LinkedIn does not always provide. For example, it often happens that someone does not list all board mandates on their LinkedIn profile.
Below are four of the most important questions that will prepare you for a successful conversation and how to answer them with these 2 tools.
Surf to open the box, find a company and see who the directors are in the Spiderweb.
For more details, see the “mandates” tab. There you will find more information such as:
- the start date of the mandate;
- the total number administrative mandates that a director has;
- the number of companies that have set up a director in Belgium;
- etc.
If the director is a company, openthebox also informs you which natural person represents this company.
Watch financial ratios that are important in your sector (such as liquidity, debt ratio, net sales margin, etc.). This is not reflected in the financial statements. A tool like open the box calculate that for you.
Check out the financial statements over the years and look for trends or events.
Are you short on time? Then use a financial health indicator. Openthebox gives companies a score out of 10, which indicates the chance that a company will go bankrupt within three years.
LinkedIn gives you an idea of how many employees there are today. But if you want to look into the past, you need to look at the social balance.
Openthebox gives you an easy overview of the evolution of the workforce over the years.
This way, you can immediately see whether the company is growing exponentially or whether it is moving forward steadily.
“Hey, do you know that one?” , is a good icebreaker.
Or, you just want to know what other companies your prospect has invested in.
Once again, LinkedIn and openthebox are complementary.
LinkedIn can inform you who your prospect is connected to on LinkedIn. But you can't trust that 2 business partners are necessarily a connection. You can't always tell what their relationship is from LinkedIn either.
Therefore, consult the financial statements. It will inform you if someone is a director of the two companies you know. Based on the financial statements, you can also find out whether a company has shares in another company (insofar as this participation amounts to at least 10%).
You can search for financial statements via the National Bank. However, finding the information you need is a challenge. Therefore, it is better to use openthebox. In openthebox, you can simply enter the enter the name of 2 companies or people and view their relationship immediately.
An example:
In the example above, you can see that one company, Pulsar-IT, has a relationship with another company, Roularta Media Group, through the company Mediafin. Indeed, we see that Roularta Media Group has a stake in Mediafin. Mediafin, on the other hand, has a director who is also a director at Pulsar-IT