Business Bridges gives you an EDGE

Everyone wants an edge—especially if they are truly motivated to penetrate their market much more successfully than their competition. Business Bridges gives you the edge you need to accomplish this—decisively. Business Bridges provides the finest data foundation available for you to fulfill your strategic objectives. There is always a temptation to skimp on the investment that needs to be made to acquire first-class data. Certainly, this is the case in economic times when budgets are tight. Let your competition be the ones to view data purely as a commodity. You will win, if you view data as a reflection of insight—insight that will turn the tide of battle for dominance in your market and give you the deepest penetration of any player in your marketplace. What we are about to share with you has been tested across multiple industries and is proven to be an effective approach to cold market penetration.

The Business Bridges EDGE is, first and foremost, a mindset about doing business. Working with the most aggressively-minded businesses for over 20 years, ensuring our products conform to their most stringent requirements, has forged our own mindset and created a corporate culture at Business Bridges that is determined to WIN—and to see to it that we give our customers everything we are capable of giving, so that they WIN.

It’s all a question of mindset. Businesses that sell their own services as commodities are not generally a fit for Business Bridges—because their mindset tends to view most things as commodities. We work best with customers who understand that “the Premium Product is less expensive, in the long-run”. If you are fixated on “the price per name”, when buying data, you will end up wasting a lot of your internal resources, wading through duplicates, financially-unqualified prospects and generally useless information. It’s this approach to buying data that drives sales professionals in the organization to avoid cold market penetration activities, because they waste too much time using bad data, forcing them to focus on warm market prospecting. As a result, the business has a much-reduced capability to carve out market share for itself from cold market prospecting. This limits the scope of the business’ TOTAL FUTURE OPPORTUNITY to the sum total of warm market contacts actually being worked properly (and followed up with) by the sales professionals in their organization. This is not always a given.

How do you know if you are being held hostage to bad data and an over-reliance on warm market prospecting? If your organization is focused on warm market prospecting and does very little, if any cold market penetration, this may indicate the possibility you have not been able to efficiently access your cold market, because of poor data quality. It goes without saying that, if a business is really being provided with high-quality data that its sales professionals can use to effectively penetrate the cold market, there would not be such an over-emphasis on warm market prospecting.

It’s never an either/or situation. When done properly, cold market penetration activities compliment and strengthen warm market prospecting. Those who do cold market prospecting correctly, find out that the cold market is not really that cold and the warm market is really not that warm. We are told this, over and over again, by our customers. They realize they have a serious need to elevate the quality of their team’s sales presentations, their sale team’s follow-up process, their marketing materials, when they are confronted with a less-sympathetic cold market audience. If they step up and bring these areas up to cold-market-par, they will also see more deals closing in their warm markets, a significantly-higher percentage of the time. We cannot over-emphasize the importance of the point that has just been made.

What’s a good reality check for your business, as you think about all of this? Introduce a new element to the equation—one that will challenge and support the sales team, as they step into the cold market arena. Acquire our premium data: the Business Bridges Market Intelligence Builder™. Retain our business development group: the Business Bridges Opportunity Generator™ program. Run it alongside and/or in conjunction with your internal sales group’s efforts. Analyze the critical mass of opportunity that is brought to the table from the cold market. Evaluate how well your internal sales professionals are really working with the cold market prospects. Is there assiduous follow-up with each qualified lead? Are callbacks made on time—within the timeframe the prospect indicated they’d be ready to do business? Is your sales person getting on the phone with a cold prospect and treating them like a cold prospect, by figuring out all the reasons why they shouldn’t do business with that prospect, so that they can get off the phone as quickly as possible and get back to working their warm-market leads? OR Are your internal sales professionals ensuring they make a great impression on that business owner, treating a cold-market-prospect as if they were a warm-market-prospect, finding ways to get that prospect involved in doing business with you and working toward a time when you have the lion’s share of that customer’s business? Many are dismayed with the answers they discover, when they really take a hard look at these issues. Business Bridges knows that this is the situation with most businesses and the culture of most sales teams. Let us work with you to either begin a transformation or accelerate a transformation that is already underway, as to your capabilities to penetrate areas of your market where no salesman has gone before.